The Roundtable
Forum
Official
Newsletter of the Battle of Midway
Roundtable
Issue Number 2011-19
16 August 2011 • Our 14th Year
~
AROUND THE TABLE ~
MEMBERS’
TOPICS IN THIS ISSUE:
1. From Our Archives: Midway After the Battle
2. Book Review: Attack on Pearl Harbor
3. Zero Pilot Harada
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1. FROM OUR ARCHIVES: MIDWAY AFTER THE BATTLE
Ed.
note: Walt Grist was a key member of our BOM
veteran cadre until his passing in 2004.
He was an aviation mechanic on the atoll, servicing the Marine SBDs and
SB2Us that would become a part of history on 4 June 1942. In the following message, Walt gives a
little insight on what it was like there immediately after the battle as well
as through the rest of the war.
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20 October 2002
From: MSgt Walter C. Grist, USMC-Ret
BOM vet, PFC, VMSB-241,
Midway
Another comment about the defense of Midway after the battle. Adm. Spruance withdrew to the east rather
than pursue the Japanese strike force and maybe engage the main body. His logic was to have aircraft available to
defend Midway in case the Japanese tried to make a landing.
The Marine Air Group (MAG-22) was all but wiped out. It no longer had aircraft that could
fly after the morning attack on June 4th.
Of the 25 fighters (VMF-221)that launched on the morning of the 4th, only
2 returned that flew again. The rest
were shot down or so badly damaged they could not be repaired and made
airworthy. Of the 35 dive bombers
(VMSB-241) only 3 were airworthy.
Some of the damage was gaping holes, engines that had oversped, and were
damaged by direct hits to the case, control cables shot away, hydraulic systems
severely damaged, fabric ripped off and many other problems that could not be
repaired. Therefore, if a landing was attempted, the only air
defense would have to be provided from the U.S. carriers. We were ready to defend the island with what
we had but it was slim pickings and we were thankful that Adm. Spruance made
the right decision.
Midway was a very important base as outer defense for the Hawaiian
Islands and we were always on alert.
After the battle we were still expecting a landing. A new runway
was built on Sand Island in 1943 and a squadron of F4Us operated from it for
the rest of the war. The runways
on Eastern Island were used by the dive bomber squadron and patrol
planes after the longer one on Sand Island was built. There were no runways on Sand Island during
the battle. The runway on Sand Island is still in use today and
handles jet aircraft. The runways on
Eastern Island used during the battle have been abandoned. The squadrons
on Midway were back up to strength as planes and personnel were
available but I don't know the time frame.
The 6th Defense Battalion stayed on Midway until after the war. The
naval base was used for sub refueling and fleet operations throughout the war.
These things are coming back to me as I think about events, but 60
years takes a toll, and I have those senior moments. Keep asking
questions and I will try to come up with whatever I can. There has been very little written about
Midway after the battle because Guadalcanal took all of the headlines. CINCPAC released very little info because of
fleet movements after the Battle of Midway and the landing at Guadalcanal.
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2. BOOK REVIEW: ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR ( see issues #15, 16, 18 )
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5 August 2011
From: Ted Kraver
Arizona
[Quoting from] CDR Alan D. Zimm, 22 July:
“Another consideration is that Yamamoto
and the NGS both anticipated losing at least half the Japanese carriers.
There simply was no way, in their calculations and war games, that the aircraft
that they had available to hit the estimated 600 U.S. aircraft on the island
ought to have prevented all counterattacks.”
We have always celebrated the fact that our
carriers were distant from Pearl Harbor. But I have not heard of anyone
discussing what could have happened if they were cruising within the battle
zone and could have added their squadrons to the defense of Pearl Harbor. Or, if in port, would their aircraft have
been operational Sunday morning and could they have been part of the defense of
Pearl Harbor and as a force to attack the Japanese carriers?
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Ed. note: this is
discussed at some length in Roundtable member Jim Bresnahan’s new book, Refighting
the Pacific War. Watch
for a review in the next issue.
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3. ZERO PILOT HARADA
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15 August 2011
From: Lu Yu
Iowa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHfBG5pSwpU&feature=related
This is a Japanese language documentary I recently found on YouTube. It is about a veteran Japanese Zero pilot
Harada Kaname (原田 要).
At the age of 94, he recollects his combat experiences in the Pearl
Harbor Attack, the Indian Ocean Raid, the Battle of Midway (as PO1c) and
the Guadalcanal Campaign. Harada joined
the IJN in 1933 at the age of 16 and graduated as Sōren (Japanese
pilot training program) 35th Class.
At 25, he participated in the Pearl Harbor attack as a Zero pilot aboard
Sōryū. He flew CAP
missions and did not see action. In the
air combat near Sri Lanka, his shōtai shot down 5 British aircraft and he
personally 3 (as he claimed).
The part related to BOM is from 04:39 to about 07:00 [run time on the video]. His mission again was CAP. The CG [computer generated imagery] showed
the combat as Harada recollects it. His
shōtai was launched at 1000 and engaged VT-3. During combat,
one plane in his shōtai, that of PO2c Nagasawa, was shot down by the
TBDs. After 4 Japanese carriers were bombed,
Harada made a forced water landing due to fuel exhaustion. After 4
hours in the water, he was rescued by a DD.
Refer to Shattered Sword Appendix for his action.
From 1965, Harada began to manage a kindergarten, which is shown at the end of
the video.
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Ed, note: although
the video is entirely in Japanese, you can follow it fairly well from the
visuals. It runs a little over 12
minutes. Harada appears extensively in Shattered
Sword—see Index page 597.
