Monthly Archives: September 2021

The World Wonders

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I mentioned recently that I had picked up a copy of the book The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. I just finished it and would highly recommend it. The author, James Hornfischer does an excellent job of interweaving the fates of the ships and their crews over the course of several chapters. There’s an excellent sense of the fear and sense of duty among the sailors. He also includes several maps to help one orient themselves as they read about the battle unfolding. He appears to have done his research, which includes numerous interviews with the survivors, reading of the ships logs and more. The one area of missing information, and he admits it, is an adequate understanding of the Japanese side of the battle. This appears in part to be due to a lack of access to such logs and I suspect a language barrier and the difficulty of travelling to Japan.

I mention this because it’s important to understand that the story he writes, nearly 60 years after the battle gives a far fuller picture of what happened than any of the participants had that day. But even now that story is missing pieces.

To quickly recap, the Imperial Japanese Navy was given the mission of breaking up MacArthur’s landings on Leyte in order to reclaim the Philippines. Like many Japanese naval plans it was audacious but also required meticulous planning and timing. And it involved a decoy fleet. This is an important element to what precipitated the last stand. At this point in the war (late 1944), the Japanese Navy had few planes and few experienced pilots, so their aircraft carriers were not an effective force. This despite the fact that the Japanese had shown at Pearl Harbor that the future of surface naval warfare was almost exclusively to be done via aircraft. So they decided to use their aircraft carriers as bait for the Third Fleet commanded by Admiral Halsey. A bait he took; hook, line and sinker.

This left the northern edge of the Seventh Fleet, guarding the San Bernardino Strait basically undefended except for 3 task forces, Taffies 1-3, with just a slew of “jeep” carriers and destroyers and destroyer escorts. Taffy 3 was the northernmost of these and the ones directly engaged by the Japanese fleet. They were soon to be met be the IJN Yamato and and the rest of Admiral Kurita’s fleet of battleships and cruisers. By any measure, Taffy 3 was outgunned and outmatched. Yet, by the end of the day, despite the loss of 2 destroyers, 1 destroyer escort, and 2 escort carriers, the Japanese fleet had lost 3 heavy cruisers, 3 more damaged, a destroyer damaged and the loss of 52 aircraft (compared to the US losing 23) and was in full retreat.

At this point, and for the last 77 years one could reasonably ask, “why?” What drove Admiral Kurita’s decision to withdraw. Unfortunately, most of the answers are predicated on guesswork, educated guesswork, but still guesswork all the same. The simple answer appears to be two fold. For one, he didn’t know if Admiral Halsey had taken the bait, and in fact it appears that he didn’t think Halsey had, and that he was in fact attacking the fleet carriers, not escort carriers, and hence a much larger American fleet than was actually present. But despite his erroneous belief about the American Third Fleet’s position, he was most likely correct in his appraisal of the future of the mission: he did not believe he could continue forward and disrupt the landings. Since that was the primary goal of his mission and it most likely would fail, it appears he saw no point in risking the rest of his fleet and withdrew.

One can speculate what would have happened had he continued on with the battle. My personal, and mostly uneducated guess, is that he probably would have succeeded in sinking the other 2 carriers of Taffy 3 and perhaps the rest of the destroyers and destroyer escorts. However, his position was extremely precarious with the growing number of American aircraft starting to make sorties from Taffy 2 and from an improvised airstrip the Army had prepared and the pilots from Taffy 3 had basically taken over. It’s most likely he would have ended up with several more of his own ships on the ocean floor, including the Yamato.

So, he made what he thought was the best decision based on the information he had at the time. As did Halsey when he took the bait of the Northern Force of the basically defanged Japanese carriers.

So why do I recap all of this? Because I think it’s topical to a lot of what we do at times. This past weekend I was upgrading a SQL Server for a customer. Fairly routine work. And I ran into problems. Things I wasn’t expecting. It threw me off. Fortunately I was able to work around the issues, but it got me thinking about other upgrades and projects I’ve done.

The reality is, in IT (as well as life) we make plans to get things done. Sometimes they’re well thought out plans with lots of research done prior to the plan and everything is written down in detail to make sure nothing is forgotten.

And then… something unexpected happens. The local internet glitches. It turns out there’s a patch missing you had been told was there. Or there’s a patch there you didn’t know was there. Or a manager unexpectedly powers down the server during your data center move without telling you (yes, that happened to me once).

When things go majorly wrong, we’ll do a post-mortem. We’ll look back and say “Oh, that’s where things went wrong.” But we have to remind ourselves, at the time, we didn’t know better. We may not have had all the information on hand. When reviewing decisions, one has to separate “what do we know now” from “what did they know then.”

