I was reading through the correspondence of an American sailor who was stationed in the Pacific in October, 1945. He was expressing a lot of resentment over the fact that he wasn't allowed to go home yet despite the end of the war, and finishes off a list of his grievances with what I've transcribed as follows:
"To top it all off Truman comes along with that shit about the Missouri. Boy he really made all of the navy men in the Pacific's shit list. I'll never vote for him if he was president for a hundred years."
I assume he's referring to the USS Missouri, where Japan signed its official capitulation in September of that year, but I don't really see what the writer would find so infuriating about that.
Admittedly, I'm not the best at transcription, and "Missouri" could possibly be another word; but either way, I'm wondering if any of you know what Truman might have done this early into his presidency to make the "shit list" of Pacific sailors.
Harry Truman showed significant favoritism to the USS Missouri: he was, after all, from the state of Missouri, and his daughter had christened the ship when it was launched in 1944. Needless to say, when Truman picked the Missouri as the ship that would receive the honor of having the Japanese surrender on it, many navy veterans who served on more battle-scarred ships (such as battleships South Dakota and New Jersey) were not amused that the relatively untested Missouri would get the honor instead, and there was some thought that this was because Truman was picking favorites.
Truman had a troubled relationship with the Navy after the war as well. His massive proposed defense budget cuts were especially hard on the navy, given the fact that scrapping large ships was a lot more difficult than tanks or planes and that ships took up a larger portion of the budget. This would eventually lead to the Revolt of the Admirals where a series of admirals waged a public campaign against Truman's budget, and though Truman triumphed over the Navy, the subsequent Korean War would lead to a sudden about-face in Truman's budget policy as one immediate result of Truman's budget cuts was a lack of ships available for naval operations in East Asia.