Battle of Eniwetok 1944 - Operation Catchpole

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In February 1944, after the success of Operation Flintlock on the Marshall Islands and the quick victory at Kwajalein and Majuro Atolls. The U.S. Navy decided to use the units of the Expeditionary Force Reserve and lunch the offensive to take, what they believed to be lightly defended Eniwetok Atoll, code-named Operation Catchpole.
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13 ноя 2021

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Комментарии : 116

@voraciousreader3341 Год назад

My dad was in an amphibious unit and fought on Kwajalein, among other island battles including Saipan and Iwo Jima. His job was to guide a tractor full of men to the island and when this was done he fought with the rest of his unit. When the narrator spoke of men who were permanently scarred from their battle experiences on the islands, my dad was a definite casualty. He suffered from acute survivor’s guilt and PTSD which he self medicated with copious amounts of alcohol. He was only 19 years old, a farm boy from Michigan, when he enlisted in the Marines; when my oldest son turned 19, I shed a lot of tears for my father’s youth, as I tried to imagine my son doing the same thing. He died in 1999?

@pipperxxx 2 года назад

My father was a corpsman with recon , attack, and then navy cleanup. He did 27 landings, 9 major invasions 2 with the Army. Last was Iwo jima. 11 Bronze Stars. He told me very little. I know they scored him 3x plus for every battle in discharge points. Thank you for posting.

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Thank you for your comment. I cannot find the words to tell how honoured I'm when I receive the comments from the family members of the people who were actually there. It all looks so abstract when you read the books.

@josephaulisio9281 2 года назад

11 bronze stars? Ive actually searched for any records of anyone receiving 11 bsms and......

@williamanderson6006 2 года назад

Sometimes generals would just give one without all the paperwork look it up

@stevebussell4285 2 года назад

Wow. My son is serving now in the Navy.

@b2tall239 2 года назад

@@josephaulisio9281 Well...."27 landings and 9 major invasions" gives you lots of opportunities....🤨

@jnlaf 2 года назад

MY dad was an Army combat medic then, did quite a few landing..Didn't like to talk about it much, Just found your site, very nicely done. thank you,

@bradcurtis5324 Год назад

My Dad Patton's 3rd army and his twin fought in Italy while my other 3 Uncles, 2 marines fought in the Pacific. They wouldn't talk about until I got back from Vietnam. I figured they thought I had been bloodied, which I had, and were willing to share a few experiences with me. It was a privilege. Ordinary men faced with extraordinary circumstances.

@drno72 2 года назад

Appreciate the detailed information. Following this battle my father was sent to Engebi island with Marine dive bomber squadron VMSB 151 to harass the bypassed Japanese islands, including Truck until the end of the war. Thanks

@douglaszylstra6942 2 года назад

My father, who served on Navy APA 40 Custer, put troops from the 1st Bn, 106th Inf, 27th Div, ashore in this invasion after they were not needed at Kwajelein.

@DSchenone Год назад

My father, Donald K. Maclean, USNR, was stationed on Kwajalein. He was a machinists mate 1st class and repaired the cockpit controls of the planes that went out and came back damaged. He never spoke about the war, but when asked about his time in the Marshall Islands, he said he saw a lot of buddies fly off and not return. 😢 Thank you for making this video.

@FromtheBattlefields Год назад

Thank you!

@michaelfuller2153 Год назад

Years ago I had the opportunity to print some photo negatives taken on Eniwetok by a Navy photographer. Of the images I remember...a pit with rebar across the top with two figures in the pit, generators with windmills along the beach, a quonsett chapel (steeple), a trash pile with the tail of a Zero on top.

@HowlingWo1f Год назад

Have not heard of this battle before, fascinating, thank you for posting

@FromtheBattlefields Год назад

You're welcome!

