MORE NEWS FROM THE FRONT PART THREE

Blog number 143                                               Jan 20, 2008

I'm still reading this book about war at sea. 

World War 2 developed into a massive emergence of the number of weapons of war without a comparative increase in the number of men competent enough to use them.  In other words farmers, truck drivers, and lumbermen were given commands of ships with little or no training.

Leon Cannick tells of when he was assigned command of an LCT, " We were supposed to have six weeks of training.  When I got there...there's no three (sic) weeks of training at all.  Forget that.  The next day they gave me my crew who were far more up on LCTs than I was...I went out one day with another skipper and his crew.  Then I went out another day with my crew and another skipper on my boat.  Then the next day they said, ' There you are.' "

One of Cannick's fellow skippers astounded an admiral by explaining that he could keep his ship out of the rays of the moon by zigzagging.
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Kamikazi pilots - the first suicide bombers, were all volunteers.  The way one group volunteered was that, instead of volunteers taking one step forward, the ones who didn't want to volunteer were to take one step forward.  Of course in that culture, no one wanted to volunteer not to volunteer for giving up their life in order to maybe destroy a ship.  So nobody did.  They all became suicide bombers.

I had read before that one Kamikazi pilot strafed the command center after take off.  I read that again in this book.

Captain Inocughi of the Japanese navy and a disciple of Admiral Onishi - the initiator of the Kamikazi program, conceded that, "many of the new arrivals [at Kamikazi bases] seemed at first not only to lack enthusiasm, but indeed to be disturbed by their situation."  Hah!