Within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor American men willingly accepted the draft and by mid January,1942, the army, navy and marines had increased to more than 175,000 people— double the amount that were available but two weeks earlier, before the attack. the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States had been wholeheartedly against entering World War Two.
A New Road To Woodstock '69
Snippet 16
Woodstock: The iconic American rock festival of the twentieth century
Authors Notation: Other than those that were actually a participating member or members of the Woodstock Festival, all others are fictitious characters and situations created for dramatic effect, and especially at this author’s whim.
Further Notation: I have no intention of repeating my nineteen part Woodstock series as first submitted on Tuesday, July 26, 2022, but digging further into the earlier lives of Sharon and Clyde and her Polish immigrant parents: 'Murray and Sarah Kandinsky and his Irish immigrant parents, Malcolm and Ellen Murphy.
From the time the Kaminsky and Murray families had originally passed the ‘Loveland; Population 6,500’ sign in May of 1939 the population had swelled to 6,630 Loveland residents.
The basic local industry was farming. There were a few small, ‘odds and ends’ manufacturing factories scattered about the outskirts of town and the town itself —mainly on Main Street— consisted of Clara and Jerry Mott’s Drug Store, two doctors and one dentist office and also one Attorney at Law office. Of course there was the combination post office and Ohio Bell telephone Company office. There was a limited popular items grocery store, a novelty and gift shop and Viktor Johansson’s Bakery, There was also the ever f popular— at least to Lovelands young population— Betty Hutton's 'Frozen Delight Ice Cream Palace’ To the south, about four miles out of the city limits, is The ‘ Loveland & Miami Grove Medical center’. School age children were picked up by orange school cusses to be delivered to the Loveland/Miami Grove grade and high schools.
Oh, yes, there was also ‘Pink’s Hardware & Associates, Inc.’.
What the entire area did not have was any type of a factory producing any kind of wartime material.
Hawaii wasn’t the only U.S. territory that Japan targeted that day. What many Americans remember as the bombing of Pearl Harbor was actually part of a larger coordinated attack by the Japanese Empire on the Asian-Pacific territories of the U.S. and British empires.
Within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor American men willingly accepted the draft and by mid January,1942, the army, navy and marines had increased to more than 175,000 people— double the amount that were available but two weeks earlier, before the attack. the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States had been wholeheartedly against entering World War Two.
As Americans tend to do when our backs are forced to the wall, the country came together as Pearl Harbor’ changed the course of history, shifting the entire United States focus, making it possible for America to join the European war and help stamp out Germany's effort to conquer Europe, completely wiping the British Empire from the face of the globe.
As requested by Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1942 women came out of their roles as housewives to work in factories, guaranteeing that wartime efforts weren't slowed by the over 1.8 million men who were in either the Army, Navy, or Marines.
Proving that, as ‘Navy Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’ was said to have stated,”I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant…
To say nothing of the flexing of Rosie The Riveter’s muscle.
However, the country still in a state of depression knowing there were still bodies of American sailors tangled within a million tons of twisted steel in the Harbor of Pearl.
Factories that were not yet tooled for the manufacture of weapons of war, keeping America’s army of millions of Rosie’s from doing their part… Waiting to work! Wanting to ‘go to work’! Needing some way to make Japan feel what they had brought upon themselves.
Americans by nature are not a vengeful people.
Americans are by nature are a peace loving people.
The sleeping bear had been awoken.
‘Needing’ vengeance for those 2,403 dead Americans.
Four months into this war.
At noon on April 18, 1942...
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword...
Remember Pearl Harbor!
At noon on April 18, 1942, the citizens of Tokyo looked up into the sky and saw the impossible.
Zooming low over the imperial capital was a flight of sixteen, roaring twin-engine bombers. Nothing surprising about that in wartime Japan. Except that these aircraft were painted olive-drab, with red-white-and-blue stars on their wings and fuselage.
They were American planes dropping bombs on the sacred soil of Japan.