@ericunderwood8080 2 года назад

At 1:09 four rounds hit around that soldier standing firing... remarkable footage... Wow... POP was an Island Hopper Amphibious 2nd Engineers

@seapeoplesdidnothingwrong1307 11 месяцев назад

Wow, I have never heard of this battle, which is rare. Love it!

@FromtheBattlefields 11 месяцев назад

Thanks!!!

@kaym3052 Год назад

My Father was in the 22nd Marines & was wounded on Eniwetok by a Japanese grenade

@rickkephartactual7706 2 года назад

I always love finding a new channel with more history to learn. I really like what I have seen so far. Good luck with your channel.

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Thank you very much!

@m.garcia7850 2 года назад

Me too.

@jonathanbaron-crangle5093 2 года назад

Mark Felton does some good stuff..

@voraciousreader3341 Год назад

@Rick Kephart Actual - I find that videos like this give important information via film footage, but the only way to learn _history_ is to read books. After all, this video is just over 12 minutes long….how much “history” does one learn from that?? Several documentaries doesn’t suffice, either, because without reading, you’re only getting the merest idea of what went on. At least there are books about the Pacific war these days! I looked for years to try to get an idea of what my father went through, but very few had been written. He was a Marine in an amphibious unit that saw action on Kwajalein, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and other islands, as well.

@rickkephartactual7706 Год назад

@@voraciousreader3341 I agree with you 100%, I was an avid reader until recently when I had to stop. I don't want to go into all the health reasons but I do miss reading. Watching video's (sometime just listening without watching) is functionally about all I can physically manage these days and even that is challenging sometimes. I was in heaven when I was in Western Civ classes in college. I was fortunate that when growing up my parents also knew the value of reading and ensure that my siblings and I always had a lot of various reading material. My parents were poor but they did everything they could to enhance our education.

@kaustubhk8648 2 года назад

Wonderful narration!

@billthebold 2 года назад

Very detailed. Great work!

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Thank you very much! Sometimes it is hard to squeeze all the important stuff into 20 minutes video.

@genarobarron1259 2 года назад

These are very good videos , so informative . They're almost like the books that I have on individual battles . Great job .

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Thanks!

@JWH808 Год назад

My Great Uncle, Private Luther Brown USMC, was killed on Eniwetok.

@karlheinzvonkroemann2217 Год назад

This is mostly 4th Marine Divison stuff. My father fought for Roi-Namur (Marshalls), then Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima. Next was to be Kyushu and finally Honshu but the A-Bombs made all that unnecessary. Luckily!

@TheDustysix 2 месяца назад

Same Same my Uncle Vincent. Semper Fi.

@leondillon8723 Год назад

0:02)Looks like a limey army unit in North Africa. 6:35)1,115 troops would be about 147, 180 men. 779 trps. is 102, 828 men. 10:34-11:00)The same footage used for Tinian video.

@ronmelbourne2017 Год назад

My Grandpa was here. Navy Seabees. 110th N.C.B.

@ronaldwhite1730 2 года назад

Thank - you .

@ToddSauve 2 года назад

The famous actor Lee Marvin was a scout-sniper with the 4 Marines and invaded about 20 different islands in the Marshalls. He and his companions were inserted before the main landings in order to scout out enemy strong points and emplacements. Later he landed on Saipan in the Marianas Islands, where he was shot in the behind and foot. Of the more than 240 men in his unit there, only 6 survived the war. Marvin spent a year in the hospital recovering from his wounds on Guadalcanal, and was then discharged for medical reasons. When he got back home he was riding on a bus in 1945 when a middle aged woman gave him an earful for not being in uniform and fighting for his country. He said he was sorely tempted to drop his pants and shorts right there and show her where he had been wounded. One of the men of Marvin's scout unit was a real evil doer. He apparently gutted and skinned a pregnant native woman in the Marshalls. I don't know what happened to him but I hope he was executed for his crime.

