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Charge of the Light Brigade....25 October, 1944??!!

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by ETC(SS), Oct 25, 2021.

  1. ETC(SS)

    ETC(SS) The OTHER One Percenter.....

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    Ok.
    Maybe not.
    25 October 1944 featured a different kinda charge from a very different kind of light calvary.....or was it so very different as that?

    Some of us will remember the callsign....Taffy-3 the survivors of which used to be honored by U.S. Marines standing to attention whenever or wherever one of their number were recognized.
    Here's a short vid to introduce any interested viewer....
    Give a thumbs-up on the tubes if you're inclined. ;)


    So.
    It is utterly impossible to adequately describe just how completely screwed Clifton "Ziggy" Sprague and his ships were at 0630 on that Wednesday morning without understanding a few things about the ships involved.

    It was a done deal.
    Willy Mays under a pop fly.
    A Prius in a monster truck show..
    They were meat on a platter!

    Ziggy was going to lose all of his Jeep Carriers and the Marines on the beach at Leyte were going to get their (mostly empty) transports and supply ships sunk.....and then they were going to have to deal with battleships lobbing Prius-sized shells at them from behind.

    JUST the ONE largest Japanese warship (Yamato,) at 70,000 tons was larger (in displacement) than ALL of the 6 escort carriers and their 7 'escorts' COMBINED.
    She was arguably the largest moving, man made object in the world at the time.
    Yamato, and her then recently dispatched sister were simply immense.
    Her 18.1" guns were (and remain) the largest ever afloat, there were THREE other (albeit smaller) BATTLESHIPS to keep her company.

    The most heavily gunned US ship on the scene was arguably outgunned by the smallest Japanese opponent, and NO USN ship present that day was the least bit "armored" which is why all destroyers are known affectionately as 'tin cans' and why escort carriers are known without the least bit of affection as "Kaiser Coffins."
    With 36-knot speed, at least a destroyer can run away.
    The Casablanca-class_escort_carriers (CVE) were understood to be Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable.
    They were...."one torpedo ships."

    On a good windy day, their 19 knot speed (21mph) enabled them to just barely launch their aircraft.
    They were unarmored, under-gunned, under-powered, and fully 10 percent of them would end the war under water.
    We punched out 50 of them during WWII...more than any other class of "carrier" in history.
    They were built to do all stuff that you would not waste a "real" carrier's time on....except ONE THING which were called to do, almost by accident, at which that they were the best in the world:
    Supporting troops during an amphibious invasion!
    But....they were fragile, unreliable (that's why EACH of the three Taffys had 6 of them!) and had no business in ANY kind of stand-up fight against a real warship.

    If all that wasn't bad enough, 4 of the 7 "escorts" protecting the "escort" carriers were the smallest US warships that could be called a 'ship' instead of a boat.......the DDE...or John_C._Butler-class_destroyer_escort.
    These were "destroyer escorts" for all the same reasons that the Jeeps were "escort carriers."
    You built a bunch of these to escort convoys against submarines, and support muddy Marines with their two-5-inch guns....which were "big" only against shore emplacements and against enemy soldiers whose armor consisted of cloth uniforms and hats.
    An Escort Destroyer could duke it out against a submarine, and with her Sonar they could even FIND a submarine (As happened in the excellent movie 'The Enemy Below' )......but you NEVER sent one out against ANYTHING bigger than something called a "boat."

    Ever.

    DDE's were about half the size of an already under-sized Fletcher-class_destroyer and were generously endowed with all of the deficiencies of the Jeep carriers in speed and armament.

    However....(COMMA!!)
    The Americans had three things on that day that cost the Japanese a rare ignoble retreat and defeat.

    1. Fighting Spirit.
    2. Radar Fire Control.
    3. AIRCRAFT!!!

    Fire Control:
    Even American ships as humble as the USS_Samuel_B._Roberts_(DE-413) had radar controlled guns, meaning that they could put steel on target (if not through 24" armor!) in smoke, rain, during wild maneuvers, etc.
    The "Sammy B" would virtually empty her magazines on this day (more on that later) leaving ships, some of which were 70 times her bulk, punch drunk.
    They even shot their illumination rounds, if for no other reason than to get them out of the way, and these started more than one fire on their opponent's ships.
    Not all of their rounds hit home - but MANY if not most of them DID, if for no other reason they were too close and the Japanese ships were too big to miss.
    They were also too close for the IJN ships to depress their barrels to use their larger guns - not that these were needed against paper-thin targets.

    Alternatively, the Japanese relied on the world's best optics and dye-colored shells for shot spotting, which is why some of the period artwork is thusly colored.
    If the IJN had our technology on that day, then Admiral Sprague would have died wondering what hit him from over the horizon, and his escorts would have been sunk before they had a chance to lay down those famous smoke screens, which would have been valueless.
    Curiously, one of the other things that worked AGAINST the Japanese was the fact that the American ships WERE unarmored.
    The IJN used mostly armor piercing (AP) shells fused against much sturdier foe, and many of their shells passed completely through the unarmored American ships without striking anything substantial enough to cause them to detonate, leaving only 2 holes....sometimes.
    Sailors, unfortunately, didn't stop the shells either......

