USS Boston CA-69 in WWII

3-19-11

After the signing of the documents of Surrender in the ceremony in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship Missouri on September 4, 1945, the crew aboard CA-69 got the bad news  -  they were not going home.  Instead, the Boston became the flagship of a group of vessels tasked with Demilitarization Duty  -  the capture and destruction of small arms, submarines and suicide boat facilities up and down the coast of Honshu.  Much of their time was spent on the east coast of Honshu, north of Tokyo.

This is exactly the area where the epicenter of last week’s massive earthquake is located – just offshore of Sendai – a coastal city that received a lot of attention from the Boston. I can’t shake the images – captured on video and posted on YouTube of the tsunami waters raging outside the windows of the airport, sweeping cars, boats and buildings past the terminal while horrified passengers ran away from the glass.

The coastal cities and towns from Sendai to Tokyo (the areas of “direct hit” by the tsunami) where well known to the Boston sailors.  Also well-known to the crewmembers were Hiroshima (still smoldering 8 weeks after the Bomb when they visited) and Nagasaki. The men had a close-up view of the hellish scene of mass destruction unleashed by these two “Atomic Bombs”.

Now, almost seven decades after unleashing the fury of America following their ill-advised attack on Pearl Harbor and the resulting near-total devastation of their homeland and their people, Nature has unleashed a furious one-two punch on Japan.  And in a very cruel irony, the only nation (so far) on the receiving end of the horrors of nuclear weapons, the same atomic power  -  used for peaceful purposes (electricity generation) -  is on the brink of once again leveling that unfortunate country and their ill-fated people.

May God have mercy on Japan.

March 2011

Sorry for the slight delay in posts, my brother and I have been working on improving his living situation with hammers, nails, and drywall.  As I continue to enter sailors into the database, I noticed another trend, during march of 1944 another 100 or so sailors were sent home and another set of new sailors joined the USS Boston in Espiritu Santos in the western pacific.  They were shipped from hawaii as raw recruits, many of them joined the Navy in mid-1943.  The 100 sailors that left were mostly posted new ships under construction on the east and west coasts of the US.

Consider that the Crew of the Boston, after commissioning in June 1943, added a group of sailors in august 1943, so that they were more sailors than were a full crew.  When they arrived in San Francisco and exchange sailors took place, some new sailors replaced some sailors commissioned in june; the old sailors were sent to new ships.  In Hawaii in Dec 1943, some sailors were transferred to other cruisers.  Then in march of 1944, 100 or so (that’s every 1 in 17 men) were transferred back to new cruisers being built and they were replaced by new recruits.

I’ve had really slow going in the archival data, because the pages from Espiritu Santos were almost unreadable.  I have to try and go to the next period and see if they were added to the roster.  Every three months, the entire ships roster was re-accounted for.  This process is really tedious; especially when you can’t read the names.  sometimes the re-accounting is unreadable, then you just guess.

Making slow progress,

Bill