Now we know, “…Halsey acted stupidly” to quote a famous movie. He shouldn’t have taken the bait. We know Kurita probably should have turned back earlier (since the other half of the pincer had been turned back by the Seventh Fleet, putting the Japanese plan in serious jeopardy, or perhaps pressed on a bit longer before turning back (and taking out a few more escort carriers). But we shouldn’t judge their decisions based on what we know, but only on what they knew then.

Finally, I’m going to end with a quote from the battle. Spoken by Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland of the USS Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413) to his crew over the 1MC “This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.” And that they did. Among other things they launched their torpedoes at the IJN heavy cruiser Chōkai, hitting and disabling it and then took on another Japanese cruiser with their 5″ guns until finally a shell took out their remaining engine room and they ended up dead in the water.

I can’t begin to fathom the heroism and bravery of the men of Taffy 3 that day. If you can, find the time to get a copy of the book and to read it.

P.S. The title of this post has an interesting story of its own, and I know at least one reader will know it all to well.

ICE ICE Baby

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I rarely like to make predictions or bold claims, but dawned on me that it’s pretty much all over for the Internal Combustion Engine cars and trucks. Forget government mandates or the latest Tesla press release.

Why do I say this? a few months ago I recall reading the press release for the new F-150 electric truck. The stats made for some impressive reading. And more interestingly, if anything, it appeared Ford downplayed some numbers like range (i.e. giving a conservative estimate based on actual usage as opposed an optimal number based on unrealistic driving conditions). They announced an initial set of production numbers and a few weeks later doubled their 2024 production estimates. The Ford F-150 has been the best selling vehicle in the US since 1981. Announcing an electric version was no small thing. And people took to it like a duck to water.

But that wasn’t the thing that convinced me. It was the ad I saw tonight. I can’t find a link to the latest but it features the F-150 Lightning, the E-Transit, an electric version of their best selling van and the Mustang Mach-E. This is a wide range of vehicles and it’s clear that they’re not targeting niche vehicles or make a pro forma attempt. They mean business.

They know where the market is heading and it’s electric. The market has spoken and the future is electric. Mandates and the like won’t matter.

Touring a Tin Can

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As some of you know, my grandfather served on PT 127 in WWII. 80′ of fighting fury. PT boats were fast, with speeds of 40 knots or more. I had the honor and privilege of riding one with him close to 15 years ago when one of the few remaining operating ones in the world was on the Hudson River. After that, my family and I had the privilege of boarding PT 617, an 80′ Elco at Battleship Cove. As a “splinter” we were able go on board and below decks and get essentially a private tour. One of the items I hoped to see was the map table, where my grandfather claimed he slept, rather than his bunk. He had the privilege because he was the oldest on board and this allowed him to get a nice cross-breeze in the tropical heat of the Philippines.

Cabin of PT 617

I was thinking of him this past weekend as my wife and I visited another WWII ship, the Destroyer Escort Slater (DE-766). Everyone loves the battleships, from the USS Massachusetts at Battleship Cove to the famous Iowa class battleships that were brought back into service in the 1980s. And yes, I have to say, there is something to be said for the “big guns”. The ability to hurl a shell the mass of a Volkswagen Beetle over 15 miles and to hit ones target is impressive.

But very often the workhorses of the fleet are overlooked, the Destroyers and their little brothers, Destroyer Escorts. They guarded the conveys bringing much needed supplies to Europe to fight Hitler. They guarded the fleets in the Pacific. Literally 100s were built. The first Destroyer Escort rolled off ways in 1943. This means in the space of approximately 24 months, more than 20 a month were built. Destroyer escorts were built quickly and without the luxuries their large siblings might have, such as air conditioning or even a simple thing like an ice-cream maker. And fast, they were knot. Top speed was closer to 20knots, with them often operating slower than that. For their primary role however, anti-submarine warfare while escorting conveys, this was sufficient. Their size also allowed them to turn more tightly and gave them more maneuverability than their bigger brothers.

But this did not mean they weren’t critical to the war effort. However, at the end of the war, like much of the US arsenal many were tossed on the scrap heap. There was little need for so many of the ships often called tin cans because of their lack of armor compared to the fleet carriers and battleships. Some were transferred to other navies. This was the fate of the USS Slater. It was transferred to the Hellenic Navy and was decommissioned in 1991 when it was brought back to the US.

It eventually made its way to Albany NY where it’s a floating, living museum. I say living because you’re actually allowed to touch and operate some items and they encourage sleepovers and the like.

Looking Forward

The tour is impressive and well worth it. If you’re ever in the Albany area, I do recommend stopping by the USS Slater and then perhaps a flight of beers at the Albany Pump Station.

