By the beginning of August 1943, the men (a hundred or more, according to plank-owner Pasquale (Pat) Fedele) stationed in Boston and barracked at the Fargo Building, were doing “able-bodied” labor aboard the not-quite finished heavy cruiser Boston. She was nearly complete, and had been moved from the Navy shipbuilding facility in Quincy, MA (the Fore River Shipbuilding Yard) just south of the city to the Boston Harbor. New men arrived almost daily, and by mid-month, she was out in coastal waters on preliminary trial runs and a shakedown cruise.
A year later, the crew found themselves at anchorage in the Marshall Islands lagoon in the Eniwetok Atoll. After many months of gruelling combat, including the capture (by naval and amphibious combat forces) of the Marshall Islands and the Mariana Islands, the men finally had some respite – a month in anchorage (along with hundreds of other ships and their crews). Oh, and did I mention the Battle of the Philippine Sea? To say those guys were worn and frazzled by the time they dropped anchor would be an understatement.
Readers of A Bird’s Eye View will notice that I placed the Boston on a run north to attack Iwo Jima for the first few days of August. When I wrote the book, I struggled with what seemed to me a possible discrepancy between the terrific diary written by crewmember Frank Studenski, and the information available to me at the time. In the Notes section at the back of the book, I explain how I reluctantly decided that maybe Frank had just missed this one small detail.
In June, my brother Bill, who is working diligently on making an accurate Crew List (a very large task) for this website (and likely for the next book) travelled to Washington DC to research the crew list first-hand. I won’t get into the minutia here about his project. The bonus for me was that Bill spent a great deal of time researching the whereabouts of the ship (and came back with a ton of stuff – including pictures). I asked him for the Deck Logs from August 1, 1944 to August 4, 1944 because I was unsure I made the “right call” about the ship’s whereabouts . . . .
I am happy to report that Frank Studenski was 100% correct. The Boston was in fact anchored in Eniwetok on those days. Another group of Task Force ships had slipped north for the raid on Iwo Jima. The Boston was not one of them. My apologies to Frank.
August of 1945 was a happy one for the guys. On August 9, the Boston formed a bombardment group with the cruisers Quincy, Chicago and St. Paul and shelled industrial targets on Japan (Honshu). On August 15, the seas off the coast of Japan got a message from Admiral Halsey to Cease Fire. The war was over.