Not too many people remember Frankie. There is a plaque in a small town park in Massachusetts with his name on it. Maybe a sailor or airman said a little “here’s one for you, Frankie” when he pressed the trigger or released the bomb later in that war. Mostly, Frankie has been forgotten.
Used to be, on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack everybody took notice of the date. There were speeches in Congress and in small parks around the country. The History channel talked about it, and some TV network would run one of the movies. Old men remembered. Every one of ‘em. Sometimes they went silent for the day, cause they remembered lots.
This year Dec 7 came and passed with little notice. I don’t recall seeing anything about it on the History channel. If they said anything in Congress, I missed any reference to it on the six o’clock news. The old men remembered, but there aren’t near as many of them anymore. It was almost as if it had never happened.
As I saw it, Dec 7 this year was all about John Lennon, cause that was what filled the radio and TV. Rather a large fuss was made about him this year on the anniversary of his death. Maybe that’s because the baby boomers are getting to the nostalgia stage of life. And most of my contemporaries would rather remember the Beetles than some long ago war. I turned to the History Channel to see what they had on special for the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and got Ice Road Truckers or some such drivel.
I grew up reading about WWII, watching documentaries and movies about WWII, and listening to the stories about WWII. My bookshelves are peppered with books about WWII. So I don’t mind at all when my wife comes home from one of her forays into the second hand stores with a history book or picture book pertaining to that war. You should see the one she brought back last week.
This one has over a hundred full-page photographs, most in black and white, taken by Navy and Marine Corp cameramen, most captured during the heat of action. Page one has the shot everyone has seen of the Shaw exploding during the Pearl Harbor attack. And the last few show solemn looking men signing the peace document in Tokyo harbor.
About halfway through the book, on a right hand page, they show a low altitude aerial photograph of a Japanese aircraft carrier. It was a clear South Pacific day, with excellent visibility, and the photo jumps off the page. The flight deck sports a distinctive camouflage, painted to resemble a battleship or cruiser from the air. In the South Pacific, no one wanted to look like an aircraft carrier, because these ships were the threat, and thus became the targets. Battleships stopped being the prime target that Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor.
Looking carefully at the photo, I can see a 5” anti-aircraft battery on the starboard bow, twin barrels pointed at the camera, essentially useless when the aircraft was that low. Early in the war, no one took low altitude photographs of Japanese aircraft carriers. No one who survived, anyway. But this airplane was pretty safe.
The ship is turning sharply to starboard, black smoke pouring out of the stack, showing full power from the engines, and white smoke billowed from the stern, from those holes blasted through metal. No aircraft sat on the flight deck, which was buckled from an interior explosion. If an aircraft carrier could look scared, it would look like this ship. The book’s index confirms the inevitable, stating that she was sunk later that afternoon. The date was 24 Oct, 1944.
You can see a few men standing on the flight deck. Their shadows stretch across the deck. They were just standing, powerless to stop the attack. I decided that I needed to find out all I could about this ship. I wanted to learn her name, and hear her story.
So I wandered into a vast internet, and hiding in there, waiting for me, was a list of the Japanese fleet carriers, with their life stories and the details of their destruction, including dates. One, the Zuikaku was listed as sunk on 25 Oct 1944. Japan time. Right date. Bombs and torpedoes found her off the coast of Luzon, while the Japanese were being blasted out of the Philippine Islands.
She was the last of the carriers that had decimated Pearl Harbor in 1941. The other five were long since gone to the bottom. The pictures of her on my computer were not good, but this clearly was not the carrier in my book. She had a different camouflage pattern, and she sported a raised island on the starboard side and three aircraft elevators. My carrier only had two, and no superstructure.
But in her history it was mentioned that she was accompanied to this battle by three light carriers, the Zuiho, Chiyoda, and Chitose. The paltry remaining aircraft assigned to these four ships totaled perhaps 102. The US Navy fleet that attacked them had ten carriers, with somewhere between 600-1000 aircraft. None of the US ships sustained damage in this battle. All of the Japanese carriers were sunk. Once their few planes were shot down, these ships were nearly defenseless.
The first photo I found of Zuiho told me I had found the carrier in the book. The flight deck had the proper camouflage, and two elevators. The date of her sinking matched. Heck, it was the exact same photo. So I had the name of my ship.
In the 1930’s treaties limited the size and number of Japan’s warships. So she built other ships, like luxury passenger liners, and then converted them to aircraft carriers right before the war began. Zuiho began her life as a submarine tender, but during that construction they switched her over to be a light carrier. She was ready in 1941 to play a support role in the Pearl Harbor attack that started the war. She also was in support during the battle of Midway, the carrier battle that finally turned the tide of war against Japan.
I found much on the net. I could have read about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor where the large and very effective Japanese carrier force killed over 3000 Americans. I could have read about the war Japan's military leaders brought to China earlier, and the city of Nanjing where for fun, Japanese soldiers massacred many thousands of unarmed civilians. I could have read about the prisoners of war they herded onto the beach and machine-gunned near Singapore or about the Bataan Death March.
The Japanese military had it pretty much their own way early in that war because they had a war machine no one could resist. It took a while before the combined resolve of the American people built the weapons and filled the ranks in the army, navy, and marines and put an end to that nightmare. By the time they carried the fight to the Philippines, the tables had turned. By then, it was the Japanese army and navy that could no longer resist.
Zuiho was sent all over the South Pacific during the war, but as Japan’s stolen empire was slowly ripped from her bleeding fingers, her few remaining carriers became almost an afterthought. They could no longer defend even themselves, and the remnants of the once invincible air fleet were pressed into duty in the kamikaze attacks. The admirals had sent Zuiho and the other three carriers to the Philippines as bait, rather than as an attacking force, and the 800 defenseless men aboard when that photo was taken, like those guys on the flight deck in the photo, were just hoping not to die. Kinda like Frankie, three years earlier.
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