Saturday Matinee: Rings Around Rabaul
Setting the stage for the Solomon Islands Campaign project which kicks off next month…and what better way than with the classic, Victory at Sea:
Setting the stage for the Solomon Islands Campaign project which kicks off next month…and what better way than with the classic, Victory at Sea:
Skippy-san thinks so: When the Navy was a lot larger-a lot of these billets did not exist, and we where an organization that was 200,000 people bigger and 300 ships bigger. Yet we still got ships deployed. Why does it take so many flag officers to do so now? It doesn’t-and you know it. More…
Here and elsewhere much has been written of the Doolittle raid, from the bookstand to Hollywood and the curriculum of War Colleges the world over. Coming fast on the heels of the stunning blows barely four months prior a malevolent arc of destruction and defeat stretching from Pearl Harbor back across the Pacific to…
Fifth ship of the Essex class — fifth ship to bear Benjamin Franklin’s name… On the 19th of March, 1945, her crew would write a story for the ages as they were tested in the crucible. Today, like so many of their generation, the already small band of survivors of that day continue to dwindle….
WORLD WAR 2 was really the first multi-media war. True – photography was present in the American Civil War (or as my late grandma used to call it “The Late Unpleasantness” among some of her milder epithets – but we digress). Motion pictures were still embryonic and grainy when WWI burst on the scene and so most…
As a Student NFO back in the late 70’s (OK, 1978) in P-cola, we tended to spend a certain amount of our free time over at the (then) new-ish Naval Aviation Museum (the ‘National’ appellation still some several years off) and while our attention was drawn to some of the indoor exhibits, nicely finished and…
First, go over to EagleSpeak and read this very excellent account of how the US came to be involved in the Pacific to begin with. Then come back for the Battle of the Coral Sea. – SJS Battle of the Coral Sea, 7-8 May 1942 –The Events of 7 May 1942 …