~ NOW
HEAR THIS! ~
NEWS
& INFO IN THIS ISSUE:
- E-mail Security Problem
- Featured Link
- Editor’s Notes
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E-MAIL SECURITY PROBLEM
Any Internet-based organization like ours depends heavily
on e-mail to function. Unfortunately,
e-mail is vulnerable to a variety of scams by criminals trying to con the
innocent into providing money or personal data. Spam is the most common problem, which is at the root of specific
e-mail troubles as explained in our FAQs.
Another problem is “spoofing” of an e-mail address, and
that one seems to be rearing its ugly head quite frequently in recent
weeks. “Spoofing” means a criminal has
received a message with your name and e-mail address on it, plus those of
several people in your address book (explanation follows). He then creates a new e-mail account using
your name and what looks like your e-mail address. He sends bogus messages from that “spoofed” account to the
various IDs from your address book.
Your friends and relatives then receive what looks like legitimate
messages from you that invites you to provide certain private information, send
money, or visit a web site that will do the same thing.
How does the crook get your name, e-mail address, and those
from your address book? Easy. it’s those messages most of us are guilty of
sending to multiple addressees—typically some sort of general interest message
that you received from someone and decide to pass along to much or all of your
address book. All of those names and
e-mail addresses are in the header of your forwarded messages. Some of the people who receive the message
from you similarly forward it to a bunch of addresses in their address
books. That process continues until,
ultimately, the message winds up in the in-box of a spoofer.
All the spoofer has to do is create a new e-mail account
somewhere, label it the same as yours, and any message from that bogus account
will look like the real thing from you.
But anyone who replies to the message will be sending the reply back to
the spoofer, not you. How that’s done
is rather technical, and involves the structure of the message’s hidden
properties in the header.
How do you tell a bogus message sent by a spoofer from the
real thing? It’s usually easy—the text
might be illogical for an actual message from the victim. Also, the composition is often very poor
(spelling, punctuation, spacing, word choice, etc.). Here’s the text of a message I received last month from the
spoofed ID of one of our members, and it’s written exactly as you see here:
I'm writing this with tears
in my eyes,my family and I came down here to London, United Kingdom for a short
vacation. unfortunately,we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we
stayed,all cash and credit card were stolen off us but luckily for us we still
have our passports with us.
We've been to the
Embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all and our
flight leaves in few hours from now but we're having problems settling the
hotel bills and the hotel manager won't let us leave until we settle the bills.
Well I really need your financially assistance..Please, let me know if you can
help us out? Am freaked out at the moment!!
Besides
being an obvious money scam, it’s ludicrous to believe that our actual member
would send out something composed in this crude manner. The message shouts “fake!” at first sight.
If
you’re the victim of spoofing, what do you do about it? Basically, there are two choices. One, just be patient. The spoofer will eventually move on to
another victim when he doesn’t get rewarding responses by using your e-mail
address. Or, if you can’t wait for
that, you can change your address with your ISP and advise all of your contacts
to ignore anything from your old one.
Note
that “spoofing” as described here is not the same as “hacking.” When your e-mail account is hacked, the
criminal has obtained your password and has full control of your incoming and
outgoing e-mail. With spoofing, he can
only send out messages that appear to come from you. He will not receive messages sent to you UNLESS someone clicks
“reply” on a message that he sent. As
stated above, the reply message will go to the bogus ID that he created. You will still get messages created by
others who don’t click “reply” on a bogus message.
I
regret using so much space in our newsletter for this non-Midway issue, but
again, e-mail is vital to our operations.
Anything that can be done to mitigate aggravating e-mail problems can be
very helpful to any number of our members.
For more regarding e-mail concerns on the Roundtable, see our FAQs. Your comments are welcome. —RR
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FEATURED LINK
When did the Battle of Midway end, and what was its final
act? One opinion says that it ended
when the last shot was fired on the afternoon of June 6th during the Hornet’s
second strike against Mogami-Mikuma.
Another has it as the morning of the 7th, with the sinking of the Yorktown. Here’s yet another: it ended on June 7th
with an AAF bombing raid launched from Midway against Wake Island. During the flight, General Clarence Tinker
was killed when his Liberator bomber crashed into the sea from an apparent
mechanical failure.
The following is a new web posting concerning Gen. Tinker’s
last flight, and it has more detail than most other references. Was this the last act of the BOM? You can be the judge.
Click
here for the featured link.
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EDITOR’S NOTES
~ Correction: it
turns out that my news in the last issue concerning the artist for the VT
painting on our home page was inaccurate.
I had misread the descriptions for two pictures on a web reference,
which caused me to credit Robert Fiacco as the artist for the wrong one. To compound the confusion, a telephone
conversation with him seemed to confirm that he was the artist for our VT picture,
but he was thinking of a somewhat similar TBD painting that he’d done. So, we’re back to Square One on this
matter—if anyone can come up with the artist’s name for our home page image,
I’d love to hear about it. Meanwhile,
I’ve deleted mention of Mr. Fiacco in the archive copy of the last issue.
~ More about spoofing:
here’s an important hint to help you avoid being a victim. Don’t send messages to numerous addressees
by putting their names or e-mail IDs on the “To” or “Cc” line of an outgoing message,
especially if it’s a forward. Instead,
put those IDs on the “Bcc” line, which makes them invisible to all recipients
of the message. You can put your own ID
on the “To” line if you want, just so it won’t be blank.
~ As an example of the
above technique, our “new issue” e-mail messages are sent that way. I only have our Roundtable ID on the “To”
line, but the IDs for nearly 500 members are all on the “Bcc” line.