Sea Control - Sea Control 203 - A Near Miss with Lt j.g. (ret) Ken Sanger

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

1. "A story about the Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri, 75 years ago today, as relayed by my Dad, Lt. (Jg) Kenneth Sanger..." by David Sanger, Twitter, September 2, 2020. 

Hey folks, Jared here. We have a rare treat for you today. So our guest is Lieutenant Junior Grade Retired Ken Sanger. Ken's son is a journalist, David Sanger, who works for the New York Times. And on the anniversary of VJ Day, David shared the story on Twitter of the time his dad nearly shot down a Japanese peace delegation towards the end of World War II. So I reached out to David and asked if his dad would consent to an interview. He agreed and we were off and running. So you're going to hear not just that story, but hear about his whole war from the time he was midshipmen at Duke University on December 7, 1941, to the end of the war and demobilization. I'll just add a note here on the ending. I started to end the episode, and then Ken had some

questions about modern air defense, and it was one of the highlights of my life to be able to tell this combat veteran just a few tidbits about modern fleet air defense. Just a very cool experience. With that said, I still want to preface this episode with our usual disclaimer that all opinions are our own and not representative of any institutions with which we might otherwise be associated and add in that sea control is edited and produced by keegan ingersoll ed salo and william mcquiston keep tuning in we're going to have some exciting news about some changes for sea control coming soon and as always want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends in the simsec podcast network and our second podcast feed the bilge pumps you can find alex

drack jamie and a pile of empty iron brew bottles on apple podcast stitcher spotify and wherever else you download your podcasts. It's a more low-key, slightly less serious approach to current events in the maritime domain and naval history. Check them out wherever you download. They've got friend of the Sea Control podcast, Dr. Sal Mercogliano, on this week talking about what navies can learn from merchant fleets. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Lieutenant Junior Grade Retired Ken Sanger, and we're going to talk about his role on VJ Day now just over 75 years ago.

So, Ken, thank you for coming on the program. Would you mind starting by introducing yourself to our listeners and give them a little bit of your background? Yeah. My name is Ken Sanger. I was a Lieutenant JG on a 2200-ton destroyer in the Pacific during the war. I was in the Naval ROTC at Duke University. I was an engineering student. I started there in the fall of 1941.

And, of course, by December of 1941, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. and we went on an accelerated program. And I was commissioned, I think, in February of 44. I had not yet completed my engineering work. I don't think I had completed my NROTC work, as a matter of fact. But I guess they felt we were more valuable out in the fleet than we were in college. So that's where we stand.

Well, I wanted to start by sharing how I heard your story. Your son David is a reporter for the New York Times, and he shared it in a thread on Twitter on September 2nd. Did he tell you that he was going to do that ahead of time? No, but I subsequently found out about it. Now, David, I think I have you in the background there, and I hope you don't mind asking me the question. And how many times and in what context had you heard this story before?

Oh, I've heard it a fair number of times, Jared, while I was growing up, along with some others. And I've recorded some of these others and wrote up a little bit of it for the Times' At War columns and so forth. Although I'm not sure that made it into their most recent World War II stuff. But it was such a compelling story that I thought I should put it out on VJ Day. We were camping out on Saranac Lake and had signal out there. So I wrote it. I just took the excerpts from Dad's interview and put it up there. And we were astounded to see that, in addition to you, it had about a half a million impressions

and about 20,000 people who commented on it, did something with it. So I realized that it was a pretty compelling tale. Yeah, I thought it was a great story, and I really wanted to record it for posterity here. But, Ken, I want to hear a little bit more about the rest of your war. If you were a JG in 1945, I think it's pretty likely that you weren't in the Navy yet on December 7, 1941. But you already explained to us that you had just enrolled at Duke University at that point. When I enrolled at Duke, I also applied to the NROTC.

I don't remember exactly what date I was accepted, but I think I was officially in the Navy on campus on December 7th. So I was going to ask, do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor? Yes, I remember very clearly. I had gone over to the post office to mail a letter to a friend of mine. And on the way back to my dorm, one of the upperclassmen leaned out of the window and said, Sanger, can you shoot a gun? and they said yes why he said well you're going to have plenty of opportunity to do it and then that that evening it was a sunday and on campus we always gathered at the women's college auditorium for what was called a sing and we sang songs over there and there was a sing that night It was very subdued, and everybody was wondering what effect the news was going to have on them and their friends. And I remember that I made some rather extensive notes to myself that night, speculating as to what would happen to me and some of my friends.

