Quote:
Originally Posted by Delgard
That was his boat. Reminiscing for a moment, he said he was 17ish, this being a bunch of years ago that I ran into him. We connected because of submarines and I have a respect for the history and the challenges faced.
I was just looking for the picture I remember and don't see it. It really didn't have much meaning for me and probably went with a hard drive purging.
I was kind of surprised when he said the Navy never really kept up with him and didn't seem to know him. I just put it down to the times and that the military was releasing several millions of service members at the time. He said he got a physical and a bus ticket to his parents home in Nebraska. But, he was in a wheel chair and I gave him some errand rides and an older computer. I made the picture a part of the screen saver. I had it bypass the login and he just clicked on IE and got a home page with links. He ended up leaving the Navy shortly after the war with only like 2 years of service. He became a teacher and retired as a principal.
I think I spent all of a day looking for info and reading a general summary of the event. He remembered the mission as just being scared. I put it down to his being a farm kid in an alien world.
He was a neighbor to an apartment that I rented. He passed of heart failure and a niece came, collected him, and took him for burial.
Anyway, the immersion part of CW and the opportunity of missions out of the norm are a value for us that didn't live/participate in the times. Nowadays we just fire a missile from many miles away.
Good luck on the mod.
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Its a small world and always interesting when coincidences like that come up. In the reading I've done I don't recall Tirante ever getting to Tokyo bay (only two war patrols, was leaving on her 3rd when the war ended) but she did make it into Nagasaki a few times, which may as well have been Tokyo for as busy as it was. The Japanese were in a mad dash to get whatever and whoever they could over from China to prepare for the forthcoming American invasion and Nagasaki was the closes port.
Another important first for the Tirante, on one of these patrols she became the first american submarine to fire a homing torpedo when she used a Mk 27 "cutie" against an attacking escort. While it was claimed they heard the screw stop and the ship break up, the kill was never confirmed.