Showing posts with label Iwo Jima. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iwo Jima. Show all posts

Friday, June 24, 2022

Wednesday June 24, 1942. Eisenhower takes command.

Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London to assume command of the European Theater of Operations United States of America, replacing James E. Chaney.


In fact, Eisenhower had only recently returned to the United States on a fact finding mission, along with Hap Arnold, on the United Kingdom in which he expressed a lack of confidence in Chaney.  He was assigned to replace Chaney and sent right back to the UK.


Eisenhower's star was on the rise at the time, and would be throughout the rest of his life, taking him to the White House.  He was the last U.S. Army general officer to become President.  Notably, an Army career was mostly an educational choice for him, rather than the expression of a military vocation.

Chaney would fade into obscurity.  Having been promoted to Major General in 1940, he was an observer of the Battle of Britain and would return to become commanding general of the First Air Force, and then become a training officer in the United States.  Late in the war he was in command of Army forces for the mostly Navy action at Iwo Jima, and he had a senior role in the Western Base Command at the end of the war.  He retired in 1947.  He, as well as his wife, died in 1967.

The Afrika Korps entered Egypt.

Friday, June 26, 2020

June 26, 1920. Waters.


June 26, 1920, was a Saturday, and on that Saturday the Saturday Evening Post featured a female fly fisherman on its cover.

Women doing other activities associated with water and the outdoors would be busy on that day.


The ship the Colin H. Livingstone was launched June 26, 1920, at Virginia Shipbuilding Corporation, Alexandria, Virginia, where it was christened by daughter Clarice M. Livingstone.

The Canadian born Colin H. Livingstone was living at the time and was a railroad executive.  He was also the first president of the Boy Scouts of America, having occupied that position since 1910.  The Boy Scouts were very much a major institution at the time, as we've discussed here before.


The ship was sunk by a German submarine on August 28, 1940.

Further north, the torpedo destroyer USS Hopkins was launched.


Sarah Babbitt of Providence, Rhode Island, descendant of Esek Hopkins, commodore of the Continental Navy during the Revolution, served at the launching of the torpedo destroyer at New York Shipbuilding Corp., Camden, New Jersey.  The ship served all the way through World War Two during which it sustained a single combat casualty when it was hit by a kamikaze in 1945.  The hit was a glancing blow.  The USS Hopkins was scrapped in 1946.

Somewhat related, on this day in 1920, Charles W. Lindberg, who would serve in the Marine Corps in World War Two, and who was one of the Marines photographed raising the flag on Iwo Jima, was born.  He died in 2007.