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Home Town Tuxedo Park
Date of Passing Nov 02, 2008
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Henry Loomis
WWII Navy Veteran, Asiatic Theater of War, 13 Battle Stars Lieutenant Commander, Bronze Star, Former CIA, Head of VOA and PBS
Mr. Loomis graduated first in his naval training class and, in addition to teaching radar, served as a radar officer with carriers, air squadrons and battleships. He received the Bronze Star and Air Medal.
Henry Loomis (April 19, 1919 - November 2, 2008) was appointed director of the Voice of America in 1958 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, resigning from the post in 1965 after policy conflicts with President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was appointed by Richard Nixon in 1972 to serve as president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Loomis was born on April 19, 1919 in Tuxedo Park, New York. His father, Alfred Lee Loomis built a fortune financing public utilities and sold out just before the Wall Street crash of 1929. Alfred Loomis set up a physics laboratory in an old mansion where Henry worked with his father as a teenager on brain-wave research, including participating as a volunteer in his father's experiments. The two men later took part in pioneering research on radar.
Loomis attended Harvard University and left in 1940 during his senior year to enlist in the United States Navy. Harvard granted him an undergraduate degree in 1946 based on his radar instruction while in the Navy.
In the navy, he was on the staff of the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Pearl Harbor, at the time of the attack by the Japanese. Loomis was responsible for the creation of training materials for radar, and worked with pilots and officers on ships to help overcome their wariness of the technology and develop their skills in its use. Loomis was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and left the Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
Late in the war, Loomis had a chance meeting with United States Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, a cousin of Loomis', and Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. In a discussion about potential target cities in Japan for the atomic bomb being developed, Loomis dissuaded them from targeting Kyoto, citing the city's art treasures he had learned about while studying Japanese history at Harvard.
He attended the University of California, Berkeley after the war, where he took graduate courses in physics, including work as an assistant with Ernest Lawrence at the school's radiation laboratory. He spent four years as assistant to the Dr. James Rhyne Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and led the research and intelligence functions at the United States Information Agency. Loomis later directed the staff of Dr. Killian, who had been appointed as the President's science advisor.
He served for 13 years on the board of the not-for-profit Mitre Corporation, which was affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked with the Central Intelligence Agency and United States Department of Defense after graduating from Berkeley.
Other Comments:
During his WWII Naval Service
The Executive Officer of VS-l0 (Scouting Squadron Ten), LT William I. Martin, was very interested in the development of aviation radar. Torpedo Ten received a replacement TBF with ASB-l radar and LT Martin requested the opportunity to develop its potential for sector-search operations. The Ship's Radar Officer, LT Henry Loomis, volunteered to assist Martin in this project, and by 1 December 1942 they had 15 hours of experimental radar flying time. They recognized its capability as well as its limitations, but this was the seed that started the development of night-carrier operations. Improvements in new types of aviation radar were soon forthcoming from the engineers at MIT and the electronic industry.
World War II ended in 1945, and by the time Henry left the service the following year, he had survived Pearl Harbor Day, attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander and won awards including a Bronze Star, Air Medal and Pacific Ribbon with 13 battle stars.
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Mr. Loomis quit as VOA director in 1965 after a falling-out with President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War. Johnson demanded that VOA keep quiet about American planes flying over Laos. Believing that VOA had an obligation to report the news, Mr. Loomis resigned in protest.
World War II/Asiatic-Pacific Theater/Iwo Jima Operation
From Month/Year
February / 1945
To Month/Year
March / 1945
Description The Battle of Iwo Jima (19 February – 26 March 1945), or Operation Detachment, was a major battle in which the United States Armed Forces fought for and captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese Empire. The American invasion had the goal of capturing the entire island, including its three airfields (including South Field and Central Field), to provide a staging area for attacks on the Japanese main islands. This five-week battle comprised some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the War in the Pacific of World War II.
After the heavy losses incurred in the battle, the strategic value of the island became controversial. It was useless to the U.S. Army as a staging base and useless to the U.S. Navy as a fleet base. However, Navy SEABEES rebuilt the landing strips, which were used as emergency landing strips for USAAF B-29s.
The Imperial Japanese Army positions on the island were heavily fortified, with a dense network of bunkers, hidden artillery positions, and 18 km (11 mi) of underground tunnels. The Americans on the ground were supported by extensive naval artillery and complete air supremacy over Iwo Jima from the beginning of the battle by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aviators.
Iwo Jima was the only battle by the U.S. Marine Corps in which the Japanese combat deaths were thrice those of the Americans throughout the battle. Of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima at the beginning of the battle, only 216 were taken prisoner, some of whom were captured because they had been knocked unconscious or otherwise disabled. The majority of the remainder were killed in action, although it has been estimated that as many as 3,000 continued to resist within the various cave systems for many days afterwards, eventually succumbing to their injuries or surrendering weeks later.
Despite the bloody fighting and severe casualties on both sides, the Japanese defeat was assured from the start. Overwhelming American superiority in arms and numbers as well as complete control of air power — coupled with the impossibility of Japanese retreat or reinforcement — permitted no plausible circumstance in which the Americans could have lost the battle.
The battle was immortalized by Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the raising of the U.S. flag on top of the 166 m (545 ft) Mount Suribachi by five U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy battlefield Hospital Corpsman. The photograph records the second flag-raising on the mountain, both of which took place on the fifth day of the 35-day battle. Rosenthal's photograph promptly became an indelible icon — of that battle, of that war in the Pacific, and of the Marine Corps itself — and has been widely reproduced.
My Participation in This Battle or Operation
From Month/Year
February / 1945
To Month/Year
March / 1945
Last Updated: Mar 16, 2020
Personal Memories
Memories 1945 Chronology USS Enterprise CV-6
Luzon Invasion Jan 6-7, 1945 Hong Kong and Canton Jan 12-16, 1945 Formosa Jan 20-22, 1945 Tokyo Raids Feb 16-17, 1945 Iwo Jima Feb 19 - Mar 12, 1945 Kyushu and Shikoku Mar 18-21, 1945 Okinawa Landings Apr 7-12, 1945 Anami Gunto and Daito Gunto May 6-11, 1945 Kyushu and Shikoku May 11-16, 1945 Puget Sound Naval Yard June 7 - Sep 13, 1945 Japanese Surrender Aug 14, 1945 Navy Day Celebration Oct 27, 1945
