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WWII Untold Stories I received
this from the President of the Sarasota Veterans Council. the
main island of Honshu
and the Tokyo Plain. It's goal: the upon
Japan to surrender unconditionally or face total destruction. Avengers,
Corsairs, and Hellcats from 66 aircraft carriers
would bomb, 100
former carrier aircraft and 50 land based army planes were to be launched
in a suicide attack on the fleet. The Japanese had 58 more airfields in Korea,
western Honshu and Shikoku, which also were to be used for massive suicide
attacks. which
the Japanese hoped could be sustained for 10 days.
The Japanese
planned to coordinate their air strikes with attacks from the 40
remaining submarines from the Imperial Navy -- some armed with Long Lance
torpedoes with a range of 20 miles -- when the invasion fleet was 180
miles off Kyus hu. This time
the bulk of the Japanese defenders would not be the poorly trained half of
the Japanese home islands. Japan today could be divided much like
Korea and Germany.
The world was spared the cost of Operation Downfall,
however, because Japan formally surrendered to the United Nations September
2, 1945, and World War II was over. The aircraft carriers, cruisers and
transport ships scheduled to carry the invasion troops to Japan, ferried home
American troops in a gigantic operation called Magic Carpet.
Obscure WW II Facts
(Compiled by Col. D.G. Swinford, USMC, Ret. and history buff. You would really
have to dig to get this kind of ringside seat to history.
1. The first German serviceman killed in WWII was killed by the Japanese
(China, 1937), the first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians
(Finland 1940), the highest ranking American killed was Lt. Gen. Lesley
McNair, killed by the US Army Air Corps . . . So much for allies.
2. The youngest US serviceman was 12 year old Calvin Graham, USN. He was
wounded and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His
benefits were later restored by act of Congress.
3. At the time of Pearl Harbor the top US Navy command was Called CINCUS
(pronounced "sink us"), the shoulder patch of the US Army's 45th
Infantry division was the Swastika, and Hitler's private train was named
"Amerika." All three were soon changed for PR purposes.
4. More US servicemen died in the Air Corps than the Marine Corps. While
completing the required 30 missions your chance of being killed was 71%.
5. Generally speaking there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot.
You were either an ace or a target. For instance Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane.
6. It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a
tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. Tracers had different
ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of
your rounds were missing. Worse yet tracers instantly told your enemy he was
under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading
a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of
ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy.
Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.
YOU'VE GOT TO LOVE THIS ONE....
7. When allied armies reached the Rhine the first thing men did was pee in it.
This was pretty universal from the lowest private to Winston Churchill (who
made a big show of it) and Gen. Patton (who had himself photographed in the
act), found the photo (hand tinted black and white.)
8. German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasn't
worth the effort.
9. A malfunctioning toilet sank the German submarine, U-120.
10. Among the first "Germans" captured at Normandy were several
Koreans. They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were
captured by the Russians and forced to fight for the Russian Army until they
were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for the German Army until the
US Army captured them. (Say what?)
AND THE BEST FOR LAST....
11. Following a massive naval bombardment 35,000 U. S. and Canadian troops
stormed ashore at Kiska, in the Aleutian Islands. 21 troops were killed in the
firefight. It would have been worse if there had been any Japanese on the
island. (They had left); our people died by friendly fire.
