Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Drydock - Episode 017" video.

Admiral King was an alcoholic, womanizing, and constantly pissed off desk sailor. He seems to have developed his Anglophobia sometime during WWI when he was a staff officer assigned as liaison to the British Home Fleet. He apparently got into several battles with British officer over antisubmarine tactics, and is rumored to have only just escaped sacking when discovered in the bed of a British admiral's wife, although I have never been able to learn the name of the admiral or his wife, so that's really hearsay at this juncture. After that, he seems to have developed a loathing of all things British, and the RN in particular. He refused to allow convoys off the US coast for the first six months of the WWII. While his stated reason was we didn't have enough escort ships, others suspect it's because the convoy was a British invention. He also fought the Army's plan to fly B-24's to fly from Greenland and Iceland to close the Iceland gap to German subs. He felt the Navy's next flying boat, the Coronado, could handle the task, even though the Coronado turned out to be a failure as a long range patrol bomber. On the plus side, King was the main advocate for the invasion of Guadalcanal in the face of fierce Army opposition. While it was a long and bloody campaign, history has proven King's strategic thinking correct. Guadalcanal was the first retaking of conquered Japanese territory in the war, and it proved the Army and Navy together could use amphibious operations to take islands from the Japanese. He was also instrumental in seeing that enough naval strength was available in the Pacific in 1942 to protect supply lines to Australia and prevent the Japanese actually invading the country. By far his most egregious decision was his role in the court-martial of Charles B McVay III, captain of the USS Indianapolis. He overturned Admiral Nimitz's letter of reprimand as a result of the sinking of the Indianapolis and instead demanded a court-martial, and carried his demands all the way to Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. Forestall gave in because he didn't want to start an open battle between him and King so soon after the end of the war. The court-martial eventually convicted Captain McVay in November, 1945 of failing to zigzag as an antisubmarine measure. Even though Forrestal overturned the sentence, and McVay had an essentially honorary promotion to rear admiral just before his retirement in 1949, the court-martial was the end of the career for a promising and honorable Navy officer. Indianapolis's survivors came together and tried for many years to have the court-martial removed from what they consider "their skipper's" record. McVay spent many years in self recrimination over the deaths of so many of his men, even though most (but not all) the survivors tried to rally around him. His family stated he received hate mail and telephone calls from some survivor's families for many years after the court-martial, particularly as each anniversary of the sinking approached. McVay suffered from mental health problems for years after the court-martial. His family reported he would wake up screaming from nightmares he was back in the water with his shipmates, trying to fight off attacking sharks. Finally, he lost the battle and, in 1968, committed suicide using his Navy service pistol on the back steps of his Litchfield, Connecticut home. After all the attempts to clear McVay's name, it was a 12 year old schoolboy's class project in 1998 that finally bought the miscarriage of justice to national attention. Hunter Scott testified before Congress and turned over the voluminous notes he took from interviews with almost 150 Indianapolis survivors. Congress passed a resolution in 2000 asking the Navy to exonerate Captain McVay. President Clinton, to his credit, signed the resolution the same year. The Navy finally, after fighting tooth and nail not to, exonerated Captain McVay in July, 2001, with Secretary of the Navy England ordered McVay's Navy record purged of the court-martial and of all implication of wrongdoing on his part. Why was King so intent on seeing McVay convicted? The evidence implicates King carrying a grudge all those years because McVay's father, Admiral Charles B McVay Jr, had ordered a letter of reprimand be placed in King's file in 1922 because he and others were caught sneaking women onto a Navy ship. He apparently decided his best revenge was seeing the career of his son destroyed, and this is exactly what Admiral Charles McVay Jr thought was the reason. King has been accused of the death of many US Navy sailors and merchant sailors because of his refusal to initiate convoys. That can be argued, but one death can be laid squarely on King's shoulders, and that was the death of Captain McVay. I'm sorry for the length of this, but I couldn't let the mention of Admiral King pass by without telling this story. Like Hunter Scott, I was a 16 year old schoolboy in 1963, and my junior history project was the sinking of the Indianapolis. Captain (then Rear Admiral) McVay paid me the honor of speaking to me for almost three hours over two days about him, his ship, and the sinking. He told me of the heroism of not only his own crew but what survivors would call the Angel of the Sky and the two Angels of the Water. Many more of the crew wouldn't have survived without them. The rescue was more a result of them and their amazing efforts than the Navy. Look them up to find out what they did or this will become more of War and Peace than it already has. Even in 1963, McVay still bore the full responsibility for the sinking if his ship. My school project didn't stir anything but one newspaper story, but it left me carrying Charles McVay in my heart. My heart sank on that terrible day of November 6, 1968 when I heard of Admiral McVay's death, and not a November 6 goes by that I don't think of him. There are only two villains in this story. The first are the unknown naval bureaucrats that denied the Indianapolis a destroyer escort and then delayed rescue for days because they didn't have a system to alert them when a single ship was overdue. The other is Admiral Ernest King.