    Aircraft:

    Aircraft was why, contrary to what we heard in The Hunt For Red October, Halsey did NOT act stupidly in sending the bulk of his force 'carrier hunting.'
    He had permission.
    He had a different boss
    AND in war you often do not know what you do not know.

    The VERY REASON that Taffy 3 survived was that they HAD the very weapon system (ish) that Halsey was trying to take away from Japan.
    Even escort carrier aircraft not equipped with ship KILLING weapons are still capable of ruining your day, and historians often ALSO forget that the Japanese leader still had wet uniforms from having his last ship sunk underneath him the day before by........carrier aircraft.
    Kurita was emotionally and physically drained after 36 hours of continuous combat....BEFORE he pounced on Taffy-3.

    The very first thing Taffy-3's skipper did when 300-foot columns of dye colored water started erupting around his ships was to turn EAST instead of South and launch aircraft.
    Loaded.
    Unloaded.
    They launched as many of them as they could spot on the cat, sometimes orphaning the plane's regular pilot.
    The six Taffies carried 2 adult-sized Aircraft Carriers worth of warplanes, and even though they were loaded for air-to-mud work (ground support for US Marines) they were like a six swarms of angry hornets in a field with 23 large bulls.
    The TBF Avenger carried on the Taffies was used for anti-submarine patrols and surface bombing by the jeep carriers, but the Japanese recognized them for WHAT THEY WERE, which were torpedo bombers - a threat to even a 70,000 ton battleship.
    Unarmed TBFs driving in low and slow with their bomb (torpedo) bay doors OPEN simply could NOT be ignored by ANY sane ship skipper, and most of them were armed with SOMETHING.....even if it was depth bombs, which could stove in hull plates and .30 cal machine guns, which were a hazard to the folks aiming those massive guns.
    This left Kurita's ships in a tangled disarray and denied him from coordinating a coherent attack.
    23 USN aircraft were lost to the enemy....and some of them WERE bravely going up against hundreds of guns shooting at them while they were "winchester" (out of ammo.)

    Which leads to the REAL game changer in Three Acts:

    3. The 3 G's....

    “In no engagement of its entire history, has the United States Navy shown more gallantry, guts and gumption than in those two morning hours between 0730 and 0930 off Samar.” - ” Samuel Eliot Morison

    1. Escort Carriers carried ONE open naval gun, a 5-inch aft-mounted "stinger" called, appropriately, a Pea Shooter. (a 5/38 dual purpose mount for the curious)
    All six of them would blister the paint off of their barrels on this day, and Ziggy's Flagship (Fanshaw Bay) was credited with severely damaging an IJN Cruiser by detonating it's torpedos - which were BANNED under the disastrously flawed Washington Treaty .
    When the Japanese ships began to retire and it began to look like the remaining ships might actually survive, at least one sailor was reported to yell,
    '. . . dammit, boys, they're getting away!'

    2. The 1,000 ton Samuel B Roberts would virtually deplete her entire magazine of torpedoes and shells against ships 5 to 70 times her size....all except....literally ONE LAST 5" shell that a mortally wounded GM3 Paul Henry Carr was trying to fire from a shattered aft gun.
    His shipmates did what they could for him, giving him morphine and preparing to abandon ship.
    They turned their backs on him long enough for him to crawl back to his gun and, again, try to load that last shell.
    He was nominated for the Navy Cross but the award was downgraded to a Silver Star.
    Not long after I joined the Navy....USS Carr (FFG-52), an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, was commissioned.....along with....one more.

    3. Carr's tiny little ship that fought off dreadnaughts was lost that day....BUT one of the final ships in the USN's Oliver Hazard Perry-class of frigates was commissioned as USS Samuel B Roberts, FFG-58 in 1986. If the name sounds familiar, The "Sammy B" was severely damaged by an Iranian mine in 1988, opening a 15-foot hole in her engine room and breaking her keel - BOTH of which are almost universally fatal in a ship that size.

    Her crew responded with the same gallantry, guts and gumption that was exhibited by their forebears and, against all odds saved the ship.
    One of the people that helped keep the Sammy-B from the same fate as her namesake reportedly shared the same proud USN heritage and the same last name as Paul Henry Carr, according to historian James Hornfischer's excellent book:
    The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.

    If anyone reads these scribblings to the end - READ THAT BOOK, and then perhaps explain to me how ANYONE could find history...."boring."

    If you like it?
    Hornfischer also wrote the go-to book for the Guadalcanal campaign....which also featured squids protecting Marines, even though historians don't always tell it that way....but

    .....maybe later. ;)

    Edit.....

