What’s really, truly fascinating is that it’s a difference between an entirely mundane (from a historical perspective—I’m sure it was terrible to live through) account attesting to something that the historical record will readily bear out (a destroyer-sized vessel can take a kamikaze hit without sinking) and an extraordinary account that purports to provide an unnecessarily convoluted and highly implausible explanation for one of the most baffling incidents of the war: why did MacArthur so badly botch the initial response to news of the attack on Pearl Harbor?
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence to be believed. I’m happy enough to believe that someone’s dad, say, took a bullet in the arm in Vietnam or survived a kamikaze attack during WWII (so long as there are no higher stakes tangled up in the claim). Less so to believe the sort of claim DrDeth is making.
I wish I could remember the name of Dad’s DE. It was likely an Edsall-class out of Consolidated Steel in Orange, TX.
Honestly, I’m not sure he was at Iwo but his comments at the recruitment office where I enlisted and at the memorial by Arlington Cemetery led me to believe his ship was there.
I personally would be interested if you do find them. Even if they don’t have any really new information, it would be neat to read them, or at least read a summary (if you don’t want to post the whole thing).
Much of the account has to do with the aftermath. Dad was running in and out of compartments, looking for casualties. He eventually found himself in some officer’s quarters, completely unoccupied other than himself. He picked up a pearl-handled pistol and was about to walk out with the sidearm when an officer walked in and demanded to know what he was doing there. Dad complied, handed over the sidearm, and was allowed to leave.
He recounted this story in some veterans’ magazine. Couple of months later, a letter from that same officer appeared in the magazine, thanking Dad for returning his sidearm!
For years, @DrDeth has been cleverly writing these posts to make it appear as if his father were a key insider. Previously, until I forced the issue, his claim was the his father was on “Doug’s” staff, implying a staff officer. Then he claimed that his father once typed a memo for a high ranking officer. Yea!!! That’s why is father had the inside scoop on the real reason MacArthur inexplicably panicked on December 8th, and it was all a secret plan by Roosevelt, something that all the NCOs would know but the generals on the staff would be kept in the dark.
Here, though he’s overplayed his hand, because bullshitters will be bullshitters.
To prove that this fictional father was a super patriot, it wasn’t enough that he was in the army in the Philippines on December 8th! No! He had to be a civilian who volunteered! But how do you get him there? Oh! A civilian aircraft crewmember! Of course, once we established that his as an NCO, then we have to get him out of the Philippines before it fell so let’s give him malaria! But since bullshitters must be bullshitters, no only does he go to Australia, but back home!! Then he’s so special, he gets recalled!!! But to make it seem a little less problematic, let’s put some qualifiers in!
It’s all fucking stolen valor. Asshole! There were so many damn good men who bravely died in that conflict but you (and you are reading this) are going to steal some of their bravery so you look better and allow you to “win” meaningless arguments on the internet. Pathetic nobody.
Look at all the problems with it. The story has to be miraculous, so he arrives on the very day of the attack! BS. Not a day before, not a day later.
Why Boeing? Why the fuck were they flying planes are the world? Not an airline, but the manufacture? He was aircrew, but not needed for the plane? They let him just run off and join the army? How the fuck does he join the army in the Philippines? Why would they take him without training? They weren’t that desperate for men, especially untrained men.
The most absurd line was the he “was invalided to Australia then home before the Philippines fell”? How? This is when Japan controlled the skies and seas and the Navy was using any desperate method of trying to resupply them, including attempting to outfit subs. New, untrained recruits (if the absurd story were to be believed) gets one of the million dollar tickets out of there on a sub, jumping to the head of the queue ahead of general officers because he’s a superhero, I suppose. In reality, the sick sadly were left to die.
Sick personnel were simply not getting transported of the Philippines in the first couple of chaotic weeks of the war and no one was get transported after that. The whole situation was going to hell. It was war, it was hell, they were getting bombed, enough ships were getting sunk that they completely stopped even attempting to use surface ships, they were trying to figure out how to save the country and some new, untrained civilian recruit gets a ticket out of there? MacArthur had to flee by PT boat in the dead of night avoiding Japanese warships. So how did a raw recruit snag a spot? (even if recruits were being accepted?)
