Message posted by jklier on September 01, 2019 at 18:32:05 PST:
My dad was on a destroyer in the pacific during WWII. The USS Radford, DD-446. He never talked about his time in the Navy. All I knew was he was in the Navy during WWII. Unfortunately he passed away while I was in college. A few years later one of my uncles gave me a cap that had his ships name on it. With that I was able to piece together what he did during that time. On one occasion the Radford and her sister ship the USS Nicholas were involved in rescuing survivors from the sunken cruiser USS Helena. The DD's had to break off rescue operation 3 times to re-engage Japanese forces. During the rescue the Radford and Nicholas sunk a Japanese destroyer and cruiser. One of my favorite photos is of my dad and a bunch of his ship mates celebrating at a bar. The back of the photo states it was taken at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The photo has a date of August 15th 1945. They were out celebrating the surrender of Japan. I was curious as to why they were in San Francisco. So after some checking I found that the Radford had struck a mine on Feb 14th 1945 and they were in San Francisco getting repaired so they could participate in Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands. I now often wonder whether I would be here if the invasion had been necessary.
In Reply to: OT Operation Case White posted by Gregos on September 01, 2019 at 10:57:56 PST:
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