And, of course, the next day, Roosevelt gave his speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war, which I heard on a little radio on my desk in my dorm room. And do you remember what your reaction was to Roosevelt's words at that point? Great uncertainty about the future, what would happen, and a great deal of speculation and rumors and the like, but nothing very concrete evolved until, I guess, into the second semester when we officially went on active duty at college. It was very difficult because when the Navy took over, we had to have lights out at 10 o'clock and up again at 6 for calisthenics

and didn't leave much time for study. And it was an accelerated program. summer vacations were cancelled we the NROTC used some of the time in the summer time for training cruises

and I remember I went down to Florida and went out on a seagoing tug for a training cruise and as a matter of fact

We pulled out of Miami, out of the channel there, and there were German submarines all up and down the coast then, and two torpedoes cut in front of our bow, fortunately not hitting us. We went to General Quarters, I remember. My General Quarters station was a searchlight platform halfway up the mast of this tug. And I went up there in my skivvies and froze to death. But eventually the sun came up and I thawed out. Now, as the battles were going on, and this was a Navy war, like we haven't had a Navy war since then. What was it like to get the news back about battles like Guadalcanal and Midway? Was information flowing back to you as midshipmen explaining to you what was happening?

Not an awful lot, no. Not that I can recall. Maybe we did, but I don't recall getting an awful lot of news. I remember very distinctly a couple of years later, I was at St. Simon's Island in Georgia getting flight of director training, and that's where I got the news of the landing in Normandy. But I don't recall an awful lot of news. There probably were some, but you've got to understand,

And we were on such a crash course with the engineering curriculum and naval ROTC studies on top of that, plus drills, plus having the lights out at 10 and the calisthenics at 6. There wasn't an awful lot of time to sit back and read the New York Times those days. Yeah, absolutely. What was the ROTC training like at that point? The things that stand out in my mind are the drills out on the field. I remember a good deal of study of the law of the sea. I can't honestly say that I got very much useful training there. But I know at one point in time, I was asked to use a maneuvering board.

This was after I was aboard my ship. And I hadn't the faintest idea. We had never had any training on a maneuvering board. So I flubbed that completely. Thanks. So you said you graduated February of 44, and then your active duty career begins, or your career as a commissioned officer begins at that point. How did you begin your training from that point? You said you went to the fighter director school.

How did you get selected? My first assignment was the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I became familiar with radars. And up until that time, we were permitted to use the term radar, but none of us knew what it meant or what its capabilities were. And it wasn't until I got to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and was able to, I guess, actually use a Raytheon surface search radar And I began to think that maybe the Japanese were in for a good deal of trouble. And how did you transition from that surface search radar to an air search radar? um after brooklyn i was assigned to a fighter director school at a hotel in atlantic city that had been taken over by the navy and the planes would go back and go out out over the

over the ocean and we'd run intercepts on them and then after that we did more or less I was sent to St. Simons Island in Georgia and got further training there

after St. Simons Island I think I was assigned to the precondition the pre-commissioning detail for the ship that I was to be on, and I went to the Navy Yard where it was built, and I remember the voyage from the Navy Yard,

from the construction yard to the Navy Yard, and in those days, of course, women weren't permitted on any commissioned ship, but for the run from the place where it was built to the Navy yard the ship was not

yet commissioned so some of the female Navy brass came ashore, came aboard for the trip down and we test fired the guns and cranked it up to flank speed

and tried to put it through its paces a little bit But then we docked at the Navy Yard and we were outfitted and so on. So after you had left the Navy Yard then, did your ship have to do some unit-level training before you joined the fleet? Was there some sort of shakedown cruise for you all? Oh, yeah. After we were outfitted at the Navy Yard,

then we went out to Bermuda for shakedown cruise. and I remember one amusing incident there were several destroyers out there at the same time for shakedown and one night

we were supposed to run in towards the shore in a line of breasts and then turn 90 degrees and run parallel to the shoreline and simulate a bombardment on the shore of Bermuda.