A WWII airman heads out with secret orders
Sunday,
April 15, 2007 KATY
MULDOON The
Oregonian When
the USS Hornet slipped under the Golden Gate Bridge and headed west with 16 B-25
bombers squeezed onto its deck, Jake DeShazer still didn't know the aircraft
carrier's destination or what his crew's top-secret mission would entail. But 10
miles out to sea, the public-address system crackled to life and spilled the
secret: With
Lt. Col. James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle leading the way, Jake and more
than six dozen other Army Air Forces airmen would bomb Japan. Their daring
strike would lift American morale when the nation needed it most -- four months
after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. In
time, the Doolittle Raid would become the stuff of Hollywood movies, inspire
books and even fuel a lucrative collectibles niche on eBay. But Jake couldn't
have guessed the shift it would inspire in his own life. He never suspected that
his lust for revenge against the enemy would evolve into something entirely
different. Surely
on that day, April 2, 1942, it must have made Jake, a bombardier, wonder what
he'd gotten himself into. The
29-year-old son of Oregon wheat farmers was an average guy who had joined the
service two years earlier for an average reason: He needed the money. His
folks couldn't afford to send him to college during the Great Depression. So in
1931, the year Jake graduated from Madras High School, his only option was to
find work. He
took jobs where he could: sewing gunnysacks; cutting trees; as a ranch hand
making $1 a day, plus board. For two years he carried supplies by mule train to
sheepherders tending flocks in the furthest corners of southern Oregon and
Northern California and Nevada. The bonus: Out there in the desolate Great
Basin, all Jake could do with his earnings was save them. He
squirreled away $1,000 -- enough to start his own turkey-growing operation in
Butte Falls, south of Crater Lake. When it came time to sell the birds, though,
the bottom dropped out of the turkey market. With only a couple of hundred
dollars left, he had a decision to make. The
Army Air Corps, which was about to change its name to the Army Air Forces,
offered good pay. Jake enlisted and studied to be an aircraft mechanic and
bombardier. Two
years later, on Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes, led by flight commander Mitsuo
Fuchida, stunned the United States and the world when they attacked Pearl
Harbor, killing more than 2,000 people, sinking American ships and wiping out
nearly 200 planes. The
United States was at war. At
a South Carolina air base a month later, Jake and 15 to 20 other men reported to
their captain's office. The captain needed volunteers for a mission so dangerous
it was likely that some men wouldn't make it back alive. Who
was willing? Jake,
as the story goes in the DeShazer family, was at the end of the line -- and none
too hot on the idea. "But
everybody else said yes," recalled his wife, Florence, "so he did,
too." Jake
and the other men -- pilots and co-pilots, navigators, bombardiers and gunners
from the 89th Reconnaissance Squadron and 17th Bombardment Group -- got to work
training in the B-25s at Eglin Field in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., for a mission
that, to them, was still a mystery. It
became clear that their task would require quick takeoffs, low flying and
bombing. When they got orders to travel to Alameda, Calif., in March 1942, the
crews used the trip as practice, flying the bulky twin-engine bombers low much
of the way across the country. On
April 1, the planes were loaded onto the aircraft carrier's flight deck. Jake's
plane, No. 16, took the rear position, its tail jutting off the USS Hornet's
stern. The
next day, with Jake and 79 other Army airmen aboard, the Hornet pushed away from
Alameda, crossed San Francisco Bay and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge about
noon. Ten miles out to sea, when the announcement cleared up the mission's
mystery, the men aboard the Hornet burst into cheers. Retaliation
for Pearl Harbor would be in their hands. If
they succeeded, Americans would know that Japan was not invulnerable. If
they succeeded, Jake and the others would have stories to tell for decades to
come -- or as long as their memories held out. At
least, they would if they survived. Aboard
the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, Cpl. Jake DeShazer and the other airmen were
200 miles shy of their planned launch site when lookouts spotted trouble: a
picket boat. If it radioed Japan, the surprise attack would be discovered. The
order came: Launch. The
Hornet sailed out of San Francisco Bay 16 days earlier, on April 2, 1942. The
carrier was 10 miles out to sea before Army Air Forces pilots and their crews
learned the nature of the secret mission they'd volunteered for: With Lt. Col.
James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle leading the way, Jake and the other airmen
would bomb Japan. After
the carnage the Japanese visited on Pearl Harbor four months earlier, thrusting
the United States into World War II, Jake would say later that he felt as the
other men did: They were hungry for payback. The whole country was. Raised
on a farm in Madras, Jake enlisted as an Army airman two years earlier after
wandering from job to job and wondering what to do with his life. The
29-year-old bombardier hadn't been keen on volunteering for Doolittle's secret
mission -- particularly after his captain informed Jake and other prospective
volunteers that it would be so dangerous, it was unlikely they'd all survive.