@SuperBajafresh 2 года назад

Lee later made a movie with John Wayne called Donavan's Reef, where he jumps from a navy ship to an island of fun. I was in that movie. My dad served the Pacific War as a navy man.

@nathanbreakfast7424 2 года назад

@@SuperBajafresh I was also in that movie

@OLDMANWAFFLES Год назад

@@nathanbreakfast7424 i too was in that movie!

@karlheinzvonkroemann2217 Год назад

My father was in the 4th Marine Division too from the Roi-Namur through Iwo Jima. He always told me that Saipan was the worst for him. I guess it depends on where you are and when.

@ToddSauve Год назад

@@karlheinzvonkroemann2217 Saipan was an absolute nut house slaughter. It would have been much more sensible for the Japanese to make diplomatic efforts to prevent such a wholesale loss of life but when criminals run a nation, like they did imperial Japan, they don't care what happens to the people under them. My ex's uncle was with the 27 Infantry on Saipan and he told me in 1991 that they simply did not take any Japanese prisoners. None. Period. Shot them all dead. Too many fake surrenders where a completely naked soldier would produce a grenade out of you-know-where and take several GIs or marines with him. So they just refused to try and take any more. Uncle Bob was shot in the back and the doctors refused to try to take the bullet out for fear of paralyzing him because it was right next to his spine. He worked for the Phoenix, Arizona post office much of his life. A really tough guy. 😮

@sabrecatsmiladon7380 2 года назад

MY GRIPE ABOUT THIS.......it is too short !! =)

@LesSharp 2 года назад

Great work! Love your videos!

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Thank you!

@greylion629 2 года назад

My dad was in the 22nd Marines, he ate some of that dirt.

@adelesuddes9593 2 года назад

What unit with the 22nd?

@greylion629 2 года назад

@@adelesuddes9593 No idea, he enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, was with them at the beginning. He got filariasis’ during the Guam campaign, he spent some time in the hospital recovering from that after Guam. He told me the fighting for the Orote peninsula was the worst of the war for him. RIP, he died in 1997.

@danfarbecker2441 Год назад

I have watched all your videos....I am going to go back and make sure they all have a thumbs up.

@FromtheBattlefields Год назад

Thank you!!!

@rikijett310 2 года назад

These are excellent videos!!!! 🇺🇸

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Well, thank you, I'm trying to do my best.

@philipbyfield8814 Год назад

To think the guys father in the previous post was one of those amazing men ..this story brings to life the struggle the brave men who took part in what must have seemed at the time a never ending battle 👍

@voraciousreader3341 Год назад

My dad was there, too, a 19 year old who enlisted in the Marines. He personally could not stand the way people glorified the terrible experiences he lived through, and scoffed at the notion of “bravery,” because every Marine in his unit was scared to death the entire time, and he said it was also true of the soldiers in other units. There was no bravery, according to him….there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. On Saipan, for example, the Marines and Army infantry killed *29,000 Japanese soldiers who had been ordered to fight to the death, as well as hundreds of civilians, all on an island 12 miles long and 5.5 miles wide.* Can you imagine the carnage?? The Japanese eventually ran low on ammunition, so they hid in caves, pillboxes, and foxholes, and they would open fire against any US soldiers who came within range, so they eventually had to use flamethrowers to burn the Japanese soldiers alive. I know a lot of veterans who have said that the only people who glorify war are those who’ve never had to experience the horror of what the “brave” soldiers actually have to do.

@BreakingBranches Год назад

I am directing a documentary series, and a story within the series focuses on a marine who was killed in Eniwetok on 2/18/1944. Looking for stock footage and came across this. How can I get the rights to use it? Who can I speak to?

@FromtheBattlefields Год назад

Send me an email and I'll point you in the right direction.

@SuperBajafresh 2 года назад

There was a lot of bad intelligence gathering during this period. It improved later in war at Philippines Islands.