In '41 and '42, they were desperate for trained aircrew and would have steered this hypothetical father into that. Why would he have been make into an errand boy instead? And why would a new, untrained recruit be assigned to HQ? He wouldn’t know shit about the military and now he’s suddenly working for the big bosses?
The story is impossible, but let’s just pretend that MacArthur personally ordered an extra PT boat and rather then allow some of the nurses to escape (which they where actually trying to do) the sick, untrained, raw recruit bumps general officers to out of there. At most, he would have been working for a few weeks or a month. Not only does he get to the safety of Australia, but then he gets a trip back to the States!!! Why? In early 1942? How?
Then, this super hero goes back to the States, and someone damn high up in the army (but not MacArthur!) personally orders an untrained civilian recruit who has been underfoot for 14 days in one of the worse disasters in the history of the US military to be tracked down and ordered back to be a pool typist and driver!!! Because none of the other 8 million recruits would do?
For the dangerous flight from the Philippines by PT boat at night, only 13 staff members from Corregidor were allowed to escape with MacArthur and these were knows as the “Bataan Gang” and formed the nucleus of General Headquarters (GHQ) Southwest Pacific Area.
It’s this clever wording that he (the imaginary father) didn’t consider himself part of the Bataan Gang, as if he had a right to that title or that others would consider him to be part of that.
It’s stolen valor and used in the most pathetic way imaginable, to win stupid arguments on the net. For fuck’s sake.
One of my uncles – Dad’s brother – was also in the South Pacific. Spent his entire tour on an aircraft carrier; don’t recall which but I’m sure one of my siblings has a copy of his paperwork.
I never really got to know my uncle, he died in an industrial accident when I was, like, 7.
My dad was in the Middle East – both Iraq and Iran. All I knew as a kid was that he was in the motor pool and used to drive like a bat out of hell in the desert. It wasn’t until my mom died that I saw his records and saw that he was part of a joint Russian-American group. I have one of those Russian lambswool hats with a big red enamal star with the hammer and sickle on it. He said he traded hats with a soldier on a train, but I wondered if he had been someone he actually knew.
I have older siblings who are Vietnam-era veterans. Sis was a Marine, spent her tour in Quantico on their PR staff. Bro was in the Army and had the good fortune to be assigned to the Berlin Wall but ran into some legal trouble over there; something about a black marketeer.
One of my maternal (great?) grandfathers was a Civil War veteran – 12th Wisconsin Infantry.
My dad served in the Persian Gulf War on a boat that did submarine repairs. He used to be a submariner himself earlier in his career (he was a Machinist’s Mate with a CPO rank) but by the time of the war he no longer served in that capacity.
The closest I got to military service was when I worked for the US Navy’s MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation); I worked at a movie theater on a base. So no military service but I was a direct employee of the Navy and I even had a civil service rank; I was NF-1 which was basically minimum wage.
ETA: I just looked up the ship my dad served on in the war and it was decommissioned in July 1992, which makes sense because that’s around the time my dad was no longer on it. He must have been part of the last crew. I never knew that.
I have a cool family war story that I can’t prove. In WWII my grandfather on my dad’s side was a cook in the Army, stationed in the Philippines. This must have been after they were retaken by the US, because he was part of a battalion that were moving some Japanese POWs by road. Some of the other GIs were being assholes to the POWs as they were moved – things like pushing them off trucks, throwing things at them, etc. My grandpa put a stop to this mistreatment (I’m not sure how). When they arrived at the prison camp, the senior officer among the Japanese POWs presented my grandpa with his family’s war flag, signed by generations of his family in Japanese. For many years that flag was hung on the wall of my father’s bedroom, and in the 80s they went to the local Japanese consulate to try and find the family of the Japanese officer. This was unsuccessful, and my father ended up donating the flag to the local WWII museum.
