Destroyers in Action

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DESTROYERS IN ACTION

By

Richard A. Shafter

Destroyers in Action was originally published in 1945 by Cornell Maritime Press, New York, as the first book in The US. Navy in Action Series.

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 4

Foreword 5

PART ONE — GENESIS OF THE TINCANS 6

1. A Lovely Ship 6

2. Torpedoboat No. 1 10

3. Another Stripe or a Coffin 14

4. Trial and Error 18

5. Torpedoboat Destroyers 22

6. Destroyer Doctrine 25

7. Dreadnoughts and Midgets 29

PART TWO — DESTROYERS IN THE ATLANTIC 32

8. Little Ships for a Big Job 32

9. Kearny 37

10. Jacob Jones 42

11. Borie 47

PART THREE — DESTROYERS IN THE INVASIONS 51

12. Floating Field Artillery 51

13. Bernadou 53

14. Plunkett 58

15. Corry 65

PART FOUR — DESTROYERS IN THE PACIFIC 70

16. Pacific Apotheosis 70

17. Ward 72

18. O’Bannon 77

19. Laffey 86

20. Hamilton 92

PART FIVE — MAIDS OF ALL WORK 104

21. The Ships Behind the Ships 104

22. Melville 106

23. Prairie 111

24. Kanawha 114

25. L’Envoi 116

Acknowledgments 117

Illustrations 118

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 129

Foreword

If there is one thing the war just ended has again demonstrated, it has been the ingenuity, courage and virility of our young American skippers. Destroyers and destroyer personnel have continued to uphold the outstanding record they established in the First World War. Not only are destroyers the work horses of the Navy, but they have inevitably become the spearheads of all surface fleet operations and attacks. It takes real seamen to operate these little fighting ships.

Mr. Shafter has brought out the many and varied ways in which destroyers are employed in wartime and has added many interesting items concerning their historical background. As an officer who has served much of his time at sea with destroyers, it is a delight to see these little vessels brought before the public—too often the press is filled with the accounts of action by larger vessels and the outstanding work of the destroyers is overlooked. They are the Navy’s biggest school of seamanship and command—the chance for young officers of ability and ambition to prove themselves.

The war just ended has again shown that sea power is indispensable to our nation. As long as we have navies, there will exist the necessity for destroyers to perform the multitudinous tasks so vividly portrayed in Destroyers in Action. No one can read this account of our destroyers in action without feeling a surge of pride and confidence in our American youth and without sensing that we had something the Japanese did not understand—we had a strength in our spirit which they did not comprehend; we had a latent power they could not estimate; we had an ability to carry the war to the enemy across thousands of miles of water—beyond anything even our most ambitious Navy men had ever dreamed of.

The destroyer is undoubtedly the nursery for our future flag officers—it develops strength of purpose, the power of rapid decision, of instant action and, if need be, of strenuous endurance through a period of danger. For these reasons the tales in Destroyers in Action are well worth reading.

H. F. LEARY,

Vice-Admiral, U.S. Navy,

Commander, Eastern Sea Frontier.

PART ONE — GENESIS OF THE TINCANS

1. A Lovely Ship

Destroyers! Mention the word and the layman’s mind will conjure up a picture of a little ship steaming death-defying, head-on into the fire from an enemy battlewagon’s heavy guns. In the heavy seaway the little ship is tossing like a cork, with the white water breaking high over her bows. Then suddenly she swerves hard to starboard. There are a couple of splashes on her portside and a moment later appear the bubbling wakes of the tin fish she has sent on their voyage of destruction. And a short while later there is a terrific crash. The enemy’s sides and decks are clothed in sheets of smoke and flame from the explosions that tear her inwards apart. And another naval battle is won.

It is an inspiring picture that has adorned many a calendar sent by solicitous ship’s chandlers and seed stores to their customers, to be remembered by for the rest of the year. The practice looks different. Whether it’s even more romantic than the calendar artist envisioned, or just a drab, humdrum existence, depends very largely on the point of view of the individual man who crews a tincan. One thing, however, can be said for it: it’s most versatile. If Kipling’s crack about the liner has of late found an officially sanctioned variation to describe the glamour girl of the Navy, The Carrier, she’s a Lady, then it can safely be varied once again: The destroyer, she’s a workhorse.

