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The Rest in Peace Thread


SteveAJones

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One of the absolute best. He had the music in his soul.

Rest in peace, and thank you for Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Well said, and the soul in his music, too.

Funny thing is I've been listening to JC with relish of late, but still can't watch Robin Williams or PS Hoffman on film yet...

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Anyone who knows me knows I am not a sports fan...but I am sobbing here watching the coverage of the passing of Stuart Scott.

Appendiceal cancer. 49 years young.

Damn it!

+1

Good man, damn disease!

RIP Stuart Scott, prayers go out to his family.

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Salute.

Edward J. Saylor, Airman Who Took Fight to Japan With the Doolittle Raiders, Dies at 94

By KIRK JOHNSON

JAN. 30, 2015 New York Times

30Saylor-obit-master675-v2.jpg

Edward J. Saylor in 2014. He was one of 80 Army fliers on a mission to strike Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.Credit

David Ryder for The New York Times

SEATTLE — Edward J. Saylor, one of the last surviving members of the Doolittle Raiders, a band of World War II airmen who bombed Japan in early 1942, stunning the Japanese at a time when their army and navy were racking up victories across Asia, died on Wednesday at his home near here. He was 94.

His death was announced by the Doolittle Raiders, a group organized to honor the airmen. Only three of the original 80 men in the squadron remain alive, the group said. The team’s leader, James H. Doolittle, who was awarded the Medal of Honor after the raid and retired as a general in the Air Force, died in 1993.

Mr. Saylor, who enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1939 and stayed in the military for 28 years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel, was stoic and understated in talking about the raid, which many believed would be a suicide mission.

The 16 B-25 bombers — his was plane No. 15 — could not carry enough fuel to return to the aircraft carrier from which they took off, more than 600 miles from Japan. Their plan was to keep going after the run and land in mainland China, hoping to evade the Japanese Army after that.

But even taking off at all was an uncertainty. Launching land-based bombers, laden with fuel, bombs and five-man crews, from the short runway of a carrier designed for smaller fighter planes had been done in training, but never in combat.

That he survived the bombing run, and the water landing of plane 15, and then a cat-and-mouse drama for weeks with the Japanese Army as it hunted for the airmen — eight of the 80 men were captured and three were executed — was just a matter of luck and of doing one’s job, Mr. Saylor said in an interview with The New York Times last year.

“I didn’t dwell on it,” he said, his voice clipped and matter-of-fact, his shirt buttoned to the top. “It was just a mission we did in the war,” he added. “We did what we had to do.”

In some ways, the real test for Sergeant Saylor, who turned 22 the month before the raid, on April 18, 1942, came before takeoff, when an engine of his plane malfunctioned in testing on the carrier Hornet as the squadron sailed west toward Japan.

The task of finding the trouble and fixing it fell to him as the plane’s engineer gunner, he said. Disassembling a bomber engine on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific, he said, had never been done, and it meant carrying every loose part into the fuselage as he worked, for fear that pieces would roll off the deck into the sea. On a coffee table in his house, he kept a replica of the gear arm that was at the heart of his, and his engine’s, trouble that day.

Military historians have said that while the raid caused relatively little physical damage to Japan, it may well have shifted, perhaps crucially, Japan’s military strategy: Surprised and alarmed by the attack, the Japanese began to pull back resources closer to the home islands in defense. And the raid unquestionably boosted American morale — a primary goal — by proving that United States forces had not been crippled after the disaster at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and a string of subsequent defeats. (The raid was dramatized in the 1944 movie “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” with Spencer Tracy as Lt. Col. Doolittle, based on a book by Maj. Ted W. Lawson, another participant.)

The Doolittle attack “was designed to show Japan that it was vulnerable,” said Col. Mark K. Wells, who teaches military history at the United States Air Force Academy. He said that some historians had attributed the United States’ victory in the Battle of Midway in June 1942 at least in part to the altered Japanese strategy after the raid.

Mr. Saylor, who was born on March 15, 1920, in Brusett, Mont., said he became obsessed with aircraft engines from the moment he first saw a plane fly overhead as a boy. He was determined to understand everything about what made flight possible.

He continued to work with his hands after retiring from the military — building and selling houses, and later making stained glass art pieces.

He is survived by three children and a host of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, said Thomas Casey, a manager of the Raiders group. Mr. Saylor’s wife of 69 years, Lorraine, died several years ago, Mr. Casey said.

In telling the story of the Doolittle attack seven decades later to The Times, Mr. Saylor became most visibly emotional in talking about the Chinese boy who risked his life to save the men of plane 15 by helping them evade Japanese troops. Mr. Saylor said he vowed at the time to find the boy and bring him back to America, but in the maelstrom of the war, the boy disappeared without a trace.

“We owed him,” Mr. Saylor said.

Edited by Strider
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  • 2 weeks later...

Lesley Gore passed away.

She is one of my favorite female singers from the Sixties. I didn't know much about her until I watched a Biography episode about her during the 1990's. She was only sixteen when It's My Party was released. In addition to her singing career she found time to attend Sarah Lawrence College and campaign for Robert F. Kennedy.

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