Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered"
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Halsey was totally responsible for the loss of so many men and ships to Cobra. He knew that the storm was getting bigger and more intense. It could be seen on ship's radar up to 150 miles away, so it didn't just sneak up on them. Halsey was intent on getting his ships refueled to resume air operations. If he had called off the refuelling and ordered his ships to sail on a 90 degree path across the approaching storm. his should could ave escaped with very little damage or loss of life, It was only the intervention of Admiral Nimitz that saved Halsey from being court martialed. Almost unbelievably, Halsey sailed the Third Fleet right into Typhoon Connie in June, 1945, even though he had the command ship USS Ancon as part of his fleet. She had the most advanced radars of any ship off Okinawa, and her radar was able ot see Connie a75 miles away. If he had liaison officer aboard her, the flett could have turned away from the storm in time. Instead, Ancon had to send a coded radio message that took five hours to decode, and the storm was on top of them by then. Luckily, it wasn't as bad a Cobra, so no ships were lost (although many were damaged) and only six men were lost. Once again, Nimitz stepped in to save Halsey from sanction and reassignment, and he kept command of the fleet until December, 1945. Halsey had turned from the best admiral we could have in 1942 into a disaster by 1945.
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The training film "Ditch and Live" was made because so many crews forced down over water were dying only after three or four days on a raft. Realizing this, the Army Air Force had their film unit produce a training film starring Arthur Kennedy as Captain Scott H Reynolds. After a previous ditching where he was the sole survivor when the rest of his crew died at sea, he decided to train his new crew mercilessly in ditching procedures and survival techniques.
As bad luck would have it, Captain Reynolds and his crew were forced down at sea and were able to put their training to good use. There was one scene where the men were rolled out of bed at 3:00 in the moring to practice on a derelict B-17 so the men would be used to having to ditch in the dark. Several of the men, while getting dressed to head out to the plane, remarked that they'd live longer than Reynolds if they ditched just so they could throw him in the dunk tank when they got back to base. This was an obvious play on what Rickenbacker's crew said about him. He later found out about what the men had said. In reality, it was more like they wanted to live so they could kill him. The producers, not being sure of Rickenbacker's reaction, showed him the script with the more sanitized version of what the crew had said. He approved it without comment.
Many of the survival procedures were adapted from Rickenbacker's harrowing experience, and he contributes=d to the script. It became mandatory viewing for bomber crews, and the amount of time men lived at sea more than doubled for crews that had seen the film. Rickenbacker's experiences helped many more men than just the crew he went down with.
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