Check out this link Lew:

[Beachcomber]

Graveyard of Ships

I stumbled across this while looking to see if the SS Norway was still in service or not. Sadly it has been scrapped. It staretd life as The France and then saw many yrs of service in NCL as The Norway, which was the largest ship ever designated for 100% "cruise service".

[Lew]

I have such mixed feelings about those pics. On the one hand, I'd love to be able to hop on skiff and run around those wrecks, even go on board a few of them. At the same time, I hate to see such a sad end.

I came into Mojave, CA one time and I didn't know there was a boneyard there. It was really hot, you know how the heat comes off the road and plays tricks with your eyes, way off in the distance I saw what looked like a 747. Then another one. Then another one. And I just figured I was hallucinating, but as I got closer I saw all these old aircraft painted in liveries of airlines that don't exist anymore. And I would have loved to just walk around them and take a look, but they don't allow civilians onto the base.

Same thing with the James River ghost fleet. If you get too close to it with your boat, here comes the police to escort you away.

[Beachcomber]

There was a good documentary last night on PBS about the Japanese WWII battleship Yamato. Largest battleship ever built, and they sent it on a suicide run at the approaching US fleet. Ofcourse our airforce intercepted and sent 3,000 sailors to a watery grave. But it never should have happened, the Japanese were "willing and ready to surrender". Vulgar, war mongering Americans. Ooops, wrong thread my bad.

[Beachcomber]

they lost their best pilots on kamikaze runs at the US fleet. It stated in the documentary that the Yamato was to fire upon as much of the US fleet as possible and then ram other ships "in a glorious end" but you say they planned on beaching it. Not trying to pick a fight with you, just wonder which was their actual plan?

You are spot on in re Russia. Most Americans don't understand their viewpoint after WWII. Hitler and Germany no longer a threat, Stalin had very real reasons ot mistrust us and esp Churchill. It was openly discussed that we should turn our guns on the Soviets and wipe the communists out of power.

[Beachcomber]

and their lack of fuel was a very real issue too. The main reason US/Japan became hostile is the US blocked oil shipments due to the Japanese presence in Nanking, China. Japan mistakenly thought the attack on Pearl Harbor would cowe the US into more agreeable terms with them.

[Lew]

Lan, I love all, I serve all......I'm sort of the embodiment of the Hard Rock Cafe....

GL, I'd have to check some of my references to see where exactly, but by beaching the YAMATO it allows her to fight longer, of course. The guns would be used to counter to amphibious invasion of Okinawa. They knew that the U.S. would eventually conquer Okinawa, but their thought was, take as many U.S. servicemen with you as you can. As a sidenote, the YAMATO had a sister-ship, the MUSASHI, and together they were the largest battleships ever built. The MUSASHI was sunk by U.S. carrier-based aircraft at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the YAMATO was sunk in April 1945. For all the hype about them, neither ship made much of a showing during the war. To their credit, the Japanese, more than the U.S., foresaw the advent of naval warfare revolving around the carrier, not the battleship, and I've often wondered why they even built those two monsters in the first place.

But, you've touched on a sticky subject (you have a proclivity to do that, GL [img]wink.gif[/img] ) and that involves U.S. submarines. As ahead-of-the-curve as the Japanese were when it came to carriers, they were (fortunately) neglectful when it came to subs. They had them, of course, but they played a much smaller role in their overall strategy. And they spent even less time in the area of anti-submarine warfare, something that the U.S. and the Brits excelled at throughout the war and in both oceans.

To this day, U.S. submarine veterans have always felt short-changed by history. Certainly the carriers deserve all the press they received. But there's no shortage of pictures and stories about the battleships, and the fact is that the subs played a far more vital role than the battleships or for that matter any other surface ships after the carriers.

Part of that, undoubtedly, is due to the stealth nature of sub warfare. But, there are those who have argued there are political reasons for this as well. In the history of naval combat, there are three nations who have instituted an offical policy of unrestricted submarine warfare (i.e. subs approaching and sinking unarmed merchant ships w/o warning)- Imperial Germany during WWI, Nazi Germany during WWII, and the U.S. Navy during WWII. Now, as for me personally, I have no problem with that. A war should be fought with one purpose in mind- ending it as soon as possible. One of the primary reasons Japan was in the shape it was in 1944 and 1945 was because U.S. subs had put millions of tons of Japanese cargo on the ocean floor. Fuel, rubber, steel, you name it, not much of it got through (and Japan has comparatively few natural resources). So to me, the men who served on those subs should be honored the same as everyone else.

