Indy 500 Quiz: Name the two British racers who won the Indy
500 in the 1960s. Answer below.
Relief Pitcher Quiz: 1) Name the top five in career saves. 2)
Name the top five in career relief wins. [Hint: Two pitched some
in the 1950s.] 3) Name the 8 relief pitchers who won a Cy
Young Award. [Hint: 4 in each league Cy Young first issued
in 1956.]
Memorial Day
This is a little early, but since the next Bar Chat won’t be until
after the Day of Remembrance, I thought I’d rerun a piece I did
two years ago.
Tarawa
One of the epic battles of World War II, the battle for Tarawa
opened the way to the Marshall Islands in the Pacific and started
the American drive towards Japan. It was also the bloodiest
four-day conflict in the Pacific theatre.
In the territory known as the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), there
is a group of atolls where the Japanese had built air bases to
better project their forces. The first target for the Americans was
Makin. The U.S. Pacific Fleet, under the command of Admiral
Chester Nimitz, began closing in. It took four days for 6,500
troops from the 27th Infantry Division to take care of just 300
Japanese. Tarawa, with its force of some 4,700 Japanese
soldiers, would be far more difficult.
The main island of the Tarawa atoll was Betio, all of 2 miles
long and 900 yards across at its widest. In other words, smaller
than New York’s Central Park. But the Japanese force was
comprised of top-grade troops and their commander, Rear-
Admiral Shibasaki Keiji, boasted that the island could not be
taken by a million men in a hundred years.
Vice-Admiral Spruance, the victor at the battle of Midway,
assembled the U.S. force that would take Tarawa; 35,000 men in
all, comprised of the 2nd Marine as well as the 27th Infantry.
There were also some 12 battleships, 8 heavy and 4 light
cruisers, 66 destroyers, and 17 carriers bearing more than 900
fighters and dive-bombers.
The Japanese had 14 coastal defense guns guarding the
oceanfront, while 40 more artillery pieces were emplaced to
barrage every beach and access route in explosive fury.
The defenses were lightest on the lagoon side, which is where the
assault would take place, but the obstacles were formidable. A
coconut-log seawall 4-feet high lined the shorefront with more
than 100 machine guns aimed to fire over its lip. The invasion
was planned for dawn November 21, 1943.
The opening round of the battle was ferocious. Spruance’s ships
and bombers pumped some 3,000 rounds onto the island the day
before the assault. Rear-Admiral Howard Kingman, the force
commander, said “We will not neutralize Betio, we will
obliterate it.” One marine muttered as he watched the
explosions, “It’s a wonder the whole goddamn island doesn’t fall
apart and sink.”
But the Japanese defenses, pillboxes of coconut logs, concrete
and steel, proved able to withstand much of the bombing and
shelling as many just glanced off harmlessly.
And the Japanese shore batteries, surviving the onslaught, found
the range of the transport ships as the Marines disembarked. The
American plan began to unravel quickly.
The Marines were relying on LVTs (landing vehicles, tracked, or
“amtracs”) with tank-like treads that would have no problem
negotiating the coral reef some 600-800 yards from shore (and at
a depth of about 5-feet). But there were too few of them so they
had to rely on Higgins boats, which drew about 4-feet, a problem
should the depth estimates be wrong.
As the troops approached the shore, at 3,000 yards they faced
artillery shells, at 2,000 machine guns, and then at 800 yards the
amtracs started hitting the reefs and ran into a curtain of fire. [It
didn’t help either that the tides had been misread.]
Many of the amtracs blew up on the reef as their fuel tanks were
hit. Others, drivers hit, spun wildly out of control. Some landed
at the wrong beaches, a disaster in an attack as coordinated as
this one was to be. There was a monstrous jumble of blasted
landing craft and the troops were forced to wade ashore.
Communications also broke down as the radios became
waterlogged, while many of the flamethrowers were rendered
useless.