As the body-felt, ‘crump… crump...crump’ of sixty-four explosions and the drone of aircraft motors faded, and the air raid sirens continued to wail, the people of Tokyo asked themselves a fateful question:
What just happened?
The Doolittle Raid on April 18,1942was more than one of history’s most momentous air attacks. It was also one of the most economical. The Allies dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany, and the United States dropped seven million tons. And still the Nazis continued to fight. Yet ‘sixteen’ B-25 bombers carrying perhaps sixteen tons of bombs actually managed to change the course of history.
It was a stunning reversal. In war, momentum is everything, and Japan was the one that had it in the early spring of 1942. Within four months, they had decimated the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, conquered Southeast Asia, the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and the islands of the Central Pacific, and were about to compel the last battered U.S. defenders in the Philippines to surrender.
America ‘must’ reverse the momentum with a victory— ‘Any’ kind of victory—to lift the morale of the people of America, and take back the initiative.
Roosevelt had the right idea: days after Pearl Harbor, he called for the Japanese homeland to be bombed in retaliation. But how? Not with heavy bombers like the B-17, because with the air bases in the Philippines gone, land-based planes were out of range. Carrier-based aircraft? U.S. Navy carrier planes had a combat range of perhaps 250 miles, and the Navy didn’t dare sail its handful of precious carriers that close to Japan.
Then a Navy officer had a brilliant idea: Was it possible for U.S. Army Air Force, land-based bombers with much longer range than carrier planes, to be launched off an aircraft carrier sailing near Japan?
It turned out that the new twin-engine ‘B-25B Mitchell’ medium bomber could perform the mission.
The problem was that while the B-25s could take off from a carrier, they could ‘not’ land. Which meant that they had to return to an airfield on the ground.
In effect, these bombers would have to be on a one-way mission.
By stripping them down and overloading the planes with fuel, America could fly the B-25s from a carrier several hundred miles off Japan... bomb their targets, then continue on to land on airfields in China.
Onto the carrier ‘USS Hornet’ were loaded sixteen B-25s under the command of ‘ Lt. Col. James Doolittle’.
The Hornet was accompanied by the carrier ‘Enterprise’, four cruisers and eight destroyers under the command of Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey.
The small force sailed from Hawaii and then west across the Central Pacific toward Japan with the Hornet’s flight deck packed nose to toe with B-25s, leaving only the ‘Enterprise’s’ fighters and bombers to provide air cover.
Had the task force run into Japan’s Combined Fleet—especially the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor—the battle would have ended very quickly.
Luck was with the Americans — at first— as they sailed from Hawaii, as they remained undiscovered until April 18, when the force was about 650 miles from Japan, then it came into contact with one of the small fishing boats —that Japan had stationed as cheap picket ships— that was quickly sunk by gunfire, but not before getting off a signal and Japanese naval forces immediately left from Japan.
Knowing the short range of American carrier aircraft, the Japanese assumed that the U.S. task force would not be within range of Japan until the following day, April 19, which would allow the Japanese ample time for interception.
From radio monitoring aware that their presence had been discovered, the Americans decided to launch the B-25s raid from nearly two hundred miles further from Japan than planned.
Between eight and nine a.m. on April 18, loaded with four, five hundred pound bombs, the sixteen B-25 launched from the ‘Hornet’s’ deck.
They arrived at about noon over Tokyo. Had they run into real fighter opposition, the bombers would have been wiped out. However Japanese air defenses that day were astoundingly lethargic and antiaircraft fire was negligible, and the few lightly armed Japanese fighters that did manage to take off either failed to intercept or did little damage.
Tokyo’s air-raid sirens didn’t even blare until after the attack was over.
Flying low to the ground, U.S. bombs fell on ten targets.
Considering the standards of the thousand-bomber raids over Germany, then later fire raids on Tokyo, to say nothing of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Doolittle Raid would barely qualify as a nuisance.