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@jamesnickell5908 Yes. He was Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. Hashimoto, captain of the submarine I-58, testified at the court-martial that it wouldn't have mattered if McVay was zigzagging. It was a clear night with a calm sea and the moon was behind the Indianapolis. It was perfect attack conditions, and Hashimoto felt he would have sunk her regardless of any evasive action. He was found and brought to Oakland at the behest of Admiral King, and Admiral Nimitz and many other naval officers felt this was an attempt to rile up the public against McVay, Even though Hashimoto was testifying for the prosecution, his testimony not only didn't help to convict McVay, but many observers felt it exonerated him. It didn't matter. It was either the Navy admit the errors it were made that led to the sinking and then the long delayed rescue, or they needed a fall guy. McVay was the fall guy. Hashimoto shared with McVay some of the burden of guilt over the loss of so many men. He later became a Shinto priest, and actively assisted the survivor groups trying to get McVay's conviction overturned. He wrote a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1999, at age 90, when the committee was hearing testimony about the case. He repeated what he told the court-martial in 1945. He wrote that Captain McVay was not responsible for the sinking of his ship, he was, and he asked forgiveness for himself and forgiveness for Captain McVay by our own navy. He passed away on October 25, 2000, just five days before the congressional resolution exonerating Captain McVay was signed by President Clinton.
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There were also various diffused lighting schemes to help ships blend into the background lighting at sea. While the experiments, especially with the RCN, were effective, the ship needed several hundred small light projectors scattered around the ship, the lights didn't survive heavy weather well, and made excessive demands on the ship's electrical system. All of these schemes became more or less moot with the advent of radar, and camouflage moved on to that problem.
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Klobi, USN ships mostly made their own freshwater from distilling units on board the ships. Most of the water was used for boiler feedwater with the crew needs getting what was left. Ship logs from WWII had constant exhortations for the crew to decrease water use with a running report of number of gallons used each day. These early distilling units were limited in capacity, so it was always battle between the boilers and crews getting the occasional showers and enough water for cooking needs. Almost all oilers also carried freshwater to top up the tanks of larger ships and transfer water for the tanks of smaller ships that didn't have distilling units. Ships would also top off their tanks when they were in ports with approved water supplies. The USN Medical Corps were aware of the diseases spread by impure water, and they trained hundreds of doctors and technicians in testing and treating water supplies. Some ports, particularly in the Mediterranean, never developed potable water supplies that met the Navy standards so crews on liberty were forbidden to drink unboiled water or shower with the native water. This wasn't always obeyed, and sailors did get sick from breaking the rules. When it comes to kitchen and human waste, well, they had the whole ocean, so over the side it went. Human waste was collected in tanks and then emptied when they were in a location away from the shore and the enemy since floating waste was a pretty good indication of enemy vessels in the area. Kitchen waste was collected in standard garbage cans and dumped over the side under the same restrictions as emptying human waste tanks. Ocean life generally made short work of kitchen waste.
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@klobiforpresident2254 You're welcome. I know submarines were very careful to only dump waste at night and then to sail away from the area. During the days of sail, lookouts were instructed to keep a weather eye out for jetsam, anything cast over the side of a ship. I don't know of any specific instances of floating food items leading to the discovery of a ship, but the Navy was worried enough about it that it devoted numerous pages in ship instruction manuals about how and when to fling yesterday's dinner over the side. .
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