Midway—77 Years Ago, Today.

[Tim Sielbeck]

IIRC you could preempt the draft into something the government wanted you to do by volunteering into the service of your choice.

My father tried to do that in 1942. They tried to get him to go into the infantry instead of his preference of the air cadets to be a pilot. He told them he would wait until he was drafted.

 

When he was drafted in 1943 he was tested and sent into the air cadets and he eventualy became a B-29 pilot. This despite the CO of his reception unit trying to keep him as a clerk/typist (well over 200 wpm on manual) after catching the unit up on months of unfinished paperwork in a few weeks. He was fortunate in that the war ended after his unit had recieved their orders to go to the bomber bases in the pacific but before they actually left.

[Nobu]

Depending on the error rate, 200 wpm on a manual sounds like a ticket to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces.

[Tim Sielbeck]

His error rate was close to zero. It was amazing to watch him type on his Royal portable type writer even in the 1980's. Blazing fast.

[DKTanker]

 

IIRC you could preempt the draft into something the government wanted you to do by volunteering into the service of your choice.

My father tried to do that in 1942. They tried to get him to go into the infantry instead of his preference of the air cadets to be a pilot. He told them he would wait until he was drafted.

 

When he was drafted in 1943 he was tested and sent into the air cadets and he eventualy became a B-29 pilot. This despite the CO of his reception unit trying to keep him as a clerk/typist (well over 200 wpm on manual) after catching the unit up on months of unfinished paperwork in a few weeks. He was fortunate in that the war ended after his unit had recieved their orders to go to the bomber bases in the pacific but before they actually left.

 

Perhaps a little less than 200 wpm? In 1946, using an IBM electric, Stella Pujunas set the fast recorded typing speed of 216 mpm.

[Tim Sielbeck]

Nope.

[Stuart Galbraith]

 

 

On the Japanese side, certainly. But where are the sources? I for one would love to read about the JA planning for the USSR after Nomonhan, both offensive and defensive..

More's the pity that Joe Brennan no longer crosses the threshold to this Grate Site.

Fully agree with this.

 

Swerve too.

 

 

Ive got a nasty feeling Swerve is no longer with us. He was a regular poster and just stopped overnight. Hope im wrong of course.

[JasonJ]

 

 

 

On the Japanese side, certainly. But where are the sources? I for one would love to read about the JA planning for the USSR after Nomonhan, both offensive and defensive..

More's the pity that Joe Brennan no longer crosses the threshold to this Grate Site.

Fully agree with this.

 

Swerve too.

 

 

Ive got a nasty feeling Swerve is no longer with us. He was a regular poster and just stopped overnight. Hope im wrong of course.

 

 

He was a sharp thinker and poster right up to his last ones. I've got that feeling too but I hope he is doing well.

[sunday]

I met Swerve during my first trip to London back in 2010. He was with DB and Marsh. I've got his RL contact data.

[Rich]

Yes, segregation didn't help but I was about the AF, Navy and Marines attracting hordes of volunteers and continuing to take in men when they didn't need them while the army was still short. I don't remember the title of the paper but there was too much rivalry for manpower between the services and the army drew the short straw. Aside from the rangers and airborne they weren't sexy enough.

 

No, E.O. 9279 of 5 December 1942 ended volunteering for the Services. "After the effective date of this Order no male person who has attained the eighteenth anniversary and has not attained the thirty-eighth anniversary of the day of his birth shall be inducted into the enlisted personnel of the armed forces (including reserve components), except, under provisions of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, as amended; but any such person who has, on or before the effective date of this Order, submitted a bona fide application for voluntary enlistment may be enlisted within ten days after said date."

 

Nor was black strength underutilized in an overall sense...it expanded from less than 2% of total enlisted strength in 1939 to over 10% by December 1945, ending at 9.33% 31 August 1945. It was underutilized in terms of putting blacks in combat units. The same held true for the Navy and Marines.

 

The U.S. chose not to fully mobilize its military manpower in order to ensure that productive power was not effected...in essence, the exact opposite of Germany, which over-mobilized manpower and then had to rely on forced labor to keep its industry going (and also suffered through a period of slow industrial growth and disruption to the expansion of the Heer as personnel were furloughed back into industry - temporarily - 1940. The U.S. never approached the level of manpower mobilization found in Germany, the USSR, or Great Britain in terms of either men or women, despite all the hoopla about Rosie the Riveter.