And we were doing fine, and all of a sudden one of the destroyers just heeled over and took off into the ocean and went back out to sea. And we didn't know what happened. And several days later, we were ashore in Hamilton, And we ran across an officer from the ship. We asked him what had happened. He said the navigator had come storming up to the bridge of this destroyer and said, Captain, according to my calculations, we're going to hit a reef in 45 seconds.

The captain didn't wait for a long explanation. and he just spun the wheel and had his way to the open ocean. Now, at what point in the training did you find out which theater you were headed to? Because in 1944, there's pretty large fleets both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. I don't know. I remember that after shakedown, we were assigned to escort some World War I battleships out through the canal to the Pacific. And they couldn't keep up with Task Force 58, the fast carrier task forces, but they were useful for shore bombardment. I'm not sure how they were deployed, but we escorted them through the canal up to Long Beach and then out to Pearl.

Well, I do remember that when we were out in the Pacific and cruising north to Long Beach, that we detached a float plane that flew over Clipperton Island, which nobody has heard of before or since. there's a little island out of some I don't know how far offshore quite a ways off the coast of Mexico I guess and it was suspected

of being a Japanese base so they flew a float plane over there from I guess one of the battleships or cruiser

and took a look at the island. We never found out what, if anything, they found. At least I never found out. So after you had completed your training and shakedown cruise in this transit, where did you first see combat? Well, first we stopped at Pearl, and I got some oil. And then we went out to escort the fleet that was going to do the landing at Iwo Jima. I remember an incident just after we left Saipan, I guess it was,

and we were heading north towards Iwo there was a screen of destroyers around the landing force which composed of supply ships and support carriers and

tankers and whatever troop ships we were the lead plane we were the lead ship in a semi-circular screen of destroyers and it was a bright sunny day

and we were getting fighter cover from Saipan because we were not that far away yet but up ahead of us there was a fog bank and we picked up an unidentified plane someplace on the other side of this fog bank I remember I was at my at my battle station which was the top

of the pilot house on my ship controlling some planes visually what I did is I wanted to send some planes positioned out between the fog bank and the fleet

and so I vectored them out there and had bogey bearing so-and-so and so-and-so, and I had been taught in the fighter director school that the word bogey meant unidentified aircraft, but I didn't know at the time that bogey meant, in the battle zones, bogey meant shoot first and ask questions later. anyway I used the term bogey and the whole

bloody fleet went to general quarters and eventually this plane emerged from the fog bank and it turned out to be a PBY with its IFF turned off

or inoperative or whatever anyway it wasn't sending a signal back we got a message from the commanding admiral saying in the future please be more careful

more cherry I think was the term he used please be more cherry of the use of the term bogey so that was I was going to ask if there was any blowback for you from that incident sounds like probably just the

admiral's notes I was interested to hear that your general quarters station was actually topside and that you were vectoring visually. So you weren't controlling the aircraft by radar at all. Is that accurate? Well, sometimes I did. I stood some of my watches in CIC and some of them on top of the pilot house. So I did it visually in some cases and other times I did it by radar.

I guess, what was the deciding factor in whether you were controlling from what we would call today the Combat Information Center or up on top of the pilot house? Was it just a factor of weather? I don't remember. I guess I did what I was told. But I know I did a lot of my watches in CIC, particularly any of the watches at night because being up in a pilot house at nighttime wasn't too much good. But I stood many, many watches in CIC and my battle station and in the good need of a war zone,

during the daytime, I was up on top of the pilot house. Now, your son mentioned in his thread that you were in the thick of the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. And for those who don't know, by the time those battles occurred, the Japanese had started using kamikazes in earnest, and it took a terrible toll on the fleet to include sinking 25 ships and damaging 165 more off of Okinawa. So as a fighter director,

That's really your war, is trying to intercept those inbound kamikazes. So what were your days like during those campaigns? Well, I remember my first kamikaze experience was, I forget exactly where I was, but I remember that the plane had not previously been picked up by a radar as far as I know. Anyway, it came out of the clouds on a starboard beam at about 2,500 feet and made a dive for us. I think the VT fuses, the proximity fuses, had just been released to the fleet. So the 5-inch guns were used really as anti-aircraft guns also.