But when the others in his 17th Bombardment Group raised their hands, Jake did,
too. Aboard
the Hornet, he had time to think about what he'd gotten himself into. Those
were busy days. Retired Maj. Gen. David M. Jones, another native Oregonian and
pilot for one of the 16 Doolittle planes, recalled recently that with 80 airmen
and their accompanying maintenance crews, plus the 16 B-25 bombers lined up on
deck, even that mammoth aircraft carrier felt crowded. Some
of Doolittle's men slept on cots in the admiral's quarters while others bunked
with their Navy counterparts. The Navy men stood watch and were up at daybreak,
Jones said, but Doolittle's men had the luxury of sleeping in. Once
up, pilots and navigators studied maps of Japan and China, while bombardiers and
gunners went through their planes with a fine-toothed comb, ensuring everything
was in order. They sat through lectures on Japanese culture, in case they ended
up in enemy hands. And they had their photos taken. In the shot of Jake's crew,
the men look chilled in their leather bomber jackets, with flight caps barely
covering close-cropped hair. And,
of course, there were the games. Poker.
Craps.
"It
went on pretty heavy," Jones said by phone from his Tucson, Ariz., home.
When the Navy sailors weren't working, "they were playing with us or
against us." Doolittle's
plan called for the Hornet to sail to a point about 400 miles off Japan. Late on
the night of April 18, the 16 bombers, each loaded with four 500-pound bombs,
machine guns and extra fuel tanks, would take off from the Hornet's deck. They'd
bomb Tokyo and other sites in the early-morning hours, then fly to Free China --
portions of that country not held by the Japanese -- landing before dark. The
night of the 17th, many of Doolittle's men slept in their clothes. At
dawn, lookouts aboard the Hornet and its escort ships saw a Japanese picket boat
and, on the horizon, two ships that appeared to be Japanese destroyers. They'd
been spotted. If
Doolittle's men took off nearly a full day and 200 miles shy of their intended
launch site, chances were slim they'd have enough fuel to make it to Free China.
If they waited, they'd lose the element of surprise. Doolittle
and the Hornet's skipper gave the launch order. Crews
packed quickly and scurried to their stations, swinging through the ship's
exchange and nearly emptying it, Jones remembered, of cigarettes and candy. None
of the pilots had taken off from the deck of a carrier, though they'd practiced
plenty of short takeoffs. That morning, they'd have about 350 feet of runway,
maybe a little more. They'd have rain and howling wind, too. A storm sprayed
water across the Hornet's deck and as the planes warmed up, Jones said, exhaust
choked the air. Doolittle
moved his plane into position. When the Hornet's bow rose with a swell, the
flagman gave him the signal. He released the brakes, hit the throttle and was
up. He circled the Hornet once and headed toward Japan. One
by one, 15 planes followed. As
he waited for takeoff, Jake discovered a 1-foot hole in No. 16's plastic nose.
He knew they were short on gas; the breach would make them even less efficient. He
shoved a jacket into the hole. The
engine roared, and the bomber dubbed "The Bat Out of Hell" shook. Jake
fastened his seat belt and at 9:20 a.m., they took off. In
a 1950 book describing his story, Jake recounted looking back after takeoff. The
Hornet and its escort ships had already turned around. They were headed home. Doolittle's
Raiders were on their own. About
1 p.m., Jake's plane reached Japan. Flying just over the treetops, they could
see people below, waving. Maybe they thought the bombers were Japanese. While
other raiders bombed military targets in Tokyo and other cities, Jake and his
crew headed for Nagoya, about 300 miles south. They dropped their bombs on an
oil refinery, then continued south along the Japanese coast, heading for China. Night
fell and the fog thickened. They'd been in the air 13 hours, and the fuel gauge
revealed bad news. Lt. William G. Farrow, Jake's pilot, told the crew it was
time. He didn't know whether they were over Japanese-held territory or into the
safety of Free China. Regardless, they'd have to bail out. Jake
inched his feet out the bomber's door and dropped into darkness. Jake
DeShazer yanked the rip cord. Darkness and thick fog folded around him like damp
wool, and as he drifted toward the Earth, a lonely quiet did, too. Jake
had never jumped from a plane before, and the sound of the B-25 bomber's engines
faded as he fell. He had no idea whether he'd land in friendly territory or in
enemy hands, but he had 3,000 feet to think about it -- to wonder what a guy
from Central Oregon sagebrush country was doing bailing out of a plane into
Chinese rice-paddy territory. He
landed in the mud, hitting hard enough to break a couple of ribs, but that was
the least of Jake's worries. Jake
and his crew had flown for 13 hours, but had they made it as far as China? If
so, was he in free China or in Chinese territory occupied by the Japanese? Had
his fellow airmen survived the jump? Where were they? The
29-year-old bombardier, an Army Air Forces corporal, had been up since dawn.