@jcee2259 2 года назад

My parent went to Eniwetok. To help test nuclear weapons. Had Japan halted Operation Flintlock plans by returning to Hawaii with Imperial; occupation forces then would WMD's see their first use on Japanese defenses at Pearl Harbor ? Near a captive population ?

@waveygravey3575 2 года назад

No. The only thing that would have changed is Hawaii would have been the first island retaken.

@mercator79 2 года назад

All that fighting and the island no longer exists due to IVY MIKE test

@danepatterson8107 2 года назад

Another good one. I simply do not believe the Navy's self-analysis that their bombardments were "effective." Nothing we see anywhere in the second world war describes naval bombardment as having a significant deleterious effect on defenders and their defense plans. The only place I know of is Tarawa, where bombardment severed all lines of communication, causing disorganization and probably the death of the defense commander who was using a radio outdoors. Japanese survivors from all of these actions (see especially Iwo Jima and Pelelieu) describe it as horrible, but mostly ineffective. They barely even damaged these emplaced guns that couldn't move!

@RaymondCore 2 года назад

On D-Day June 6, not a single German soldier was killed by pre-invasion naval bombardment. The Navy had invested so much in battleships they HAD to justify them.

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Although you are right, I would never want to be on the receiving end of such a bombardment.

@barthoving2053 2 года назад

To assess if the bombardment was effective you need to know what it was said out to do. The defenders plans would have taken a bombardment in account so a bombardment would not change their plans. But delivering psychological pressure and suppressing it can be effective. Remember that it takes time to organise the landing craft in a line and during that time they are extra vulnerable. Having everybody down in the bombproof shelters means you can do that. And if the enemy does decide to fire the beach artillery it gives it's biggest asset in surviving the bombardement away. It's concealment. Hard to spot a camouflaged bunker especially during the bombardment. Now if there are big muzzle flashes and smoke plumes then suddenly the chance for storing a direct hit on the bunker by the navy guns got much better.

@AndrewVelonis 2 года назад

I saw a vid about naval bombardment of Okinawa. It may have been produced on this same channel, but I'm not sure. The upshot was that naval bombardment was a very useful assist to the ground forces.

@marketablepresentations7824 Год назад

@@RaymondCore on DDay had it not been for the actions of the battle ship Texas many more soldiers would have been killed. In fact without that action the invasion would have failed. The Texas got so close to the beach they had to flood so much of one side to raise the main armament to reach German positions. What ever they did was very successful as to knock out German positions.

@lilmike2710 2 года назад

I can't do the virtual voice

@alonzowitt5931 2 года назад

hell on earth!

@Chiller01 2 года назад

What was the reason for the lack of pre landing naval bombardment on Eniwetok?

@dareisnogod5711 Год назад

Breakfast was late so they 1st delayed & then cancelled the shelling. Understand ?

@markheath3927 2 года назад

You should mention the atomic bomb testing.

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Yes, I've been thinking about it, but it did not fit in this video.

@jeski2 2 года назад

came here from private theodore miller

@q-man762 26 дней назад

When the Americans reached the ocean side of the island?? What other kind of side would there be.

@Strydr8105 2 года назад

I would really hate to be a Japanese soldier, it seems they were treated like their lives were meaningless, and to kill and rape the enemy was routine. How they saw this as a glorious act is shocking and atrocious.

@kirbyculp3449 2 года назад

For an idea of the living circumstances of a japanese soldier watch the three-part movie 'The Human Condition'.

@pandorin2348 Год назад

Like rape other usmc men or who?

@Strydr8105 Год назад

@@pandorin2348 that is such an idiot respond, although some US soldiers may have raped, it was not policy of the USA armies, like it was for the Japanese soldiers. The USA armies did not round up women aged 11 and up, to use as brothels for rape factories for their soldiers. If you can't recognize that, you are just ignorant of the facts!

@pandorin2348 Год назад

Lmfao calm your tits. Im asking who the japs raped? Their own people? Or did they rape the enemies?