3″ Gun on the Bow

While waiting for our tour guide, we walked around the tour shop a bit. Two things jumped out at me. The sodas and snacks were only 93 cents a piece (with tax that comes to an even $1.) That’s a bargain as far as tour shop snacks go. But the real find was a copy of “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors”. This had been on my reading list for a few years and I decided I’d pick up a copy on the way out. (The additional bonus of this, was any profit from the sale of the book would go to the museum and not to a large nameless company shipping it to me.)

For those not familiar with it, it details the exploits of “Taffy 3” at the Battle off Samar, where 3 destroyers and 4 destroyer escorts, combined with the aircraft off of the withdrawing “jeep” carriers (CVE) took on a major Japanese fleet, including the battleship Yamato, ultimately causing the Japanese fleet to withdraw.

To give you an idea of the mismatch here, the combined weight of the destroyers and destroyer escorts was about 1/5th of the weight of the Yamato alone. Even if you add in the weight of the CVEs and their planes, it wouldn’t have added up to the weight of the Yamato. And the Yamato, the largest warship afloat, was just a part of the Japanese fleet heading their way.

The largest guns Taffy 3 had were 5″ guns. These were no where nearly powerful enough to penetrate the armor of the Yamato or other Japanese cruisers. On the other hand, the 18.1″ guns on the Yamato were designed to penetrate the armor of American battleships. The armor on a tin can wouldn’t even slow down such a shell.

And yet, the American sailors, knowing how important it was to stop the Japanese fleet turned towards the Japanese and engaged them head on. And ultimately, the Japanese withdrew, thinking they were facing the fleet carriers and that the larger cruisers and battleships were probably on the way.

The battle of Midway is often considered the turning point of the war in the Pacific, and in many ways it is, with the Japanese losing a majority of their fleet carriers. But I think the Battle off Samar has a special place with David defeating Goliath.

Sometimes the smallest can do the mightiest things.

40 mm Bofors

Time Flies

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It was either only 20 years ago or a lifetime ago that I had received the news. Peter was on Flight 175. That’s all I needed to hear. That was all anyone who knew anyone on any of the 4 flights needed to hear. There was no hope, no questions that followed. My best friend from high school had been killed because a man in a far away land had hatched a plan to turn four airliners into deadly missiles.

I have to be honest, Peter and I hadn’t really kept in touch after high school. I can’t really say why. But I had finally reached out to him a few weeks before 9/11 and we had made plans to get together in the next month. That moment, like all my memories of him is now frozen in time. His smile that lit up a room will always be in my mind.

On this 20th anniversary, I have mixed feelings on how much 9/11 has been played out as a national tragedy for most of the last 20 years. It was no doubt a horrible day for many. Friends and family were lost that day. And yet, it seems to have taken a special hold in our national consciousness for two decades. Like Pearl Harbor, the attack was a complete surprise and caused the US to launch a war overseas. But unlike Pearl Harbor, it seems as if at times we are stuck in time. I think this is perhaps because in this case, our own planes and passengers were turned on us and because unlike WWII, there has been no distinct victory. There is no simple closure. But, thanks to people like Peter’s family, there is hope.

It was tempting for many after 9/11 to want revenge, to strike back. Some I think lost the distinction between justice and vengeance. Peter’s family did something different and I think unique. And that has been what has been on my mind.

In their own way, and a way that the Peter I knew from high school would have approved of 100%, they struck back at the Taliban. They didn’t go on the warpath. They didn’t call for attacks or bombings or even deaths in return. Instead, they opened a school for girls in Afghanistan. They setup a scholarship program for students from Afghanistan to attend the private high school, Berkshire, where Peter and I met. They decided to fight hatred and ignorance with lovingkindness and education. They fought for a future. Peter was gone, but they fought for a better world, despite him not being in it.

As the Taliban slowly regained control of parts of Afghanistan over the past years and especially the past months, I was saddened. With the fall of Kabul, I was nearly in tears. While I grieve at times for Peter, I grieve more for the dying of the dreams inspired by his murder. And this happening near the 20th anniversary of 9/11 has only made it more poignant.

That said, I actually have hope. I think it’s a dark time in Afghanistan, the current promises of their leader not withstanding. Currently it appears they will continue to allow the education of girls, but I don’t know for how long and how well.

The land, like the country is a harsh environment, but yet things grow. His family and countless others I believe have planted seeds in Afghanistan. Seeds that when the time is right will sprout and grow. So, I have hope. His death may have led to just one school and a few students coming to Berkshire, but I know his family wasn’t alone.

It may take years, perhaps decades, but I think have to believe that Peter’s death was not in vain and that more good will ultimately come of it.