Anyway, this guy dove on us from the starboard beam. I don't know whether he just had bad aim or whether he was already dead, but he passed over my head at an elevation of about 15 feet and blew up in the water on the port side and covered me with aviation gasoline, which was not burning. Witness the fact that I am speaking to you now. Yeah. Was that the closest call that you had during those campaigns? I think I had a closer one, but I wasn't aware of it at the time. We had a Baka bomb attack at night, and I don't know how close he came to me. A Baka bomb was a, the Japanese didn't seem to have electronics that would guide a bomb, so they would attach a person to a bomb, and they would ride the bomb down, and if they were still conscious, and from the drop, they would guide it into the ship. we had a

Baka bomb attack one night but I don't know how close that was to me but I remember many other attacks there was one that the zeros

which were originally were the most frequently used planes for kamikaze attacks had fixed landing gear or at least the models that they used to begin with didn't have retractable

landing gear and this plane came at us it was late in the afternoon early evening we were not at general quarters we didn't have a gun

manned excepting the routine partial manning of the guns and the first attack that I just described to you, it happened so quickly, I didn't have time to get scared

but this guy I saw coming a long way off and he was right low on the water and we were not at general quarters and I thought we were dead ducks but he was so low

that about a mile and a half away from us landing gear nicked the top of a wave and he flipped and so we lucked out

I had asked what it was like during these battles and you mentioned that you weren't at general quarters so how was the ship normally steaming just a normal watch rotation then you'd go to general quarters if something was detected or

Yeah. On a few occasions, we'd spend the night at general quarters if there was some reason to do so, but normally there was, as you say, a watch rotation. It was then that I usually stood those watches in CIC. Was your ship doing anti-submarine warfare at the same time, or was that not really a threat at this point? Yeah, there were a couple of instances where we picked up what we thought were enemy subs, and a few occasions where we dropped depth charges. But other than escorting the fleet up to Iwo Jima, I don't think we were depending so heavily on the sonar, although our sonar station was always manned. And did you have to do any sort of shore bombardment, excuse me, for either Iwo Jima or Okinawa? Yes, I remember. Our main function at Iwo Jima was to be in Radar Picket Station 1, which is due north of the island, and that's where we got a lot of Japanese traffic coming down the Ryukyu chain to Iwo. But towards the end of the battle there,

I remember we went in and bombarded Mount Suribaki at almost point-blank range. It was all full of tunnels the Japanese were in. But that was one instance of shore bombardment. Okinawa, we went up to Okinawa from Uleti. Ten days before the landing, we were doing the navigating and fighter cover for the mine sweeps, and we had a very unfortunate experience there. we would cruise along the coast of the island and the Japanese would come down to the shore

and wave to us and we'd wave back and they didn't fire at us because I guess they didn't want to give away their gun positions but I remember another destroyer that was operating with us began to sail into an unswept area. And we were just getting a blinker light signal going to them,

telling them to be careful or turn around or whatever the captain's message was. And the destroyer hit a mine and just blew up. I guess the magazines went and it just disintegrated. There were very few survivors. I was going to ask, were you also standing bridge watch at this time as a junior officer? A few times, but not with any regularity. I was mostly CIC and visual fighter director. I did stand watch a couple of times as a junior officer in the deck.

I did have some questions about what were the navigational charts like off the coast of what are enemy shores at this point? Or are you just sort of navigating blind and trying to look at the shade of the water to determine if you're approaching shoal? I don't really know how good the charts were because that was not my province. I do know that we did a lot of navigation by Loran. I don't know if Iran is even used anymore, is it? Yeah, it was phased out just before I came into the Navy, actually. Let me ask, the Navy kind of famously would change out the leadership of the fleet from third fleet to fifth fleet, but the ships would remain the same to maintain the operational tempo against the Japanese.

