Battle of The Bismark Sea

Not really much of a battle really. More like a slaughter.
Allied air forces sink an entire Japanese convoy laden with troops and equipment enroute to new Guinea.
This week, 70 years ago.
Pretty good article here

So, History Channel all night plays American Pickers and Pawn Stars. Junk TV. :twisted:

That is a good question,when is the history channel going to some history?

The irony in the pacific is that the Japanese had the best submarines and torpedoes of the war but used them poorly. Subs were assigned to fleets unlike the German wolf packs (and fewer american subs) that hunted unattached. They had no big convoy systems like the allies had because they had too many destinations and nowhere near enough destroyers (or escort carriers) to protect them. The Japanese also had far better organized air attacks in the beginning of the war but the Americans learned quickly.

Great story...

Reminds me of a P61 Widow story. Two people were flying to New Guinea to teach a class on how to assemble and maintain them. The one closest to the window said - "We must be late, two just flew by!"
The ground crews had been getting parts they did not recognize. They had piled them up in a hangar - figuring they belonged somewhere. Then two unidentified airframes showed up. They put two and two together and figured out how to assemble them.
Some of the can do spirit... My fathers unit in Egypt drove Italian made trucks they bought from the locals - theirs were still in Richmond.

Pappy Gunn was quite the tinkerer. He later installed either 37mm or 75mm cannons in the nose of the B-25. My memory doesn't let me remember, but he put cannons in the nose of those bombers.

Gene

It's really something the History Channel doesn't report more history, especially like this incident being exactly 70 years ago. For some reason since then we don't seem to fight to win. We had great generals and admirals who turned the tide of the war in a bit over a year after Pearl Harbor, from Dec. 7, 1941 to early March, 1943. Thanks for the reminder.

I used to watch everything on the military channel but it"s become a lot of reruns of the top 10 weapons, the top ten guns, the top 10 tank battles, etc. accompanied with heavy metal acid rock music blaring off and on. I got tired of it.

(quoted from post at 19:43:06 03/04/13) It's really something the History Channel doesn't report more history, especially like this incident being exactly 70 years ago. For some reason since then we don't seem to fight to win. We had great generals and admirals who turned the tide of the war in a bit over a year after Pearl Harbor, from Dec. 7, 1941 to early March, 1943. Thanks for the reminder.

Click to expand...

Actually they turned the tide in a bit under a year. The attack on Pearl, 7 Dec 1941 followed by the loss of Wake, Guam and the Philippines in early 42, that was followed by Midway, Jun 42, Guadalcanal, Aug 42 and the invaision of North Africa in Nov of 42. So the tide turned in less than a year, we went from fighting a defensive war to one of attack! What is really amazing is that the US military was pretty samll on that Sunday morning in Dec while the reat of the world was at war. A lot of the equipment was obsolete or substandard compared to what the men using it were to face. In spite of all of this our factories, men and women both in uniform and in the work force built enough forces and equipment to do all of this in less than a year.

In 1939 the US Army (including the US Army Air Corp) wan't 200,000 strong, the Navy was less than 185,000 and the Marine Corp was about 20,000.

We made a total of 295,000 aircraft of all types, 86,000 tanks, 193,000 artillery guns and 2 million trucks. And to think that only about 60% of the country's production was dedicated to the war effort.

IN all a fantastic effort by most of the American people.

Rick

About 20 years ago they DID show actual history shows, believe it or not. Now it's mostly contrived junk. Certainly not worth paying for.

This being in '43 I'll have to look and see if they were using skip bombing techniques yet or not.

On a sad note, saw we lost a member of the Doolittle Raid this last week. The article said there's four survivors left.