MinnMooney
Member
The "Power of the Pen" and what "One Man with a Rifle" can do are both awesome but it takes an exceptional man behind either.
You can "win" battle after battle but still lose the war.
The Finns were incredibly good, but they weren't miraculous.
My obscure War knowledge is a book called "The Thousand Mile War"
Think of it this way. The modern version would be if Georgia suddenly turned the tables and inflicted huge losses on Putin's war machine. Obviously that hasn't happened. But if it had, we'd all be picking our jaws up off the floor. That's what happened in 39/40.
Quote:
You can "win" battle after battle but still lose the war.
Yokel, why start a political argument in a discussion about single determined men and their ability with a rifle?
FYI, the Finns lost their war too. They also lost the Continuation war that followed.
This is true in the public discourse.The power of the pen still rules.
The war in the Aluetions (sp?) was HARD on Flyers too!
Jap Destroyer Bagged By Ralph Pitman, Mayfield
Following is a dispatch from General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in the far Pacific in which Lieut. Ralph Pitman, Mayfield, a bombardier is credited with bagging a Jap destroyer.
Lieut. Pitman, a graduate of the Mayfield High School, was a star in football and basket ball at the high school and at Western Teachers College, Bowling Green.
The account follows:
The Navy reported yesterday that American fliers bombed the Japanese on Kiska, eight times in a sigle day in the most sustained “dawn to dusk” assault yet launched to blast the enemy from the Aleutians.
Formations of Liberator heavy bombers, Mitchell medium bombers and Lighting fighters carried out the assaults, which took place April 2. Hits were observed in the target area as the Americans plastered the Jap positions with high explosives.
All the U.S. planes returned safely from their “round the clock” pounding of the enemy.
An Associated Press Dispatch from “somewhere in Papua New Guinea” yesterday described the sinking by Flying Fortresses of two Japanese cruisers and a destroyer and damaging of four other destroyers at Kavieng, New Ireland, which had been reported briefly by General MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia earlier in the day.
MacArthur’s air force swept virtually every major point of Japanese strength from Dutch New Guinea to Kavieng, except Rabual, in the twenty-four hours of operations covered by yesterday’s communiqué.
Second Lieut. Ralph Pitman of Mayfield, Ky., a bombardier, was credited with leaving one destroyer in a sinking condition in the attack at Kavieng.
The eight attacks on Kiska reported yesterday brought to a total of forty-eight the number of aerial assaults within approximately one month’s time – an average of more than one a day.
Only Saturday the Navy announced that four heavy bombing attacks had been carried out against the Japs in the Aleutians on April 1.
In the South Pacific, the Navy disclosed that eighteen Japanese Zero planes were shot down by U.S. Fliers northwest of Guadalacanal on April 1, instead of the sixteen previously announced.
While the Japanese in the fog-shrouded Aleuthians, a U.S. reconnaissance plane encountered a Japanese seaplane west of the New Georgia Islands. An air duel followed, in which the enemy plane was shot out of the sky.