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Book of Interest
Oil, Fire, and Fate
by Mike Mair
Read about the Sinking of the
USS Mississinewa (AO-59) in WWII by Japan’s Secret Weapon
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George Emerson Conklin |
by Mary Eileen Oseas McNamara
daughter of Robert Louis McNamara RM3c
mcnamara7720@roadrunner.com
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These are the men who saved the world.
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"Drenched
from head to foot with salt water. Sleep with a leg
crooked around my rack so I won't fall out. Put wet
bread under my dinner tray to keep it from sliding.
A DE, my friend, is a Destroyer
Escort. It's a ship long and narrow and sleek,
something like a destroyer but much smaller.
They are rough and tumble little ships.
Their decks are laden with depth charges. They can turn in
half the space of a destroyer.
They roll and they plunge. They
buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall
through space. They are in the air half the time,
under water half the time, their sailors say they
should have flight pay and submarine pay both."
-Ernie Pyle
Friend of the crew of the Conklin
War Correspondent
Ulithi, 1945
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Pacific
Battle Line, December 1943:
(by Foster Hailey, war correspondent,
New York Times):
"The United States has been waging in the Pacific the most
difficult war in history. And the least understood. The battleground is the
work's greatest ocean, with its tens of thousands of islands. The battle line is
a great arc extending 7,000 miles from the tropical regions of northern
Australia to the bleak, fog-covered Aleutians Islands on the rim of the Bering
Sea..." (click
here to read more) |
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The USS Conklin was commissioned
as a Destroyer Escort, Butler Class, at the Navy Yard in
Brooklyn, New York. She was named for a Marine killed at
Guadalcanal, George Emerson Conklin,
(see photo) who had enlisted only eight months before. He had remained at his
gun although mortally wounded until he could no longer man
it. Before he died, he disassembled the gun and
scattered its parts to make it useless to the
Japanese. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross
for his heroic devotion to duty.
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On April 22, 2001, the story of the USS Conklin
DE-439 in the typhoon of June, 1945, was told to the FEMA Training
Center as an example of heroism in everyday life. This award is really
for them!
(Note from Eileen: "When I gave that talk
at FEMA it was to the very same firefighters who 4 months later would do
the Pentagon rescue. When I gave the talk, which was about Heroes in
everyday life, how ordinary men can be called to be extraordinary heroes
in extraordinary circumstance, nobody was expecting we would be in our
own crisis in just 3 months.") |
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See the Newest Photos!
Postcards Added June 2001 |
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