Donald Stratton (1922–2020)
Auteur de All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor
A propos de l'auteur
Donald Stratton was born in 1922 and raised in Nebraska. He joined the United States Navy and served on the battleship USS Arizona. Following the Pearl Harbor attacks and his recovery, he reenlisted and served on the destroyer USS Stack. He was involved in the campaigns for New Guinea, the afficher plus Philippines, and Okinawa. His memoir, All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor, written with Ken Gire and published in 2016. (Bowker Author Biography) afficher moins
Œuvres de Donald Stratton
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1922-07-14
- Date de décès
- 2020-02-15
- Sexe
- male
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 1
- Membres
- 287
- Popularité
- #81,379
- Évaluation
- 4.2
- Critiques
- 8
- ISBN
- 10
This is not just another war story. This is the first “memoir” written of one’s personal experience on the USS ARIZONA before, during, and after the sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. And since it was published just a few years ago, in 2016, and only 5 men were left alive who served on that ship, I’m thinking this may be the last as well. Donald G. Stratton is still alive today, age 97, and living in Colorado Springs. To date, there are now only 3 men from the USS ARIZONA alive today. There were 185 ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet that were moored up inside the harbor the morning of Sunday, Dec 7, 1941. Of the 1,512 sailors on the USS ARIZONA, 345 men survived. From beginning to end, this story is very engaging. I learned so much that I had never known before about this war. You can follow Donald G. Stratton on his Facebook page.
Don Stratton is a southern Nebraska boy, born in 1922 in rural Inavale. His dad was one of the poor sharecroppers and their family barely survived the 1930’s “dust bowl”. During the dust bowl years, the family packed up and headed just a little way east to a little town called Red Cloud, where he would grow up and graduate high in 1940, just in time to enlist in the military, as war was looming in the horizon. The Nazi’s were conquering France, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, along with Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. And the Japanese were conquering Korea, Manchuria, and Mainland china, while pretending peace-talks with the U.S. But, like most young men, having still feeling the effects of the Great Depression, Don joined because he was to receive a steady paycheck, daily meals, and free room and board.
He enlisted in September 1940 and was shipped off to Great Lakes, Illinois for basic training. Sixty-seven years later, in September 2007, my son joined the Navy and was also shipped off to the same facility for basic training. Stratton was then stationed on the USS ARIZONA, which was being overhauled in the Naval shipyard out of Bremerton, Washington. He spent his first 3 months of service basically scraping barnacles off the bottom of the ship, then they sailed down the coast to Long Beach, California, to stock up before making the 5-day long journey to Pearl Harbor, in the south coast Hawaiian island of Oahu. They arrived in Pearl Harbor just eight months before the sneak attack by the Japanese, which occurred on December 7, 1941. The USS ARIZONA was supposed to head back to Bremerton, Washington, to be overhauled again in the Navy shipyard in November of that year, but as fate would have it, the ship was side-swiped by the USS OKLAHOMA while on maneuvers and had to be placed in the yards there at Hawaii. They weren't going home for Christmas.
He was in the placed in the 6th Division aboard the USS ARIZONA and was director of the port antiaircraft on the sky-control platform. A couple of the photos in the book mark where he was at his station as the ship was being bombed and exploding. One photo of the ship was taken by the Japanese from aircraft just as it was being bombed. The airplanes were flying so close that he actually saw the face of one Japanese as he flew by, with a mocking smile on his face and waving. A total of 2,403 were killed that day at Pearl Harbor.
Stratton re-enlisted in the Navy again and went through boot training once again at Farragut, Ohio. He served on the USS STACK at the battle of Leyte Gulf in, a fierce 3-day battle in October 1944 and at the invasion of Okinawa, the largest amphibious landing in the Pacific theater. The Japanese had 5 lading strips built here, so it was important to cripple this entry. Leading the campaign were 1,213 Navy ships of which Stratton was a part of, along with 461,866 other service men. The ships created a circular barrier around Okinawa to protect the amphibious transports to the beach and pounded the beach with gunfire to help the men land on the beach so maybe our men would have a fighting chance.
Here, the movies never gave a hint of what the Navy ships were going through as well as the men being transported to the beach. The problem was the Japanese had created suicide bomb planes, called "kamikaze". The Oka (a.k.a. Kamikaze) planes were built super lightweight less than 1,000 pounds so it could carry 4,000 pounds of fuel and explosives, which was carried in the nose section. Between October 25, 1944 and the end of the war in August of 1945, the Japanese had launched 4,000 suicide missions. For the Navy on watch out at sea at Okinawa, this was the thing they feared the most. One in seven were successful in sinking a ship or severely damaging it. By the time it was all said-and-done, the Navy lost 15 of its picket ships and another 45 were damaged. On those ships, we lost 1,348 sailors and 1,585 were wounded.
Stratton goes into the reasons why the U.S. decided to drop the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the Japanese marched across China, attacked Pearl Harbor without warning, and overtook the islands in the South Pacific, and news spread of the murdering our prisoners of war, and the torturous Bataan March, ignoring the voices of even their own people, we had tried everything, working up to the atomic bombs...warnings, embargoes, trade restrictions, sanctions, then bombing certain cities, such as Tokyo, and 25 other cities. In Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Japanese had huge losses. At Iwo Jima, the U.S. lost 7,600, while the Japanese lost 19,000; and at Okinawa, the U.S. lost 7,600, while the Japanese lost 110,000 men. Still they would not surrender. Dropping the nuclear bombs was the only language they understood. America gave the citizens warning of the bomb by dropping 5 million leaflets of what's to come and encouraging them to leave certain cities that were potential targets. One week after the bombs were dropped, the Japanese surrendered. On September 2, 1945, the documents of Japan's surrender was signed.
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The best documentary about the USS ARIZONA is Discovery Channel's "Pearl Harbor: Death of the Arizona".
Books he mentioned that might be worth looking into:
1. You Can't Go Home Again: A Novel - Thomas Wolfe
2. He mentions the book, "The Worst Hard Time".
3. Book 1 - At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor - Gordon W. Prange
4. Book 2 - Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History - Gordon W. Prange
5. Look into other books about the Republican River Flood of 1935, which killed nearly a hundred people in Red Cloud, and others in surrounding towns. The great flood only flooded out Don Stratton’s family’s basement. His father helped with the cleanup, and made money, using his team of horses to haul away trees and piles of debri that had been washed into town.
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