December 1943

12-12-15

The Boston crew find themselves in Pearl Harbor among the wrecks of the Sneak Attack. They will spend the month with lots of liberty, which they relish with the energy and abandonment of 18 year-olds. When they are not enjoying liberty, the ship sets sail, joining other cruisers and destroyers in joint bombardment and anti-aircraft exercises.

During that period, more warships arrived at Pearl Harbor; some were redeployed from other Task Groups or duties in the Pacific, some were brand-new and fresh from their shakedown cruises. The new arrivals were integrated into the joint training exercises in the waters off Oahu, practicing formation drills as well as ammo training.

In the big picture of WWII, the problem of the Pacific was put indefinitely on the back burner. Even the attack of Pearl Harbor could not be dealt with — primarily because we had only a skeleton Navy of old clunkers (from WWI era mostly) that were spread out across the vast Pacific. (A do-nothing Congress would not free up the Will or the Money to fight the War that was engulfing the world prior to Dec. 7, 1941.)   The naval base of the Pacific, Pearl Harbor, was decimated in the attack, and the only lucky break we caught was that the aircraft carriers were still out on maneuvers and were not seen by the Japanese carrier pilots.

By the time of the attack, our Isolationist Congress was doing everything it could to keep us out of the War in Europe. A persuasive Winston Churchill kept nudging and working President Roosevelt, who eventually involved us by implementing the Lend-Lease program, by which we supplied arms, industrial equipment, planes, ships, railroads, etc. to the about-to-go-under Britain. It wasn’t until after Pearl Harbor that we engaged in frantic shipbuilding and planning for a two-front War (the largest theater by far was the Pacific).

In December 1943 and into early January the men, without realizing the pages of history being written around them, were participants in the creation of the largest armada of naval warships ever assembled. On January 19, 1944, the Boston waited her turn to depart Pearl Harbor. On that day, the beginning of the End for the Empire of Japan assembled in a massive array of warships off the coast of Oahu. Task Force 58 was born.

The ships maneuvered westerly – heading for their first campaign – the liberation of the Marshall Islands.