The Marines suffered very heavy casualties that first day as they
were pinned beneath beach obstacles, which offered the only
cover. Some 5,000 men landed; by nightfall, 500 were dead and
1,000 wounded. Robert Sherrod, a war correspondent, recorded:
“A Marine jumped over the seawall and began throwing blocks
of TNT into a coconut-log pillbox. Two more Marines scaled
the seawall (with a flamethrower). As another charge of TNT
boomed inside the pillbox, causing smoke and dust to billow out,
a khaki-clad figure ran out from the side entrance. The flame-
thrower, waiting for him, caught him in its withering flame of
intense fire. As soon as it touched him the Jap flared up like a
piece of celluloid. He was dead instantly but the bullets in his
cartridge belt exploded for a full sixty seconds after he had been
charred almost to nothingness.”
One company of Marines that suffered particularly was Major
Michael Ryan’s. Though one-third of his men were dead or
wounded, he rallied the rest. Backed by two tanks, and some
troops gathered from other companies, he led them on a sweep of
the island’s west coast, overrunning its pillboxes and gun
emplacements. But without a working radio, he could report
neither his position nor his victory. Then there was the story of
First Lieutenant William Dean Hawkins.
From an account in the book “The Illustrated History of World
War II,” “Hawk,” as everyone called him, “had landed a few
minutes ahead of the first wave in a daredevil commando strike
against some machine gun posts on the pier between Red 2 and
Red 3. With a flamethrower and a few grenades he and his men
cleared the pier. Then he charged over the seawall to fight his
way inland.”
“All through that day and on into the night, Hawkins never quit
fighting. The next morning he was given another tough
assignment: to knock out a cluster of machine guns that guarded
a strong point. As his men laid down covering fire, he dashed
from pillbox to pillbox, in the open, to shoot point-blank through
the firing slits. Then he tossed in grenades to finish off the
occupants. Taking a shrapnel wound from a mortar shell, he still
kept going. ‘I came here to kill Japs, not to be evacuated,’ he
told a medical corpsman. Then an explosive shell from a heavy
machine gun hit him in the shoulder. ‘The blood just gushed out
of him,’ a sergeant remembered. Hawkins died. He would
receive a posthumous Medal of Honor.”
The battle raged for another 48 hours. A rising tide finally
permitted the Higgins boats to bring in fresh battalions, and
reinforcements were landed at the perimeter secured by Major
Ryan in the west. Yard by yard the Marines took control. The
shore batteries were silenced and the pillboxes blasted. A charge
was dropped down an air vent of the island’s two-story,
bombproof command post, roasting the 200 men inside,
including the body of the Japanese commander Shibasaki.
By November 24, the island was secured. Out of 4,700 Japanese
troops and construction workers – only 17 surrendered. The rest
died defending it. 1,050 Marines were dead and 2,000 wounded.
The lessons learned were many. Remember Tarawa.
[Additional source: “The Second World War,” John Keegan]
Letter to Home
In October 1942, Lt. j.g. Robert L. Fowler III wrote to his wife
from the U.S.S. Duncan to complain about Navy life and the
stress of war:
“Just a hurried line to tell you that I still am OK alive & kicking
– kicking like hell in fact at the lousy life on this crate.
Haven’t been ashore now for five weeks and don’t expect to get
there for perhaps another five – God but these things get small
after that amount of time on board
“Love, I’m sorry for writing ridiculous letters like this but it
makes me happy to scrawl on and on about you and all our life
together; seems so far from what I am now doing far from war
and Destroyers and oceans."
Lieutenant Fowler was killed later that month in the South
Pacific.
[Source: New York Times / New York Historical Society]
Bud Selig
The other day, in an interview with the L.A. Times’ Russ
Newhan, Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig made the following
comment:
“I would say 6 to 8 (clubs) can’t exist another year, another year
and a half. We’re talking about the immediate future. There’s a
lot of clubs that simply can’t survive the status quo.”
As many have complained since this particular remark, along
with other comments Selig has made over the past year, how can
a commissioner say such things? One General Manager told the
Star-Ledger’s Lawrence Rocca, “You don’t see David Stern and
Paul Tagliabue running around saying the sky is falling, almost
all the teams can’t win. How many commissioners run the game
down? This is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
No wonder attendance is off 5% this year. It doesn’t help when
the leader of the sport is an idiot.
