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Dryden’s Second Hundred Years (Part II) does two exceptional things. First, its tight focus on local participation in World War II paradoxically chronicles the entire war, a conflict which drew its combatants from small rural townships like Dryden NY, assigned and scattered them throughout the world, and then delivered the survivors back home again, creating in every small American community a microcosm of the entire conflict, an eye-witnessing of the whole story. Second, that story is told here largely in local participants’ own words, in letters from camps, troopships, carriers, cruisers, foxholes, and hospitals, their voices a quiet backdrop to the horrific war they had been asked to fight. The resulting narrative suggests that those who don’t know history – while not always doomed to repeat it – are very likely doomed to live their lives without perspective, to mistake inconvenience for hardship, and hardship for catastrophe, and to be blind to the miracle of everyday normal life.
World War II was over and the U.S. was still using the captured Japanese island of Okinawa as a major naval base. Hundreds of vessels dotted the numerous bays and inlets, and thousands of military personnel occupied the island. In October 1945, Typhoon Louise tore into Okinawa, slamming ships together and tossing them onto reefs and beaches. Terrible winds tore up tent cities and disintegrated corrugated tin Quonset huts. One hundred people died and 383 ships of all sizes were sunk or damaged. This book tells the full story of the typhoon historian Samuel Eliot Morison called "the most furious and lethal storm ever encountered by the United States Navy."
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