This Military Service Page was created/owned by
Shaun Thomas (Underdog), OSC
to remember
Baskett, Thomas Slack (Tom), CAPT.
If you knew or served with this Sailor and have additional information or photos to support this Page, please leave a message for the Page Administrator(s) HERE.
Contact Info
Home Town St. Louis
Last Address Webster Groves, Missouri
Date of Passing Feb 07, 2002
Location of Interment Middlebury Cemetery - Middlebury, Vermont
Description The plan of the Pacific subseries was determined by the geography, strategy, and the military organization of a theater largely oceanic. Two independent, coordinate commands, one in the Southwest Pacific under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and the other in the Central, South, and North Pacific (Pacific Ocean Areas) under Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, were created early in the war. Except in the South and Southwest Pacific, each conducted its own operations with its own ground, air, and naval forces in widely separated areas. These operations required at first only a relatively small number of troops whose efforts often yielded strategic gains which cannot be measured by the size of the forces involved. Indeed, the nature of the objectivesùsmall islands, coral atolls, and jungle-bound harbors and airstrips, made the employment of large ground forces impossible and highlighted the importance of air and naval operations. Thus, until 1945, the war in the Pacific progressed by a double series of amphibious operations each of which fitted into a strategic pattern developed in Washington.
My Participation in This Battle or Operation
From Month/Year
January / 1945
To Month/Year
September / 1945
Last Updated: Mar 16, 2020
Personal Memories
Memories Third War Patrol Following refit, she put to sea on her third and final war patrol. On 29 July, she once again passed through Colnett Strait and entered the East China Sea. On 30 July, she found another motor lugger and punched holes in her with her 40 millimeter gun. She then proceeded to round up the lugger's nine-man Korean crew, all of whom had taken to the water at the first hint of trouble. Between 2 August and 4 August, she rode out an East China Sea typhoon and on 6 August, released her prisoners in a small boat near the Korean coast. That afternoon, she headed in toward the harbor of Osei To, a small island near the western coast of Korea, to conduct a shore bombardment. During that escapade, her guns destroyed four schooners and severely damaged another five, along with a sea truck, a motor trawler, and some warehouses and other dockside installations. Tench then shifted north to the Gulf of Pohai, between the Kwantung Peninsula of Manchuria and the Shantung Promontory of China. Her last encounter of the war occurred on 9 August when she surfaced in fog to torpedo and sink a seagoing tug towing two large barges. While the submarine retired from that attack, two Japanese "Betty" medium bombers dropped a bomb apiece some 500 yards (450 m) off her port beam and retired themselves. (These craft were all too small to be recorded by JANAC, and her credited score for the patrol was zero.)[13] That ended her hostile actions.