Was there any sort of break for you on the ship in between Iwo Jima and Okinawa, or was it pretty much just one long campaign pushing forward? No, there was a very distinct break. The staging, after the Iwo Jima operation, the staging for Okinawa took place from an atoll called Ulithi. I think it's in the Kwajalein group, but I'm not sure. But it was very impressive. There were lines of Essex-class carriers. They used destroyers just to distribute the mail. The Guam and the Alaska, which were the only battle cruisers that the Navy ever produced, I think, were there. They were beautiful ships. I suppose they were deployed with Task Force 38 or 58, but I don't know how they were used. but they were relatively lightly armored

but had relatively heavy guns so they were fast they had beautiful lines so post Okinawa how did you find out about the atomic bombs and the impending surrender? I remember years prior to my Navy experience when I was still in high school, that I had read some accounts of atomic research

and that in theory a pea-sized piece of fissionable material could propel an ocean liner across the Atlantic. That may have been a poor example. But I remember that I had had some inkling of atomic research being done in the, I guess, the late 30s, so that when the bomb went off, I guess we got the news about it from just the regular naval news service. And, you know, the yeoman put out what passed for a newspaper on the ship. It was a couple of sheets of news of what was going on in the Atlantic battle and so on, and some news of the Pacific. And then there was the news of this big bomb, which was called an atomic bomb.

And as soon as the word atomic was used, then I sort of made a mental linkage to this article that I had read some years before. But I had no idea at the time about his power or anything about it. And when were you told to proceed to Japan for the surrender ceremony? Well, prior to that, I had an interesting experience. We were in some sort of an operation in the East China Sea, and I remember I had just finished lunch, and I went up to relieve the watch in CIC, and as was normal practice,

I read all the dispatches that had come in since my previous watch, and one was a dispatch from General MacArthur's headquarters in the Philippines saying that if we detected a Japanese transport, I think they had been named by the Navy as autopsy, that if they were detected and if they were flying red pennants from the fuselage, that they were to be let through. So I read this dispatch and not long thereafter, we picked up an unidentified aircraft. contact with our air search radar and i had 16 marines and corsairs over me at the time and what i intended to do was to detach it the flight leaders division that would be It would have been four planes leaving the remaining 12 planes over us for subsequent protection. And I vectored him out for this intercept. But unbeknownst to me, at least initially, all 16 planes went out with their leader.

he made the intercept I assume I don't know any facts in this regard but I have always just assumed that MacArthur had arranged with the Japanese to have the commanding

generals from China flown back to Japan to receive the surrender orders in person but I don't know that that's the case anyway we were told to let a Japanese transport plane

with a red pennant flying from its fuselage to let it through so we made the intercept and the flight leader radioed back to me that it was in fact flying a red pennant so I ordered him

not to fire and I got on the squawk box and called the bridge and told them what I'd done And the captain got on the squawk box and said, shoot the son of a bitch down. I said, Captain, have you read this dispatch from General MacArthur's headquarters? He says, Sanger, don't give me any of your lip.

I remember this dialogue like it happened yesterday. I think you're leaving some words out. And he said, Sanger, don't give me any of your lip. Shoot the son of a bitch down. So I had to make a rapid calculation. Would I like to be court-martialed by General MacArthur, or would I like to be court-martialed by my commanding officer? And I opted to be committed to the latter,

and I ordered the planes to come back without firing. and my CO never mentioned it again to me so I never got quite one show I'm surprised you wasn't down in CIC two minutes later, that's an incredible story

basically someone who's inbound to attend the surrender ceremony what happened with your ship after the surrender ceremony your son hinted at this we were our ship never made it up to Tokyo for the actual surrender ceremony,

we were detailed to go into the harbor at Sasebo. They were in Sasebo. I don't know if you're familiar with that port or not, but it's an extinct volcanic caldera. There's a rather narrow entrance to the harbor, and then it opens out into a rather large harbor. But there were extensive minefields. There were these magnetic mines.

If a steel-hulled ship passed over them, they'd blow. You didn't have to be in contact with them. So, arrangements were made for a Japanese officer to come out of the harbor and guide us through the minefield into the safety of the harbor. And we didn't know whether this Japanese officer was to be trusted or whether he was willing to blow himself up for the sake of getting rid of some gaijin. But anyway, he did take us through the minefield and we did get into the harbor. And I remember just as we went through this rather narrow harbor entrance off to our starboard, here comes a Japanese submarine running on the surface, crossing our bow.

And, of course, we didn't know whether he got the word either. And so we just kept the five-inch guns trained on him, and he crossed in front of us, and he tooted his horn, and we tooted back, and he went cruising on down the harbor. We just kept the guns on him, and nothing happened, fortunately. Did the Japanese officer— Then a hurricane came up, and we had two anchors out, and we were dragging both of them, but we managed. Did the Japanese officer who was on board communicate with you other than for purposes of navigation? He didn't communicate with me at all. He was down on the bridge.