With the rest of the men -- 80 in all -- Jake had followed Lt. Col. James H.
"Jimmy" Doolittle's lead and taken off from the deck of the aircraft
carrier USS Hornet 600 miles off Japan's coast. They knew their planes might not
have enough fuel to make it to safety. On
April 18, 1942, the crews of five aboard 16 bombers had dropped payloads onto
targets in Tokyo and elsewhere. The raid didn't inflict much physical damage,
but it would be hailed back home as a great morale boost -- the first good news
since Japan bombed Pearl Harbor four months earlier. Jake
picked himself up, removed his pistol from its holster and fired a few shots
into the air. No one fired a reply. He'd
landed in a cemetery and found a shed -- a shrine from the look of it -- barely
big enough to shelter him. He pushed aside candles and icons, settled in and
slept until the sun woke him. A
1950 book about his experiences described how Jake walked through the
countryside that day. He encountered slightly built people with weathered skin.
None spoke English. Raised
in Madras, Jake had scarcely traveled outside the Pacific Northwest. He couldn't
tell if the peasants he passed were Chinese or Japanese, friends or enemies. Before
he mustered the courage to enter a house where two soldiers played with
children, he slid a bullet into his pistol's chamber and drew back the hammer. "China
or Japan?" Jake recalled asking the soldiers. China,
they replied. "They
were lying," Jake's wife, Florence DeShazer, said in a recent interview. Ten
Japanese soldiers surrounded him. One held a bayonet to Jake's back. Others drew
their guns. One took Jake's pistol. The
next morning, he saw familiar faces: the rest of the crew from his plane.
Soldiers flew them to Nanking, where they got their first taste of a Chinese
prison. "I
was still blindfolded, as I had been most of the time for over 12 hours, and
hadn't eaten all day," Jake later told C. Hoyt Watson, who wrote "The
Amazing Story of Sergeant Jacob DeShazer," which was published in 1950 by
Light and Life Press. "I had been asked questions at every opportunity, but
I would always tell them that I wouldn't talk." Guards
led Jake into a room and removed his blindfold. Standing before him was a
Japanese judge, who queried him about the USS Hornet and the raid. Jake
refused to talk. The
judge looked the airman in the eye and said, "Tomorrow morning at sunrise
I'm going to have the honor of cutting your head off." "I
lay in the cell all night, blindfolded, handcuffed, without blankets,"
Watson quoted Jake as saying. "The next morning at sunrise I was led out of
my cell. I had no breakfast. The blindfold was taken off, the handcuffs were
removed. I looked around for the judge with his weapon of execution, but I saw a
fellow with a camera, and everyone was smiling." The
camera clicked. Soldiers loaded Jake and the others onto a plane bound for
Tokyo. Jake
had despised the Japanese since the December day they'd killed more than 2,000
Americans at Pearl Harbor. His hate festered, and it's no wonder. Jake shared
cells with rats, lice and bedbugs. He was rarely allowed to speak to his
comrades. When he refused to answer questions, soldiers knocked him to his knees
and beat him. He
and the others were moved to Nagasaki, where they shared a cell for one night
with three raiders from the sixth plane to leave the Hornet. It had crashed into
the ocean, and the five-man crew tried to swim ashore. The three who made it had
no idea what happened to those aboard the other 14 bombers. They didn't know
that most had made it to safety. Sleep-deprived,
hungry and suffering from dysentery, the prisoners were moved to Shanghai, where
frequent rumors said they'd all be executed. A trial of sorts commenced, but the
Americans had no defense attorney and no chance to declare their innocence. When
it was over, all were condemned to die. A
firing squad killed three of the raiders. Robert
L. Hite, George Barr, Chase J. Nielsen Robert J. Meder and Jake learned their
sentences had been commuted to life in prison. In
a recent telephone interview from his Arkansas home, Hite said the men figured
that if Japan won the war, then they'd live their lives as slave laborers. If
the Japan lost, the airmen expected to die by firing squad. Spring
melted into sweltering summer, and the cells felt like ovens. Fall turned to
winter, and the men froze. On
Dec. 1, 1943, after 11/2 years in prison, Meder died of malnutrition and
disease. Guards
increased the remaining prisoners' rations and, for the first time, brought them