Peter Morgan Goodrich
Peter’s smile as I remember him

More on the foundation setup by his family: The Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation

Paywalled (sorry) recent article on him: The Berkshire Eagle

From his college: Bates

About his mother: a powerhouse of a woman that cancer took far too soon

P.S. One last comment about Peter himself. I think one reason we got along so well was because he was so inquisitive and always learning. At his memorial we were all told how among his possessions was found a copy of an English copy of the Qur’an, replete with many dozens of bookmarks. While we were all looking for solace and understanding the preacher reminded us, “For the love of God, he read the Qur’an.” That was Peter, always wanting to learn and understand. And he would have appreciated the wordplay in that statement.

Time Crawls On

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There’s a crevice at the top of a ridge, about 18.5 miles from my house as the crow flies. And as time flies, it’s been in my life for 36 or 37 years.

The crevice is locally known as The Snow Hole because it retains snow late into the year. Decades ago it had snow through August and sometimes beyond. Unfortunately the time for that is long past due the overall temperatures increasing a day or two.

I first visited this in the Spring of ’84 or ’85. I honestly can’t recall which year. As part of the Outdoor Education club or “OE” as we called it in high school, we did an overnight trip. The instructor liked to challenge us and in this particular case we literally arrived at a random parking lot at the base of a ridge and were purposely given a vague map and told to find a particular peak to camp on. With some bushwhacking we made it to the top of the ridge, struck south and arrived at the peak with a gorgeous view. We camped there and then the next day headed north, crossed a road, and eventually arrived at a crack in the ground full of snow. We explored the crack and I’m sure threw a few snowballs at each other. The crack has sheer walls on three sides and a walkable slope on the west side. At the very top of that slope there is a hole in the ground. Alas, no hobbit lived in it, but it was large enough to wiggle into and with some effort find oneself completely underground. It wasn’t much of a cave, but it was there. (Arguably, by some definitions, because one never got beyond what’s known as the twilight zone, it’s not really a cave, but to us, it was a cave.)

We hiked back to the road and in the parking lot there, not the one we started at, we packed up the vehicles and headed home. At the time, I honestly had no clue where we had gone. But I knew it was fun.

It was a couple of years later, I was now in college, when I joined the Rensselaer Outing Club on a day hike to Berlin Mountain. We drove east from campus and arrived at a parking lot. We unloaded and hiked south. I was having a mild sense of deja vu, but I wasn’t sure why. Several miles later, we arrived at the top of Berlin Mountain and I instantly recognized the view. I had camped there. To our east was Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts. I had returned.

On a later hike, we headed north to the Snowhole. This was the first of many return trips to both locations, the most recent being a hike this past weekend to the Snowhole with my wife.

As we headed north, I was trying to remember my last time there and I want to say close to a decade ago. As I move on in my years and I revisit locations from the past, I try to recall what they were like years ago. In some cases my memories are clouded and faded, in others though, I know my memories are accurate but the places have changed. Both were true on the hike in. In this case, there are two rather open spots about 2/3rds of the way in where one has gorgeous views. Or, more accurately had. The areas themselves are open, but the trees just downhill have continued to grow over the decades and now block much of the view.

View north of Berlin Mountain in the distance, but numerous trees in the foreground blocking much of the view. Taken from the Taconic Crest Trail on the way to the Snowhole.
Decades ago, you could see far more!

And as I mentioned above, the snow doesn’t persist as long in the Snowhole as it used it. But the Snowhole itself hasn’t changed much. Oh, I’m sure a rock or two has fallen since then, more leaves have filled the bottom and decade and I think there’s a bit of a subsistence at the bottom that’s opened up a bit, but overall it’s the same.

And one thing waiting there was that cave. For whatever reason I had not reentered that cave since my first time. This time I decided to do so. I’ve talked about in the past how sometimes we remember caves being bigger than they actually are. Well, in this case I swear the entrance was larger than I remember. I do think in fact the rock had shifted a bit, so perhaps it had been smaller in the past, but in any event, in this case I was able to crawl in without much effort. And the cave itself was deeper and far larger than I recall. Unlike most caves in New York, this is not a solutional cave formed by the breakdown of limestone. Instead, it’s really more of a breakdown cave, where as other stuff erodes away or shifts the layers of rock shift, break, or otherwise move. In my memory, the cave was about 6′ long and just enough to turn around in and peep out a much smaller window near the entrance. Now, it was probably a good 12′-15′ feet long and it dropped down about 6′. Technically I could probably have crawled over a ledge and down just enough to get out of the twilight zone. It truly is a cave, at least now. And it’s one of those rare cases where it’s far larger than I remember. I don’t know in this case if it’s just my memory, or if the cave had changed. It didn’t matter.

After a few minutes I crawled back out and started to do the math. That’s when I realized it had been nearly 40 years since I had last crawled in there. I do hope it’s not another 40 before I crawl in again.