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bobdina
08-15-2009, 01:07 PM
WWII ‘pickets’ paid heavy price

By Kat Bergeron - The (Biloxi, Miss.) Sun Herald via AP
Posted : Saturday Aug 15, 2009 8:17:48 EDT

BILOXI, Miss. — Robert Stanley White hasn’t erased the horrific memories of April Fools’ Day 1945. The 84-year-old Navy picket veteran calls it the First Day of the Kamikazes.

That day, the U.S. began fighting for pivotal Okinawa, near the Japanese mainland, and the first of 5,000 suicide pilots reserved to fend off the invasion began their strikes.

Historically, the last day of the kamikazes should be 19 weeks later, on Victory in Japan Day, or V-J Day. Depending on which side of the international date line you stood, V-J Day was 64 years ago on Aug. 14 or Aug. 15.

But for the U.S. radar picket destroyers, the suicide planes didn’t necessarily end with Emperor Hirohito’s famous radio surrender. Bob White knows that firsthand because his picket shot down two kamikazes on Aug. 14, an hour after the Japanese peace plane flew over on its way to the Philippines to sign a cease-fire with U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

White has an overload of World War II anecdotes of suicide misses and “kamikaze kills” by his beloved pickets. All those who were aboard those Navy destroyers have fascinating stories, and that’s what White wants Americans to remember on this V-J Day anniversary.

“This is not my story but a story about thousands on the pickets who have received little credit for their role in ending the war,” said White, who married Biloxian Irma Lund and is now retired on the Gulf Coast.

“In Okinawa, 80 percent of the pickets were damaged or sunk, and 5,000 sailors dead and another 4,000 injured.

“There were 4½ months of solid terror every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter if we were at sea or in harbor. We were in constant attack mode. We never slept. We were afraid suiciders would get us.”

He also recalls the wartime camaraderie and wants to swap stories. But White has found no local veterans of Okinawa pickets, the “3/8-inch steel tin cans” vital to the last pitched battle of the war.

White is a plank owner of one of those pickets, the USS Brown DD-546. That title means he served on the Brown from its commissioning in July 1943 to war’s end, by which time the Brown had received 13 battle stars. The small destroyer claimed 27 kamikaze kills, a Japanese cruiser and two destroyers and her crew received Navy and presidential unit citations.

This 300-foot Fletcher Class destroyer was one of few pickets to survive relatively unscathed in the Okinawa operation that continued after the Army and Marines secured the island on June 21.

“The Navy blacked out news of what we were losing, an average of 1½ pickets a day from the kamikazes,” White said. “They didn’t want Japan to know the kamikazes were succeeding and they didn’t want the American people to know.”

Eighty percent of the 182 destroyers that served as pickets were sunk or damaged beyond service.

“Bob White is right that those picket destroyers were sitting ducks with little armament to defend themselves, so kamikazes just went for them,” said Doug Mansfield, founder-owner of the GI Museum in Gautier.

“The pickets performed a valuable service and got very little credit for it. They saved a lot of lives.”

Mansfield explained that the term picket was first used in the Civil War for soldiers walking guard around an encampment. Pickets are the front line, the watchers, the first defenders.

So it was for the WWII picket destroyers, substituting the encampment for carriers and battleships. With radar and old-fashioned know-how, picket crews became screens for the big ships and watched for planes, enemy ships and submarines. The fall of Okinawa, followed by the dropping of two atomic bombs, led to Japan’s defeat, but not before thousands of Japanese pilots sacrificed their lives to prevent U.S. victory.

“The picket’s job in the Okinawa operation was to report when kamikazes were coming,” Mansfield said. “But of course the kamikazes dove for the first thing they saw, and that was the pickets. They were small, they weren’t armored and only lightly armed. The pickets were slaughtered.”

That’s the point White makes.

“We had 15 picket radar stations around Okinawa to warn the island when they would get hit with a big raid,” White said. “The pickets would rotate and no one would ever return from being Position 1 without being severely damaged or sunk.

“So when you knew you were Picket 1 you wrote your last letter and your will and you went to mass if you were Catholic because you knew you weren’t coming back. There are no atheists in a foxhole or on a destroyer.

“We were on our way to Position 1 and we knew we were dead. The radioman got a burst appendix and with no way to treat him they ordered the Brown to a hospital ship in Naha Harbor. Then they sent another picket to Position 1 to get killed.

“We handed the radioman over and started to the harbor to get fuel when a kamikaze hit the hospital ship. Four doctors and our radioman on the operating table were killed. Our radioman died for us. That’s the way I look at it. We’d have died as Picket 1.”

White describes sending up smoke screens to hide battleships, manning battle station guns, occasional shenanigans as the ship’s storekeeper, and the constant knowledge that a suicide attack was imminent.

“The Japanese didn’t want to lose and they fought and they fought, and thank God, one day we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima,” he said. “We would have eventually won but the atomic bomb saved 2 million lives. If we had invaded the Japanese mainland, it would have been suicide for our soldiers and Navy.”

Instead, White and the Brown crew were one of the first occupational forces on the Japanese mainland.

“At least 5,000 died on picket ships in Okinawa,” he said. “The heroes did not come back. The rest of us did our duty.”

bobdina
08-15-2009, 01:25 PM
Eighty percent of the 182 destroyers that served as pickets were sunk or damaged beyond service.
could you imagine what the media would say about this if it happened in today's times.FTM

Reactor-Axe-Man
08-15-2009, 03:51 PM
could you imagine what the media would say about this if it happened in today's times.FTM

FDR lied! People died! Support our troops - bring them home!

That about cover it?

Mel
08-15-2009, 09:48 PM
Oh...You guys are so right. The media would have a hay day on something like this.FTM

bobdina
08-15-2009, 10:29 PM
Hope that catches on, FTM