I was up on the pilot house. I don't think so. I think he just came aboard to guide us in, and he probably left the ship shortly thereafter. Now, Sasebo is in the Nagasaki Prefecture, so were you able to see what had happened in Nagasaki when you went in? Yes, Nagasaki is just south of Sasebo, not too far, and we, for the first time, could have lights on topside, and so they were showing movies one night, and some member of the crew leaned back on a railing on a deck level, one deck up from the main deck I guess and the stanchion gave way

and he fell and was rather severely injured and I remember the doctor was working on him most of the night But we got word that there was a U.S. hospital ship in the harbor at Nagasaki. And so we steamed down there the next day to put this fellow into the hospital ship. And I guess that was maybe, I don't know, eight or ten days after Nagasaki was bombed. And I remember we were docked at the harbor. I did not go ashore, but I remember looking up this valley into this decimated city. I can remember seeing in the distance one structure still standing.

I suppose it was concrete. Everything else was flattened. I remember from where the ship was moored at the pier that there was a hill off to our left as you faced the city, and you could see the part of the hill that was facing the city was black. and it was a rather sharp line of demarcation and then everything on the other side was green but it was just everything was just scorched and flat many years later I read

some horrible stories of some of the survivors of Nagasaki I remember the description of one a poor young man who lay on his stomach for eight years because the burns on his back wouldn't heal. You know, stories like that, unfortunately, have not gotten a very wide dissemination, but they should.

Absolutely. And then let me ask you, then, how did your Navy career end for you after this? Did the ship sail home a short time later or were you employed for a while? We went down to Keelung at the northern tip of what was then called Formosa. and we spent Christmas and New Year's in Shanghai and I had a fantastic day in Shanghai with the ship's doctor and the ship's supply officer and we violated Navy rules and left Shanghai

and took a train up to, what's the name of that town? Near Shanghai? Near Shanghai, yeah. I don't know where he went from Shanghai. Suchao. And the most abysmal property that you can imagine. The remnants of the of the Chiang Kai-shek army was straggling through with horse drawn and donkey drawn on carts, and then we were conducted into the most beautiful temple with a big Buddha that was maybe three stories high. We went around the Buddha into a series of chambers

which had man-sized golden statues, solid gold statues of gods. I don't purport to know anything about that, excepting I remember there was one with a black mustache, which was allegedly Marco Polo. I don't think it was a god, but I was told that there was a statue up there. It was just a beautiful, serene garden, surrounded by this unbelievable poverty. I remember seeing one man lying in the gutter, bleeding profusely from his nose. And I turned to the Chinese guy who had befriended us, and I said,

Will he be taken to the hospital? He said, He's a beggar. I said, Yes, will he be taken to the hospital? And he said, He's a beggar. In his eyes, that was sufficient explanation. It was certainly a day of great contrast. Another contrast I ran into the same day, we were in rickshaws going back to the railroad station in the late afternoon in the sea of Chinese and another white man approached us

on a rickshaw going the other way, and we stopped and talked, and he introduced himself as Dr. Sherrits, and I said, by any chance are you related to a young man by the name of Sherrits who went to Duke University Engineering School? He said, yes, he's my son. That's quite a coincidence. And then when I got back to the railroad station, we had to change some dollars into the local currency to buy tickets to return. and nobody would make change for us because the exchange rate was fluctuating so violently

that nobody knew what the exchange rate was. We were ushered into a back room in the station where there was a Chinese colonel who offered to make change for us. We struck up an acquaintance with us and we invited him to come out to our ship for dinner one night, which he did. But he was a member of the Chiang Kai-shek army, and I remember taking a real flyer and said,

By any chance do you know a young man by the name of Ronald Wong, whose father was an employee of the Chinese consulate in New York and who went to high school with me in New York. He said, well, I haven't seen Ronald for a couple of weeks. But the last I saw him, he was in the Chinese Air Force. I don't know. I assume he eventually went to work for Mosul. How were you ultimately demobilized?

