Remember Pearl Harbor

[pappymac]

Cabinfever - A lot of people don't know or realize the contribution the Coast Guard made during WWII while under the control of the U.S. Navy. The Coast Guard's only Medal of Honor winner was Douglas Munro who was a coxswain on one of the Higgins boats during the invasion of Guadalcanal. He led a number of Higgins boats back to the beach to evacuate 500 Marines who were trapped. He placed his boat between the other boats and a Japanese gun position.
The Coast Guard was at every amphibious landing made in the Pacific as well as the European Theater. We even had a fleet of small 80-foot cutters at Normandy. Their job was to pull survivors from the water after the landing crafts sunk.

 

[tbradsim1]

Pappy while I was Reg Navy, I have the highest esteem for the Coast Guard, brave men, if you don't believe go on the West Coast and see the school where the rescue teams practicing in Boats that roll 360 deg and keep on chugging. :clap:

 

[pappymac]

Brad, I could tell you some interesting stories about search and rescue on the coasts of Washington & Oregon. My first 5 years were in and around Washington & Oregon. I covered quite of few hair raising search and rescue cases up there.

 

[tuold]

My wife was visiting relatives in Hawaii some years ago and had chance to meet and talk with Allen Bodenlos, a Pearl Harbor survivor. Here is what she wrote:
"In 2008 I met Pearl Harbor survivor Bugler Master Tech. Sgt. Allen Bodenlos (who had been a Navy trumpet player) signing autographs at the USS Arizona.
He died in January 2015 and his ashes were scattered in the water near the USS Utah Memorial.

His obituary said: Bodenlos was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Aug 13, 1920. He enlisted in the Army on July 9, 1940. He was assigned to the 804th Engineer Aviation Battalion at Schofield Barracks during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

The day before the attack, he attended a concert at the Army-Navy YMCA. Later that evening, Bodenlos declined an offer to stay the night on the USS Arizona. The next morning, he witnessed the attack. Bodenlos was the company courier and delivered messages from the command post via a motorcycle to the airfields for the next two days."

 

[mawnansmiff]

There was a very interesting documentary shown by the BBC last month (I recorded it and saw it last night) where allegedly new information has come to light suggesting both Churchill and Roosevelt were aware that Pearl Harbour was going to happen but for various reasons never spoke out or acted until after the fact.
I'm sure you have access to the BBC in the US so did anyone else see this?
Regards,
Jay.

 

[tuold]

From what I've read on the subject, there was indeed an expectation of acts of war by Japan by the Roosevelt administration. The intelligence predicted the attack would be limited to be the Philippines. Western powers very much underestimated the ability of the Japanese to have the ability to carry out a large scale attack against Pearl Harbor. Their biases worked against them. It never pays to underestimate a potential enemy.
I'd like to see that documentary. Maybe it will be on Netflix sometime.

 

[mawnansmiff]

Tuold, I wish I could remember the exact title for you but I forgot to keep the docu on my HD.
I can to a certain degree understand Churchill keeping quiet about it but for Roosevelt to do so (if indeed he did) seems downright treacherous to me.
Regards,
Jay.

 

[aldecaker]

There's not a damned thing I would put past a politician, historical or present day.

 

[pappymac]

@aldecaker - you just have to accept that the number one job of a politician after elected to office is to get re-elected. Also, not all liars are politicians but all politicians are liars.

 

[tbradsim1]

Breakdown, POLY, means many, TIC is a blood sucker, put together is many blood suckers.

 

[balkisobrains]

This type of rumor has been around for years. I doubt that we will ever know the true answer. Personally, I think that they both knew ahead of time. If Roosevelt knew and had revealed it, it would not have stopped the attack. It would have prompted the Japanese to change their codes, which would have been a future complication since we had already cracked them.

Locally we had a number of "heads-ups" just prior to the attack, and chose to ignore them to our own detriment.

 

[mso489]

In some of the accounts I've read and seen in documentaries, there was the serious anticipation of an attack at Pearl Harbor and that war with Japan was impending. As with all social responses, there was not a good sense of how soon this would happen, and that led to lack of psychological readiness. Surprise often depends on the defenders sense of timing as much as their thinking that nothing is coming. As I recall, some of the officers who were putting out the alarm were thought of as Chicken Little types. The thinking seemed to be that this was some weeks or months in the future. The American habit to that point had been some denial and postponement, thinking that things might settle out before the U.S. got in the war. Canada had been in the war on behalf of Great Britain for some time. The "America First" movement promoted U.S. isolationism, with the pilot hero Charles Lindberg as a figurehead, and there were some Nazi groups around the U.S. before things became clearly polarized, after which that promptly ended.
A father of a friend of mine who was a motorcycle touring guy before the war went and trained with the Royal Canadian Air Force and was in combat before the U.S. was in the war, and later joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, and named my friend, his first son, after a friend he'd lost in one of the air battles. He was a fighter pilot. In civilian life, he was an extremely low-key guy who worked for the power company and had a side business running a carnival ride for small children on weekends.