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Question for Grognards

 
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Question for Grognards - 8/14/2002 5:54:28 AM   
Kavik Kang

 

Posts: 26
Joined: 7/9/2002
Status: offline 		Hi,

This has nothing to do with UV, but I know I can spend hours to find this info myself or one of you true grognards (unlike me, a pseudo-gognard:-) will just know this.

How long did it take for a typical transport ship, one that soldiers would travel on, to get from the East Coast of the US to Tokyo?

More specifically, my family is trying to reconstruct what my grandather did during the war. We tried to get some paperwork he needed for medical reasons and it became a big mystery. Part of this mystery is that he arrived in Tokyo, by ship, from Fort Benning, GA, on Sept. 2, 1945. What we are really wanting to know is... did he leave for Tokyo before or after the first nuclear weapon was used. It seems like a close call, none of us are sure how long this trip took and since I am into this stuff it's my job to find out.

So about how long would it take an alleged pistol intructor at Fort Benning to reach Tokyo by ship in August 1945?

Thanks.

_____________________________

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." -- Neil Peart
Post #: 1
- 8/24/2002 12:59:12 PM   
Capt Napalm

 

Posts: 6
Joined: 8/24/2002
Status: offline 		This won't be much help, but odds are he did not travel from Ft. Benning to Tokyo completely by ship. More likely is that he travelled from Benning to the West Coast via train and then boarded a transport from there. Even after the war ended in Europe, it was still quicker to send troops via train to the coast than sending ships through the canal the long way.

(in reply to Kavik Kang)
Post #: 2
- 8/24/2002 1:19:29 PM   
denisonh


Posts: 2194
Joined: 12/21/2001
From: Upstate SC
Status: offline 		Sure would be difficult leaving Ft Benning by ship, as it would have to have a shallow draft to navigate the Chattahoochee river.:D

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"Life is tough, it's even tougher when you're stupid" -SGT John M. Stryker, USMC

(in reply to Kavik Kang)
Post #: 3
- 8/26/2002 8:56:40 PM   
Kavik Kang

 

Posts: 26
Joined: 7/9/2002
Status: offline 		You are exactly right, we had figured that out. What he did in Japan is still a mystery, but we now know some of what he never told us. He was a US Army Ranger instructor at Ft. Bragg, went to Ft. Benning to officer candidate school at Ft. Benning and alsi became among the first too be trained in EOD (which was called "Bombs, Mines, and Booby Traps" on the certificate we found). He was then rushed to Japan, leaving Ft. Benning for Japan on the very same day that the first A-bomb was dropped landing on Sept. 2, 1945 in the 'invasion' of Tokyo Bay.

It is at this point that we have become stuck. From the moment he leaves for Japan what little we can find out about his military career is odd or unusual every step of the way. He was a member of MacArthor's staff and his direct commanding officer was a Brigadier General Edward M. Starr (whom we can also find nothing about, plenty about him as a Lt. Col and CO of the 124th Regiment of the 31st Division, but nothing on General Starr later in the war or my grandfather.

The military insists that all of my grandfathers records were lost in a fire at the National Archives in the 70's, the same fire that burnt anything related to intelligence that you might happen to ask for. We think he might have been involved with the OSS in some way, but we really have no idea. We have pretty much given up since we get all the same answers to questions that we would get to UFO questions we assume that this is information that we will never be allowed to have.

Oh well, I was bored and figured I'd post the results of that search we had been on.

_____________________________

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." -- Neil Peart

(in reply to Kavik Kang)
Post #: 4
I wouldn't leap to conclusions. - 8/26/2002 9:52:56 PM   
Capt Napalm

 

Posts: 6
Joined: 8/24/2002
Status: offline 		There probably wasn't anything sinister going on. If he was assigned to the OSS he would have be detached to them, not assigned to a normal HQ unit. It sounds more like he was taking part in the normal occupation forces who were dealing with all the issues of reorganizing Japan back into a peacetime society. If his specialty was EOD, he was probably working on just that. Just imagine how much unexploded ordnance was laying around the Japanese mainland by Aug 1945. The U.S. took responsibility for getting rid of all that stuff.

If you found what unit he was in you might be able to find one of the WWII "Alumni" groups. There may be a survivor group that gets together to share war stories about their experiences during and after the war.

(in reply to Kavik Kang)
Post #: 5
- 8/30/2002 4:56:01 AM   
Kavik Kang

 

Posts: 26
Joined: 7/9/2002
Status: offline 		None of us think anything 'sinister' is going on. I guess you had to know my grandfather. He was just plain impressive, you couldn't meet him without feeling that you had been in the pressence of greatness. He was one of those people who gave off that aura. And the family had always been suspicios of what he did during the war because he never talked about it. Literrally all he would say was "I was a drill seargent, then I was in Tokyo after the war with MacArthor." For his entire life that was the only information anyone ever got out of him. We just firgured out that he was actually a Ranger instructor... and we are assuming that based on the fact that we now know from our grandmother that he taught Thompson's at Ft. Bragg. What we have actually pieced together comes more from family, the military hardly acknowledges his existence.

We think the key is finding out what Edward M. Starr was doing in Tokyo, but he is an even more mysterious figure. We originally assumed exactly what you have, that he was there to defuse bombs. But lots of things have brought us away from that. We are pretty sure that he was doing something other than that for Starr. Whatever it was, it was probably something quite normal but with a need for secrecy at the time. And now it's just been lost to history, at least to the history an amature like me can find in two weeks:-)

_____________________________

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." -- Neil Peart

(in reply to Kavik Kang)
Post #: 6
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