Snippets yorktown5/16/2023 It was commissioned on April 15, 1943, as Ed duly notes in his diary. Its crew numbered 380 officers, 3,088 enlisted personnel, and 90 planes. I should say is 820 feet long-it is now docked at Patriot’s Point near Charleston, South Carolina. “It was nearly the length of three football fields,” he always used to tell us when we were kids, and sure enough, the Yorktown was 820 feet long. ![]() This is Ed’s first reference to the USS Yorktown, the Essex-class aircraft carrier named to commemorate the first aircraft carrier Yorktown that was lost in June 1942 at the Battle of Midway. “Glad it’s a big ship, you don’t get so sick.” Clark (left), and Admiral Chester Nimitz aboard the Yorktown.īy April 5, Ed finds himself five miles up the road at Camp Allen. And on your way out, drain that pool, will you? We may need it for something.” The carrier’s captain, Joseph J. Imagine the Navy walking into Chicago’s Palmer House or New York’s Waldorf Astoria one day and saying, “We’ll be moving in now. Stables were cleaned and used as living quarters for some of the sailors, while in the swimming pool area the water was drained and the bottom of the swimming pool was used as a classroom. ![]() Navy commandeered the Cavalier Hotel as a radar training school. So how did he wind up in such splendid digs? Because the U.S. Built in 1927, it was a masterpiece of architecture, sophisticated ambience, and gorgeous ocean views. Of all the reasons Ed looks forward to returning home after his Navy service, Mary tops the list.Įd arrives in Virginia Beach March 13, 1943, and is bivouacked in the historic Cavalier Hotel. “Will miss Chicago.” He leaves behind a 19-year-old neighborhood girl named Mary Ellen Murphy, who will surface repeatedly in the pages of his diary. He begins in February 1943, when he writes that he is on leave from the Great Lakes Naval Training Base and has “nine heavenly days in Chicago.” A few days later, he leaves Great Lakes bound for Virginia Beach. Pacific Fleet of a ship’s captain who was the first Native American to graduate from the Naval Academy of Pearl Harbor of Pacific atolls and the natives inhabiting them? All of this is ours to share in Ed’s diary. What if, through our Chicago sailor, we caught a glimpse of Admiral Chester W. But what if we could be right beside a sailor from Chicago during these assaults? What if we could share his homesickness, his delight in new places, his fear of the ever-present danger that dive bombers and submarines and kamikazes represented, his pride in America’s military might and the rightness of its cause? We all know from reading history books that Allied assaults on Japanese island strongholds in the Pacific-the Marshall Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Marianas-were the beginning of the end for Japan in World War II. What makes his story so compelling is that it turns the impersonal into the intensely personal. So it is only fitting that the story of Ed Reynolds be shared, and shared as widely as possible. If he and some 16 million other Americans had not stepped up to the plate the way they did, our lives would be profoundly different, and not in a positive way. Gradually it dawned on me that his story belongs to everyone who benefited from his service in the Navy. The diary became my way of experiencing the war vicariously. Questions and curiosities aside, by the time I got to the part where my father laid eyes on the shiny new aircraft carrier that was about to propel him into harm’s way in the boundless blue, I was hooked. Women situation acute-125 men to every woman.” Radarman Ed Reynolds, one of more 3,400 men aboard the USS Yorktown (CV-10), kept a diary that spanned more than 500 days. Impressed by Navy Band playing ‘Aloha’ as we pulled up to docks. And how did he manage to not miss a single day? We’re talking about approximately 545 days of entries, and they come from places as far flung as the Great Lakes Naval Base in Illinois, Virginia Beach, Central America, Pearl Harbor, New Guinea, the Marshall Islands, San Francisco, and sweet home Chicago at 1814 South Komensky Avenue.Īnd could this really be my father saying something like: “Arrived Pearl Harbor in afternoon. First, how did this book survive in such perfect condition? The guy served on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, for cryin’ out loud, where salt water, humidity, and rain were constants. That’s the kind of door I stumbled upon in February 2010 when my 91-year-old father, Edward James Reynolds, died and left behind a diary that recounts nearly every day he spent as a radar man on the aircraft carrier Yorktown during World War II.Īs I opened and read through this remarkable little gem, all kinds of questions surfaced. Suppose you found a magic door that opened onto some of the most crucial battles fought in the Pacific during World War II?
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