    WAR is NOT a Hallmark movie.
    There was ignobility and gross mistakes made by both sides, in THIS and all of the campaigns.
    The Butcher's bill.....
    • 1,161 killed and missing
    • 913 wounded
    Some, perhaps MANY of the sailors died well AFTER this battle when left their ships, or their ships left them....becoming part of the flotsam.
    The last of the these were pulled, sun blistered, oil soaked and dying of thirst in the world's largest body of water, after 2 agonizing days and nights on the open sea.

    AND Lastly....(finally! :) )

    The Imperial Japanese Navy was not well regarded by anyone for their hospitality towards vanquished foes.
    ON THIS DAY however, more than a few of them stood at attention and saluted their American enemy as they retired, and some of them threw potatoes instead of grenades.....NOT to harass, but perhaps as sustenance against a common enemy.

    CERTAINLY a gesture of well earned respect.
     
    #1 ETC(SS), Oct 25, 2021
    Last edited: Oct 25, 2021
    Mendel Leisk and bisco like this.
  2. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    It wasn't that many years ago (less than 5 iirc?) That the sunken cruiser Indianapolis was finally discovered on the bottom of the ocean. This too was another historical moment of bravery tragedy. Having delivered uranium for the ultimate Construction of the nuke used against Hiroshima, they ran radio silent. A Japanese submarine sank the cruiser - middle of the night. Hundreds of the 1,100 Souls went down with the ship. Still - hundreds of sailers jumped ship into the blackness of the night sea. Imagining they had survived the worst, that actually began the next Terror. Sailors could be heard screaming as they were eaten alive by sharks. 4½ days later - with only some 300 sailors still surviving - a rescue.

    Inside deadliest shark attack EVER as 150 sailors from USS Indianapolis eaten alive after warship sunk in WW2

    .
     
    #2 hill, Oct 26, 2021
    Last edited: Oct 26, 2021
  3. Georgina Rudkus

    Georgina Rudkus Senior Member

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    I wear my Cardigan sweater and my sweat shirt with Raglan sleeves in honor of the original slaughter of the Light Brigade.

    The British blamed the Turks, but they were fully responsible. It was "the noble savage" and "the white man's burden" according the Rudyard Kipling, the famous British author.
     
  4. ETC(SS)

    ETC(SS) The OTHER One Percenter.....

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    I was actually thinking of Indy when re-visiting Taffy's survivors.
    SAR is a difficult gig with 1940's tech, and we did a less than noble job in finding and rescuing the human flotsam following nearly all of our WWII engagements.
    The only reason this wasn't as much a thing in the Atlantic, is that you only lasted a few minutes in the cold Atlantic water.

    I haven't met a single WW2 era submariner or (credible) historian that thinks that the Japanese I-58 sunk Indianapolis her with "long lance" torpedoes instead of Kaiten (human guided torpedoes)....but hey.
    Politics.
    The Indy's skipper got blamed - rightfully, IMHO, for the sinking because.......he was the skipper.
    Naval ossifers always crave that title and the god-like authority that came with it at that time.
    The Price?
    The CO is responsible.

    Period.
    Full stop.

    The Japanese had some of, if not THE finest submarines in the world, and their torpedoes were absolutely the best in the world.
    If they had used their submarines strategically instead of tactically (especially against our oilers) they might have altered things a tiny bit.
    However (comma!) they were already beaten when they dropped their first torpedo into the warm muddy waters in Pearl Harbor on that fateful Sunday morning.
    We followed the German model and sent our subs after Marus (commerce shipping) because our goal was to win the war - not the battles.
    Japanese oilers WERE one of our top priorities.

    Indianapolis' skipper (Captain Charles B. McVay III) is widely regarded as the only captain who was formally charged with the loss of his ship in combat during WWII, even though his (surviving) crew as a whole thought otherwise.
    Following a public trial and years of shame, ceaseless harassment by some of the grieving families, and probably as-yet discovered PTSD, he took his own life in 1968.
    He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Gulf of Mexico.

    In 1996, he was formally, if posthumously cleared following, in part, the efforts of a sixth-grade student named Hunter Scott who studied the Indianapolis incident and other efforts by the surviving Indy crewmembers all those years later.


    The poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the battle in the Crimea ARE two different things, really, but people often forget that most of the Lancers survived the ill-fated charge.
    Compared to the industrialized carnage of WW1, the Crimean stuff really WAS a Hallmark Novel.

    The Brits didn't get to be a superpower by being "nice."
    Neither, BTW did the Turks. (Ask any Armenian.)
    If the 20th century was "Americas" century and the ChiComms realize their goals in the 21st - one wonders how they will be treated by historians in the 22nd century. ;)
    (Maybe ask the Uighurs, or the LGBT community?)

    Historians do not like winners.
     
    #4 ETC(SS), Oct 26, 2021
    Last edited: Oct 26, 2021
  5. ETC(SS)

    ETC(SS) The OTHER One Percenter.....

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    When can their glory fade?
    O the wild charge they made!
    All the world wonder’d.….
    -
    Tennyson

    Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four? The world wonders.…
    -
    Nimitz (and staff)