Something from my day today, that maybe you will appreciate. I may even have the story right:
One of my customers is a 70ish gentleman, who lives on a small orange orchard. He's lived there 50 years, and grew up a half-mile further down the road. So he's lived all his life in this canyon, except 2 1/2 years he spent in the Pacific. Those years he spent on the USS Tennessee, a battleship carrying the Flag in the Third Fleet. He saw the Aleutians, Guam, Tarawa, Tinian, Saipan, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. On Tarawa the Marines stalled on a reef while trying to land, and Japanese machine gunners slaughtered 1,500 on the beach. At Leyte Gulf the Navy caught the Imperial Fleet, and Tennessee hit Japanese ships from seven miles out, with 14 inch guns. A typhoon caught the American fleet, a destroyer escorting Tennessee took a wave down its stacks; when the seawater hit the ship's boiler it exploded, and the destroyer vanished. At Iwo Jima the Tennessee sat offshore for a month and pounded the island. At Okinawa there were suicide planes, the kamikazee, who flew straight into the ships blowing them apart. Some of us grew up watching this man's life, Victory At Sea. |