a few books, including a Bible. While
Jake had been raised in a Christian home, he had never embraced the faith, his
wife, Florence, said. The Bible was new territory. The guards passed it to Jake
in May 1944 and gave him three weeks to read it. In his cell's dim light, he
plowed through the entire book several times, memorizing some passages. He'd
later swear that he knew the precise moment his life changed. It was June 8, as
he read Romans 10:9: "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus,
and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou
shalt be saved." "Hunger,
starvation and a freezing cold prison cell no longer had horrors for me,"
Jake told his biographer. "Even death could hold no threat when I knew that
God had saved me." From
that day, Jake vowed, he'd live the words he'd read. If he ever was freed, he'd
find a way to share his newfound personal peace with the people he believed
needed it most. Jake
DeShazer awoke on a summer morning and sensed he should pray for peace. In
his cramped Chinese prison cell, guarded by occupying Japanese troops, the Army
Air Forces corporal from Oregon had no clue that the United States effectively
ended World War II that morning, Aug. 6, 1945, when it dropped an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima. Jake
prayed. Ten
days later, his cell opened. Guards handed Jake and his three fellow airmen
their old U.S. Army Air Forces uniforms, loaded them in a truck and dropped them
at an English hotel in Peking, now Beijing. Nearly
31/2 years after they'd joined Lt. Col. James "Jimmy" Doolittle in a
daring raid on Japan, 65 years ago today, they were free. Their 40 months of
solitary confinement, interrogation, torture, hunger, disease, loneliness and
repeated threats of execution were over at last. Jake
could get on with the surprising life he'd mapped out for himself in prison. Although
raised in a Christian home, he wasn't a believer until his Japanese captors
handed him a Bible. Jake devoured it. The words, he'd later tell his biographer,
overwhelmed him with joy he wanted to share. He vowed to spend his life
evangelizing to those who had imprisoned him -- his former enemies, the
Japanese. Jake
returned to Oregon and considered his future. His folks hadn't been able to
afford to send him to college during the Depression. He'd tackled odd jobs,
then, with the promise of steady pay, joined the military two years before the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Jake
was promoted to sergeant for his role in the legendary Doolittle Raid. He
collected more than three years' military back pay and, at 32, finally had his
shot at school. His
sister worked for C. Hoyt Watson, president of Seattle Pacific College, now
Seattle Pacific University, a Christian school. Watson, who wrote "The
Amazing Story of Sergeant Jacob DeShazer," first published in 1950 by Light
and Life Press, invited him to enroll and prepare for the missionary life. Jake's
college portrait shows a smartly dressed man with a luxurious crop of wavy, dark
hair. His gentle, deep-set eyes appear older than the rest of his face. Jake
had seen a lot. And though he was a quiet sort, particularly after years in
solitary confinement, once surrounded by students in school and church audiences
keen to hear his story, he began to speak a lot, too. On
May 1, 1946, he took an Iowa girl with a bright smile and warm manner to a Youth
for Christ meeting. Her name was Florence Matheny. "I
think he was attracted to me," she said recently, "because he knew I
wanted to go into missionary work. Not everybody wanted to go to Japan with
him." They
married that August in Gresham. By
the time Jake and Florence finished school in June 1948, they'd started a
family. They visited churches across the nation whose members were eager to hear
the tale of the war prisoner who found salvation and forgave his captors. Jake's
dream, though, was to share the story with a different audience. In
a 1948 photo, Jake and Florence are bundled up against December's chill, leaning
on the rail of the USS General Meigs, a former troop carrier. Jake wore a
fedora, and Florence, a fancy corsage. They were about to set sail from San
Francisco Bay to Japan, just as Jake had done six years earlier aboard the USS
Hornet, on his way to bomb the enemy. Jake
wrote a pamphlet titled "I Was a Prisoner of Japan," and a religious
publisher distributed 1 million copies of it in Japan before the couple arrived.