 

The U.S. Army also made some questionable manpower utilization decisions early on as it overestimated the replacement requirement for its new and untested wartime component, the Armored Force. The result was an unbalanced replacement stream as too many personnel were trained and provided as Armored troops and too few as Infantry troops. To make it worse though, early on replacement categorization was so poor that large numbers of trained tank crew replacements shipped to the Middle East ended up as Armored Infantry replacements under the odd assumption that all Armored troops were the same. Worse, the Army elected to follow the individual replacement policy instituted in the Great War that ended the old unit replacement policy in place since the Civil War, but unfortunately fixing the old vice created new ones. The Army also made the mistake of sending the "best and brightest" enlisted to the Technical Services and USAAF, while starving the combat arms of the highest scoring testees.

 

Finally, certain components were over-expanded early on...the AAA story is well known, but explicable, however, less well known is the over-expansion of Army Service Forces and the refusal by ASF to release manpower to the combat arms when the crisis came. Arguably it did mean the Army was better able to support its expeditionary forces in the far-flung overseas theaters...but that makes the motor transportation problems encountered by the ETOUSA in summer and fall 1944 that less explicable too.

 

All these decisions meant that the available manpower to the Army (and other services) was finite and ultimately dependent on the requirements of industry. Thus, as I said, it was BOTH a planning/organizational mistake as well as an actual shortage of raw manpower.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Another trailer.

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ9eqWiIlP4&time_continue=87

[Markus Becker]

Thanks for the detailed reply Rich. It's been years since I read about this.

 

Re: Black manpower. Here is an in depth study from the late 40's. Very dry reading at times but highlights the negative effect of the segregation*.

 

https://history.army.mil/html/books/011/11-4/CMH_Pub_11-4-1.pdf

 

 

* Black technical specialists were harder to come by that white ones but mixed untis were a No-No. That held things back everywhere.

[Brian Kennedy]

So 1) did the USN expand in WW2 to a size vastly larger than it actually needed to be to win the Pacific War and 2) should that be seen as a mis-use of our priorities? Counter-argument = the only crucial equipment I can think of that the US was short of was landing craft, and I don't see how we could have increased production much more, given the extremely high priority we had assigned to them.

[JasonJ]

Another trailer.

Looks like the sequal to PH2001.

 

Don't criticize it, might get mobbed by facepalms.

[Nobu]

So 1) did the USN expand in WW2 to a size vastly larger than it actually needed to be to win the Pacific War and 2) should that be seen as a mis-use of our priorities? Counter-argument = the only crucial equipment I can think of that the US was short of was landing craft, and I don't see how we could have increased production much more, given the extremely high priority we had assigned to them.

 

The USN's expansion seems consistent with the uncharted territory of the kind of total war it had entered combined with the industrial momentum of production planning when the outcome of the war was in greater doubt.

[Rich]

Thanks for the detailed reply Rich. It's been years since I read about this.

 

Re: Black manpower. Here is an in depth study from the late 40's. Very dry reading at times but highlights the negative effect of the segregation*.

 

https://history.army.mil/html/books/011/11-4/CMH_Pub_11-4-1.pdf

 

 

* Black technical specialists were harder to come by that white ones but mixed untis were a No-No. That held things back everywhere.

 

Yep, but that is actually very dry reading originally from 1966. Part of it was based upon the 1946 AGF postwar study (No. 36) The Training of Negro Troops, by Bell I. Wiley andthe background material collected for that study.

 

BTW, as an aside, the 38 AGF studies completed immediately postwar are almost the only source of material for the AGF side of many wartime controversies...and yet they have been virtually ignored for 75 years now. For example, D. L. McCaskey's study No. 34, The Role of the Army Ground Forces in the Development of Equipment, is invaluable to counterbalance the carefully choreographed Ordnance story on what happened to tank, gun, and projectile development...you know, the notion that Lesley McNair fucked everything up just because.

[Rich]

 

Another trailer.

Looks like the sequal to PH2001.

 

Don't criticize it, might get mobbed by facepalms.

 

 

Hey, its Roland Emmerich, the German Michael Bay, what could possibly go wrong?

[shep854]

 

 

 

Another trailer.

Looks like the sequal to PH2001.

 

Don't criticize it, might get mobbed by facepalms.

Hey, its Roland Emmerich, the German Michael Bay, what could possibly go wrong?

From a historian, thats pretty damning. 😳

[JasonJ]

 

 

 

Another trailer.

Looks like the sequal to PH2001.

Don't criticize it, might get mobbed by facepalms.

Hey, its Roland Emmerich, the German Michael Bay, what could possibly go wrong?

From a historian, thats pretty damning.

If that's damning, then what's a facepalm?