The ship went back to San Francisco, where I had a marvelous time. And the married officers were allowed to go home first. Then I went home on leave and came back to the ship, which had been taken up to the naval shipyard in Kaleo, I guess it was. They cut the ship in half and installed larger fuel tanks and patched it back together again that my number came up and I was sent home in the spring of 45, I guess it was. Six. 46 by then, yeah, 46.

I was discharged then. So that's it. Well, thank you very much for taking the time today, David. were there any follow-up questions that you think I missed? Hey folks, Jared here. We have a rare treat for you today. So our guest is Lieutenant Junior Grade Retired Ken Sanger. Ken's son is a journalist, David Sanger, who works for the New York Times. And on the anniversary of VJ Day, David shared the story on Twitter of the time his dad nearly shot down a Japanese peace delegation towards the end of World War II. So I reached out to David and asked if his dad would consent to an

interview. He agreed and we were off and running. So you're going to hear not just that story, but hear about his whole war from the time he was a midshipman at Duke University on December 7th, 1941 to the end of the war and demobilization. I'll just add a note here on the ending is I started to end the episode and then Ken had some questions about modern air defense. And it was one of the highlights of my life to be able to tell this combat veteran just a few tidbits about modern fleet air defense. Just a very cool experience. With that said, I still want to preface this episode with our usual disclaimer that all opinions are our own and not representative of any institutions with which we might otherwise be associated, and add in that Seat Control is edited and produced by Keegan Ingersoll, Ed Salo, and William McQuiston.

Keep tuning in. We're going to have some exciting news about some changes for Seat Control coming soon, and as always, I want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends in the SimSec Podcast Network and our second podcast, Feed the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Drack, Jamie, and a pile of empty iron brew bottles on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and wherever else you download your podcasts. It's a more low-key, slightly less serious approach to current events in the maritime domain and naval history. Check them out wherever you download. They've got friend of the Sea Control podcast, Dr. Sal Mercogliano, on this week talking about what navies can learn from merchant fleets. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men.

No, I think you covered it incredibly well. And I think that your knowledge of the ships and the history threw out some things I hadn't heard before. So it was great. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, I had the good fortune to interview an author by the name of Trent Hone a couple weeks ago. He wrote a book called Learning War about sort of the development of the Combat Information Center and the way that the Navy fought in the Pacific.

And that was just a couple weeks ago. So that provided a wealth of background material for this. But I really appreciate you both taking the time. There's a book on the development of the CIC? Yes, sir. Learning War. And the author is Trent Holm. I'll send a link to you.

Please, please do. He's a tremendous author and historian. Worked at the Naval War College for a number of years. But it's really good. And I think you would appreciate it as someone who actually lived the development of the CIC. Is this still an occupation analogous to a fighter director in the Navy? Yes, but what I would tell you is that it's a little different, is that primarily if you're on a surface ship doing it, you're probably an enlisted sailor.

So you're a first-class petty officer or a chief petty officer doing the work of what we call an air intercept controller. We do have officers who do it, but they tend to be aviators, And they're working in the airborne early warning aircraft, the E-2, flying from the aircraft carrier and then controlling from the back of the E-2. So there's a little bifurcation there in the way we control the fighter aircraft and who is controlling them. What I would say is the officers who do it on a – I think the speed of the modern fighters make the interception a whole different science. uh it does in the speed but then we also have you know i think you would find the more effective sensors as well so yeah the speed and the time it all becomes a little bit relative because you can

see at a much further distance where the quote-unquote enemy is coming from and how we want to set up for it as well as just the weapon engagement ranges are very different but yeah Air Warfare, just as I've observed it in training, it's a really high speed affair, but it's probably not significantly different only because the enemy would be much closer to you at the first detection in your case. So I think it's still a high speed game, whether you were doing it in 1945 or today in 2020. I really appreciate you both taking the time today. David, you for sharing the story initially on Twitter, and then Ken filling in all the details here. This was just fascinating for me, particularly having just read that book. I can actually talk to someone who sat in that CIC and knows what it was like to direct the aircraft around.

This was just tremendous. But I really appreciate you both taking the time, and on a Labor Day, no less. So this was great. Thank you for having me. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Oh, help me, oh, I'm pulling me out of this. Why are you pulling me out of this? Help me, oh, I'm pulling me out of this.

Pulling out of this shit, oh, now.