@bigeggplantholder7095 Год назад

Its no a response you puss. Its a question from the looks of it. Hes asking who the japanese did these thing to?

@wymple09 2 года назад

The Japanese were vicious, dedicated, and well dug in. And the Army & Marines wiped them out in fairly short order.

@voraciousreader3341 Год назад

They didn’t “[wipe] them out in fairly short order]” on Saipan and Iwo Jima though, did they? My dad was a Marine who fought at Kwajalein and the aforementioned islands, though he said very little about his experiences from when he was 19 years old. On Saipan, 29,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, at the end being burned to death by flamethrowers, on an island 12 miles long and 5.5 miles wide….can you imagine the carnage, the smell?? Saipan was also the place where the Japanese forced many of the native inhabitants to jumps off cliffs to their deaths on the rocks below, even mothers holding babies.

@geodes6722 2 года назад

Very interesting that every time the reserve was committed it landed at one if the original assault beaches. These islands look like they were ready made for a double envelopment by the Americans. This would have trapped the Japanese and there would have been no chance to evacuate them. There must be some reason that the planners did nit consider this

@lwilton 2 года назад

Many of the islands, while being basically flat, had nasty cliffs and overhanging sand dunes, or mangrove swamps, along their shores, making landing effectively impossible against any sort of defense at all. That severely limited the possible landing areas on many islands. Also, it was generally preferable to land on the lagoon side of many islands, both because the seas were much rougher than on the lagoon side, and it was believed (usually correctly) that most of the heavy guns would have been placed to fire seaward.

@geodes6722 2 года назад

@@lwilton That makes sense!

@voraciousreader3341 Год назад

@@geodes6722 There are some excellent books on the Pacific campaign out there. It’s not possible to really learn history through videos or documentaries.

@CorePathway 2 года назад

Seems like we wasted a whole lot of lives invading small islands that could simply be bypassed, blockaded and contained.

@lwilton 2 года назад

While that argument is certainly valid in some cases, in general the state of equipment (planes, ships, radar, etc.) in that era meant that you pretty much needed to be able to fly medium bombers over the suppressed areas to keep them suppressed. That meant a landing field within about 200 miles or less of the suppressed islands. So you needed to capture airfields or at least places to build airfields. You also needed to clear out resistance within about 50 miles of the airfield, as getting between the islets in an atoll was relatively easy. Leaving existing airfields unoccupied was also potentially dangerous, as it was unknown how many planes the Japanese had, or where they were. So leaving a field that could be repaired occupied by Japanese meant that in a few days they might be launching air attacks from that field. Now in practice this didn't happen much because we'd wiped out most of their planes. But that is hindsight from 50 years later, it wasn't known at the time. The Navy from pretty early on basically targeted islands that could be air bases to suppress the surrounding areas, and this was a case in point. MacArthur and his staff finally figured this out after about a year of killing lots of men.

@voraciousreader3341 Год назад

It’s really funny the way guys think about war! They treat it like an easy exercise, and that when they act as armchair generals, they know exactly how they would have planned strategy so much better than the men who were there! What they don’t understand is that they’re only showing their ignorance by saying these things, especially since it’s obvious that they’ve never read a book on the subject! That always cracks me right up! _The easy answer is NEVER the correct answer!_

@dougstitt1652 6 месяцев назад

teach your mech voice

@sandylukemarsden7160 2 года назад

Overuse of the word 'the'. Just saying. Still, good vid, thanks.

@kennethcurtis1856 2 года назад

This isn't an English class.

@FromtheBattlefields 2 года назад

Thank you for the tip. There are two reasons behind this. First, the voice I'm using makes an awkward break when he misses "the" in front of the word. Second, English is not my first language, so I feel more comfortable with overuse than missing it when is necessary.

@sandylukemarsden7160 2 года назад

@@FromtheBattlefields Sorry. English teacher. Can't help it...! Thanks for the coolness.