[JasonJ]

 

 

Another trailer.

 

Looks like the sequal to PH2001.

Don't criticize it, might get mobbed by facepalms.

Hey, its Roland Emmerich, the German Michael Bay, what could possibly go wrong?

If the Bataan march was a war crime, if the Burma rail line was a war crime, if Sook Ching was a war crime, then the atomic bombs were also war crimes. If the attack on Pearl Harbor was a war crime, then so too was the oil embargo and refusal meet war crimes. If Tojo was a war criminal, so to was FDR a war criminal.

 

It sounds radical the first hearing straight from a Japanese right winger's mouth in their own language. But are they really wrong? Remember Pearl Harbor! makes it impossible for even highly esteemed historians to bluntly say it. Proud of the result of Pacific War? Is it anti-American to say so must never say it? It was justice well served? For real? For China without knowing anything about China except exaggerated version of Nanking Massacre? Nazi Germany was surely wrong and good to have been defeated, pretty much all the experts and fanblys alike know that war in great detail and feel confident in their conclusions that war vs Nazi Germany was most certainly worthwhile. So same dynamic, just assume same exact thing for asia, yeah? Simples!

 

But instead of getting hooked up with what's a war crime or what's not a war crime.. war is hell, country A and country B had a war. The bigger country won. Happens all the time. In that sense, I could not care so much for the Japanese cause. But the post war propaganda gets me going. Its undue acceptance in the general common knowledge makes what Japan choosing to fight seem more logical. The spilling out of communism all over, raise of Kim dynasty and Mao and Korean War and fall of Taiwan to one of the China interpretations.. make Japan's choice to fight to have made more sense. The current geopolitical situation with the raise of China, Russian bombers circling around Japan, Fat-Kim DPRK's threat of nukes on BMs, to be subject to the whims of POTUS, suddenly "in WW3 they just stay home and watch sony TV of us being attacked"... this situation makes Japan's choice to fight to have made more sense.

 

Of course life goes on, characteristically, the US is way better, and has shown a side of generosity in the post-war, but being at the mercy on generosity isn't comfortable. Abe still has been un able to meet Fat-Kim. Japan lives here. Not the US, but Japan is stuck in depending on Trump, liberal Moon, and Xi of the CPP. How comfortable.

 

Independence Day made a lot of money.

 

Nothing else matter. " Nanking" "Date of Infamy" "Remember Pearl Harbor!"

 

What a pass the CCP got on that propaganda throughtout the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s. Nothing better than that to balance out what was happening at that time such as the hunt on Falun Gong, complete erasure of Tianamen Square massacre, building up the firewall. And so on. So go crazy in buying made in China. They'll become democracy.

 

So I'm going to say it again. FDR was a war criminal. The atomic bombs were a war crime.

Edited July 1, 2019 by JasonJ

[Nobu]

Just saw the second teaser trailer. "Today, we will prove the American Navy is not a joke."

 

Not optimistic about this one.

[JasonJ]

Just saw the second teaser trailer. "Today, we will prove the American Navy is not a joke."

 

Not optimistic about this one.

"The Day Our Freedom Was Attacked!"

 

The Chinese commies winning all of China was a greater attack on those freedoms than Japan holding half the place with completely no interest in opening up a war with the US at the same time and the Chinese commies winning all of China was a greater attack on that freedom than even if Japan somehow won the Pacific War since Japan had no intetest whatsoever of going further than Pearl Harbor. The US would have been just fine. But today now US and China have to mingle fo the sake of the economy and peace.

Edited July 1, 2019 by JasonJ

[Stuart Galbraith]

 

Another trailer.

Looks like the sequal to PH2001.

 

Don't criticize it, might get mobbed by facepalms.

 

 

Yeah, you arent the only one. Clearly nobody in Hollywood is capable of taking notes.

 

Not to worry, we still have the 1976 version.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Just saw the second teaser trailer. "Today, we will prove the American Navy is not a joke."

 

Not optimistic about this one.

 

I just had a thought of a really great film, a follow up to 'The Final Countdown'. An LCS goes back in time to 1941, and find's its no more capable there than here.

[Rick]

 

Just saw the second teaser trailer. "Today, we will prove the American Navy is not a joke."

 

Not optimistic about this one.

 

I just had a thought of a really great film, a follow up to 'The Final Countdown'. An LCS goes back in time to 1941, and find's its no more capable there than here.

 

Young man, do you know how close you made my morning coffee exit my nostrils

[Stuart Galbraith]

I glad your keyboard survived the experience.