Top Ten American Beers
Beer expert Michael Jackson has a bit in the latest issue of
American Heritage magazine. Following are his selections for
the ten best brews in the U.S. I suggest you get your friends
together and take a road trip this summer or anytime, for that
matter.
1. Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Pils – Old Dominion microbrewery
(near Dulles Airport)
2. St. Victorius – Victory Brewing / Downingtown, PA
3. Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout – Brooklyn, NY (dessert
beer, chocolate taste, but without the chocolate Mmmmm)
4. Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold – Cleveland, OH
5. Expedition Stout – Kalamazoo Brewing Co. (Kalamazoo)
6. New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red – New Glarus, WI
7. La Folie – New Belgium Brewing Co. / Fort Collins, CO
8. Anchor Steam Beer – San Francisco
9. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale – Chico, CA
10. Bridgeport India Pale Ale – Portland, OR
Personally, I’m going to have to take a day trip this summer out
to Downingtown, PA .know what I’m sayin’?
Stuff
–Scientists and communications experts are increasingly worried
about the amount of junk in space, which can destroy
communications satellites, for starters. Recently, the
International Space Station also had to maneuver to avoid some
garbage.
To give you an idea of the dangers, particularly from old
satellites that simply break up in space, one scientist recently
said:
“A small coin traveling at 22,300 miles per hour through space
will have the same impact energy as a small bus traveling at 62
mph on the ground.”
–Beavers! Great story in the Wall Street Journal the other day
on wildlife in America, particularly in the northeast. For
example, I didn’t know the following. There are 70,000 beavers
in Massachusetts today (which makes for great business
opportunities for animal control experts). But back in 1600, it is
estimated there were anywhere from 50-400 million. However,
they were so easy to trap, and Europeans were so hot for the
pelts, by 1700 the beaver was basically eliminated from all lands
east of the Appalachians. Well, fear not beaver lovers, for not
only are they once again proliferating in Massachusetts, there are
now 15-25 million in the U.S. and Canada. Of course in times of
economic slowdown, beavers can make for stiff competition on
the labor front.
–Funky Winkerbean: Not for nothing, but if you’ve read this
comic strip recently, I’m sure you’d agree with my brother and
yours truly as we wish Cindy the worst.
–NASCAR’s Ricky Rudd will be making his 656th consecutive
Winston Cup start dating back to 1981 when he competes this
Sunday in the Coca-Cola 600. Awesome. [Rudd is breaking
Terry Labonte’s record, 1979-2000]
Top 3 songs for the week of 5/20/72: #1 “The First Time Ever I
Saw Your Face” (Roberta Flack) #2 “Oh Girl” (Chi-Lites) #3
“I’ll Take You There” (The Staple Singers)
Indy 500 Quiz Answer: British drivers to win in the 60s – Jim
Clark (1965 actually, he was a Scotsman) and Graham Hill
(1966). Boy, these were the best years not only for Indy, but
Formula One as well.
Relief Pitcher Quiz:
1) Top five in career saves: Lee Smith, 478; John Franco, 422;
Dennis Eckersley, 390; Jeff Reardon, 367; Randy Myers, 347.
2) Career wins: Hoyt Wilhelm, 124; Lindy McDaniel, 119; Rich
Gossage, 115; Rollie Fingers, 107; Sparky Lyle, 99.
3) Cy Young Winners: Mike Marshall (1974 – Dodgers),
Sparky Lyle (1977 – Yankees), Bruce Sutter (1979 – Cubs),
Rollie Fingers (1981 – Brewers), Willie Hernandez (1984 –
Tigers), Steve Bedrosian (1987 – Phillies), Mark Davis (1989 –
Padres), Dennis Eckersley (1992 – A’s). Both Fingers and
Hernandez were also MVPs.
Next Bar Chat, Tuesday barring technical problems from
overseas.