But....

The Germans were evil for doing that in 1915-16 (that was one of the reasons Wilson aruged we should go to war with them). And the Nazis were evil for doing that in the North Atlantic in the early 1940s. So I guess there is this thought that, how can we condemn the Germans for doing something "evil" that, well, is ok when we do it? And as a result, history has significantly downplayed (and in some cases outright ignored) the accomplishments of our sub-mariners in WWII.

Hollywood was the same way. Most sub movies take place in the Atlantic, the only Pacific ones I can think of off the top of my head are "Run Silent, Run Deep" (in which the enemy are Japanese warships), and "Torpedo Run," which does involve fighting against transport vessel that's carrying U.S. POWs (and still ends with your boy Glen Ford sinking a Japanese carrier).

[Beachcomber]

I think the use of submarines could never escape the stigmata of being "Sneaky, not dignified, cheating..." Psychologically in war you meet your opponent in an open contest of strength, guile is permitted but outright sneakiness is still not considered acceptable. Submarines are basically "cheating at cards". A Napoleonic reference I think is quite applicable. Napoleon realized Europe would never accept the manner in which he took Spain, not in open battle but he tricked them and basically "cheated at cards" as his foreign minister Talleyrand explained it. He broke the rules. He cheated. And somewhere in the military and I think national subconscience, submarines are "cheating".

[Lew]

You know, the Soviets lost well over a million men in 1945 alone (and that's from January to May). Some in the German high-command had tried to feel out Great Britain and the U.S. to see if those two countries would be interested in cease-fire, leaving the Germans to still fight the Soviets. My point being, the Germans in 1945 (even though defeat was inevitable and, other than Hitler, they all knew it) still had a formidable fighting military. That's why the Russians kept coming and launched an all-out assault on Berlin.

In contrast, the Japanese were just plain whipped. It reached a point in the summer of 1945 that the B-29s had their side guns removed to allow more weight for bombs; and the reason they could do this, there were no more Japanese fighters available to intercept them. They had the planes, but they didn't have the pilots or the fuel.

The YAMATO was indeed on a suicide mission because there wasn't enough fuel for the trip home. The plan was to beach her, then use its guns until they ran out of ammo, then blow it up so the U.S. couldn't capture it. As you mention, the U.S. intercepted it before it could reach its final destination. But there were other Japanese warships that were captured after the war at their moorings, they simply had no fuel to go anywhere.

[LanDroid]

Lew, why do you hate America?

[Lew]

There's a lot of merit to your comments, GL. In fact, that's more or less how the British Admiralty (and Churhill in particular) felt about it. That the use of submarines to attack unarmed merchant ships was "uncivilized" (as if there's anything "civilized" at all about a war).

Of course, the Brits seemed to have no problems with secretly arming some of their merchant ships, nor did they have a problem in using passenger and merchant ships to transport military supplies.

Again, I have no problem with it. I mean, I have an overall problem with war, but once you're at war, you should do everything to end it as soon as possible. I think part of the problem is, we have allowed ourselves to be taught about this great distinction between civilian and military deaths. If you torpedo a warship and send 2,000 men to their deaths, well, that's ok, they're military personnel and they "consented" to it. But if you sink a merchant ship and send 50 civilians to their death, oh crap that's a "war crime."

I never have made that distinction. A soldier/sailor that is killed is still a human being, still leaves behind a family, and it's no less a tragedy than a civilian death. But I would disagree strongly with any American who would suggest that it was a "war crime" what the U-Boats did in the Atlantic, and not feel the same way about our actions in the Pacific.

And I should also point out that the Japanese stubbornly refused to implement ASW even as the losses mounted. U.S. subs would patrol their shipping lanes and have an absolute feast, and the Japanese response was to....well, do nothing. Send 10 ships, hope that half of them make it. Send 10 more next week, hope half of them make it. I do feel for the men who were on those ships because they were on a suicide mission.

By contrast, in the North Atlantic, the allies used convoys, escorts, aircraft (even blimps were utilized, and they actually turned out to be effective sub spotters because of they could go slower than aircraft and obviously had a much longer range). The battle in the Atlantic was a true battle of opposing forces. The sub battles in the Pacific were decidedly one-sided.