It recounted the torture and starvation Jake had endured, and described how he
had replaced hatred for his enemies with the love he discovered in the Bible. When
the General Meigs pulled into Yokohama on Dec. 28, dozens of reporters swarmed
the dock, curious to meet the former war prisoner returning to their country
voluntarily. "They
asked him why he came back to Japan," Florence remembered. "He told
them what happened to him, and he wanted them to know about Jesus. He wanted
them to be ready, so that when the time came for them to die, they'd go to
heaven." The
news stories sparked scores of speaking invitations. Florence
set up a home base, while Jake toured the country in a donated 1948 Chevrolet
coupe, outfitted with megaphones on the roof, to advertise his talks. With the
aid of a Japanese interpreter, Jake told his story in churches, schools,
hospitals, factories, mines and city streets, evangelizing sometimes three and
four times a day. In
1950, those pamphlets Jake had written still circulated. One landed in the hands
of Mitsuo Fuchida, who had commanded the Japanese force that attacked Pearl
Harbor nine years earlier. He'd later write that Jake's words inspired him to
read the Bible, which led him to convert to Christianity. The
two old enemies met that year, and later they'd preach together to large crowds
in Japan and the United States. As
Jake's family grew -- the DeShazers eventually had five children -- his
followers did, too. With Florence, he started three Free Methodist churches in
Japan, including one in Nagoya, the city his plane had bombed during the
Doolittle Raid. The couple helped the Japanese start about 20 more churches. In
Japan and the states, Jake tried to branch out and deliver sermons on varied
topics. But those who came to listen insisted that he tell the story he'd told
thousands of times -- his story of hatred turned to love, of fighting
transformed to forgiveness, of finding faith. "Even
people who had heard him many times . . . they wanted to hear his story
again," said his youngest child, Ruth Kutrakun, a Seattle schoolteacher. "When
he told his story," she said, "he experienced it all over again. . . .
It was so much a part of who he was." Jake
and Florence retired from missionary work in 1978, a year after they'd moved to
the Willamette Valley, where Jake was born 94 years ago. He continued to preach
his story until he was 90. Citations,
plaques and photographs line the walls and sit atop a desk in the small
apartment that Jake and Florence share in a Salem assisted-living center.
Colorful prints depict those bulky B-25 bombers taking off from the USS Hornet's
deck on a windswept day 65 years ago. One frame holds more than a half-dozen of
Jake's medals, including a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross,
awarded for his service in the Doolittle Raid. Even
those, however, aren't enough to jog Jake's memory, which began to slip about
four years ago into the dark recesses of dementia. He'll look at a photo of a
handsome young airman with deep-set eyes and a soft smile and ask, "Who's
that?" He
doesn't recall volunteering for a dangerous mission, jumping from a bomber on a
pitch-black night into enemy territory or 40 months of hunger and torture in
prison. He doesn't know that he is the oldest of the 14
Doolittle Raiders still living. "It's sad," Florence said. "But maybe
it's good, in a way." Katy Muldoon: 503-221-8526; katymuldoon@news.oregonian.com
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