A few industrial sites were damaged, as were some docks ans a couple of military installations, killing or injuring about 450 people.
After the raid, one bomber landed in the Soviet Union—which was at war with Germany but had a nonaggression pact with Japan— and was interned. The remaining fifteen turned southwest toward eastern China, where the Chinese were supposed to activate homing beacons to guide them to the airfields. But— a major fuck-up— the U.S. Navy failed to signal the Chinese to turn on the beacons.
Low on fuel, with darkness approaching and the weather worsening, the crews either crash-landed or bailed out.
Most were saved by Chinese soldiers or civilians. But three crewmen died bailing out, and eight were captured by the Japanese, of whom three were executed by firing squad.
Because of the raid, the humiliation felt by the Japanese was immense: ‘Why, the emperor himself could have been killed by those bombs!’
What really shamed the Japanese military was the failure to prevent an American carrier task force from sailing that close to the homeland. Such an error could not be tolerated.
This the first time that America struck back, and considering the diminutive size of Colonel Doolittle's force, the U.S. struck back hard!
Yes, the physical damage was not all that much — they hit a few factories, they hit some docks, they started some fires — that the Japanese fixed fairly quickly.
But they could not fix the impact of the emotions and morale of the American people, or the Japanese, and the Japanese military."
The Doolittle raid was not only a near impossible surprise military operation, but mainly a huge— thoroughly effective— propaganda effort designed to boost the American morale by demonstrating that the U.S. could strike back at Japan —even if primarily symbolically— to restore confidence within the American people and military.
5/2/42
As Per President Roosevelt’s wish to reverse the momentum... Move theaters throughout America..
Through the country Americans in movie theaters cheering as the grainy footage of bombardier movie film somehow smuggled from China by the Chinese Army showing smoky explosions caused by the bombs drooped by Jimmy Doolittle’s thirty seconds over Tokyo.
Inspired now: Existing factories producing weapons and materials of war doubling… With the help of America’s Rosie’s tripling production.
Inspired now: Existing factories throughout the country re-tooled for the production of weapons and materials of war.
Inspired now: Women! Millions of women! Young. Old. Married. Single. Anxious to join alongside America’s ‘Rosie’. Now given the chance to flex their feminine American muscle.
Cities and production areas in the United States of America literally humming with excelled war-time production.
‘Navy Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto's statement is often shown after the fact. He may have been the only one of the Japanese probably thought military that believe d it. After Pearl Harbor, especially, most Japanese probably thought Americans were lazy and weak in spite of our movies.
Recently my brother told me that he has been singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I too have been singing it before going to bed. I also do a little bit of Dixie that I know to be fair what is considered the idyllic life of the old South, except for the poor unnamed slaves made it possible.
The Doolittle raid was a huge gamble that came off well. Just like the unfortunate, but necessary to nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both were huge turning points eventually make Japan wealthy and still a strong ally the United States. A legacy of our treatment of our defeated in war like Germany's resurgence to economic power in the late 50s and 60s.
Thanks to TV channels like History, I have watched detailed accounts of the Doolittle Raid more than once. As well as many other stories from World War II and other wars. I'm an avid fan of history program that are accurate. However, there are some that tend to inflate legends that aren't true. And in the future, historical information may be misused by AI to make a historical lessons that are untrue like much of history already written by powerful influence as propaganda rather than truth. Modern forensics of all kinds reversing this written history or verifying it all the time.
I believe there was a movie, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, during the war, probably starting Colonel Jimmy Stewart, a real Army Air Corps pilot. Certainly inspiring Americans and demoralizing Japanese who suddenly felt vulnerable even at great distance from the United States.
Was there a movie theater in Loveland? It was large enough. Small towns in Wisconsin during the summer would hang a sheet after dark in the park and show the latest films from the war effort and newsreels.
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The One Week Writing Workshop shows you how to write a book step by step through a series of motivating writing activities. Working with your own creative ideas, you’ll learn a 7-step novel writing method to use now and on your future novel projects.
