Navy Day in New York, 1945 The biggest display of military might the nation had ever seen. By Elliot Rosenberg
http://www.wsj.com/articles/navy-day-in-new-york-1945-1445899687
Seventy years ago, on Oct. 27, 1945, New York City was the site of the most spectacular homefront display of American military might the nation had ever seen. Navy Day was in effect a monumental victory lap, coming seven weeks after the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri.
Now the “Big Mo” and other stars and supporting players from the Pacific Fleet had come home. Along a six-mile stretch of the Hudson River, 47 warships gathered—battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines and submarine chasers.
President Truman was there. So was I. About 3.5 million people crowded along Manhattan’s West Side, with another 1.5 million viewing from New Jersey, according to press reports. Joining the USS Missouri, with its 16-inch turret guns bristling from its 56,000-ton frame, were the USS New York (an older battle wagon) and the USS Enterprise, the only aircraft carrier that had been active from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day.
At midafternoon, President Truman boarded a destroyer for a two-hour review of the assembled firepower. Twenty-one-gun salutes boomed from many of the vessels. Overhead, 1,200 Hellcat and Corsair fighters, Avenger torpedo planes and Helldiver bombers circled in 12-mile ovals. For half-hour spells on two successive nights the ships turned on their 24-inch and 36-inch searchlights, sending brilliant blue-white beams, with millions in candle power, flashing across the sky and illuminating the city’s skyscrapers. No fireworks display could compare.
Many of the ships initially moored at piers along the river, welcoming visitors, and tens of thousands clambered aboard. The Missouri was the biggest celebrity; visitors especially wanted to see a small starboard-deck plaque that read: “Over this spot on 2 September 1945 the instrument of formal surrender of Japan to the Allied Powers was signed.”
By the time my father was off work and able to take me to see the naval display, the ships had left their piers and lined up in mid-river. Navy launches ferried civilians to visit them, and my father and I were among the lucky ones.
I would have preferred to see the Big Mo, but the Enterprise was a worthy consolation prize. I marveled at being aboard an aircraft carrier, previously known only through movies like “Wing and a Prayer” and “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.” The rectangular expanse of the flight deck. The squadrons of planes bunched together, wings folded. The rows of antiaircraft guns lining its rim. A large poster provided some Enterprise statistics: 911 Japanese planes shot down, 71 ships sunk, 192 more ships damaged or sunk.
After Oct. 27, the Navy fleet gradually dispersed. Elsewhere that fall, the Soviet Union was scrambling to develop an atomic bomb, and the Korean peninsula was about to be sliced at something called the 38th Parallel. Vietnam was still a faraway French outpost in Indochina. And Afghanistan and Iraq barely registered in the mind of at least one New York schoolboy, who had witnessed Navy Day and come away certain that America could still lick any international bully on the planet.
Mr. Rosenberg is the author, with Louis Eisenstein, of “A Stripe of Tammany’s Tiger” (Cornell University, 2013 paperback).
Comments are closed.