Pulling binder, hay rig, threshing machine or the democrat for the family on its way to church, it’s all one to a farmer’s workhorse. A Navy workhorse may be on antisubmarine patrol today: dropping depth charges in their prescribed pattern all over the spot where the co-operating Navy flier believes he has seen the underwater raider; tomorrow, she may be riding herd on a convoy of merchantmen: running breathlessly and tongue-lolling around her flock, shooing stragglers into line, and then tackling, in the manner of good and faithful sheepdogs anywhere, all enemies regardless of size and number, whether aircraft, surface squadron, or wolf pack. Or they might install a pair of steel ovaries on her decks and give her a load of ugly horned eggs to drop in waters the enemy’s fleet is certain to traverse. Then again, they might give her a pair of paravanes to tow and send her out to sweep the channels leading to a new invasion beach clear of the mines which the enemy himself has sown there, and then the next day convert her into a fast transport and send her in with a deckload of Marine Raiders who are to establish the first beachhead foothold. And while weird landing craft are yet on their way with reinforcements, supplies, tanks and artillery, the destroyer that has landed them will stand by to give the Leathernecks who are digging themselves in on the narrow coral strip whatever fire support her 4-or 5-inch guns are capable of.

Then again, on duty with a task force, the destroyer is in the van and on the flanks of the capital ships, scouting, protecting, running interference and when the actual engagement begins, throwing a smoke screen around the carrier or battlewagon to spoil the enemy’s gunnery. When disaster comes, when carrier, battleship or cruiser has received the deadly wound that causes the decks to buckle and burst with the explosion of magazines and fuel tanks, it’s the destroyer that rushes in close, though the heat may blister what patches of paint are still left on her sea-bitten plates, and takes off the men still left alive after the unsuccessful battle to save their doomed ship. As the hull of the big capital ship slowly drifts down with the tide, a roaring inferno, yet still floating, it is the destroyer’s job to come in and send the once proud craft to the bottom with a torpedo, to save her from the last ignominy of having her dead body defiled by the enemy’s hands.

Rescue missions generally are hardly more than mere routine assignments among the manifold jobs that are a destroyer’s lot. Many a flier, shot down by ack-ack, or forced down in a gale, later got back in the fight simply because some indefatigable DD would not give up the search. A quart of whiskey for her skipper and ten gallons of ice cream for her wardroom became the traditional price that any carrier gladly paid to a DD for each of its fliers delivered back aboard or safely landed in port.

Let the DD’s do it! has almost become axiomatic with the Navy whenever there is a particularly unpleasant or difficult job under discussion. Their speed, their maneuverability, their relatively high firepower for their size, and their comparatively low building price, have made destroyers not merely the most versatile, but ton for ton the most efficient, naval craft ever devised. They are the Navy’s true expendables.

The spirit of the little ships reflects itself in that of their crews. Destroyermen are a bit apart from the rest of our man-of-war men. On their small ships they have to do without many of the comforts the crews of carriers, battleships or even cruisers enjoy. They live in cramped quarters. There is no canteen or ship’s service booth where a man might get a coke, an ice cream or western story pulp magazine. Yet the destroyerman, though he beefs about it all and swears it’s a dog’s life, in his innermost heart glories in the hardships his particular trade imposes upon him. He’s inclined to look down on the men from the big ships as softies. His walk is a destroyer roll. His hat sits precariously on one eyebrow. He is the bane of the Shore Patrol.

He’ll abuse his ship roundly as the most uncomfortable, leakingest, buckingest crate that ever went to sea. But let somebody else pass unfavorable comment on her and he’s up in arms. Asked why he wasn’t applying for a transfer after he had given a lengthy and extremely critical recital of his ship’s famed action, a survivor of the Borie put it all in a nutshell. Me? No, thanks! There’s too much red tape on a big ship for me. On a destroyer you know everybody with their good sides and their faults. And everybody knows you. You can’t sham on a DD. You gotta be a sailor, mister.

Destroyermen from different ships, meeting on shore liberty, have only two general topics of conversation—their ships and their girls. They rank in that order. Commonly the men disagree violently on the good points of either.

They agree, however—and wholeheartedly—on one point: a destroyer is not just a mere ship, but a definite personality. And they refer to her with alliterative and frequently none too refined nicknames: The Lucky Lud for the Ludlow; Little Hellion or The Mighty Mick for the equally lucky O’Bannon, companion ship of the cruiser Helena; or "The Fouled-Up Fletcher. Of course other, bigger ships have their nicknames too: The Lady Lex, The Sara" {Saratoga), Fighting Nora (Northampton), Weevie (West Virginia), even Prune Barge (California). But the affectionate handles bestowed by destroyermen on their little ships are intended as more than mere Paul Bunyanesque exaggerations; they are apt to emphasize an outstanding character trait of the ship, and, aye, of the man after whom she was named.

DD’s do not bear the names of vague geographic entities like cities, states and battlegrounds, however hallowed their memory. They are named for men who, some of them not so very long ago, were human flesh and blood. Some bear the names of gallant captains of war, great strategists or famous statesmen. And some are named after simple sailor boys and obscure Leathernecks whose only claim to immortality was the heroic manner of their death. No use arguing against it as rank superstition, service old-timers will convince you that a ship takes on some of the characteristics of the man after whom she is named. They will cite example and historic precedent going back to the 1830’s, when the Navy began to perpetuate the names of some of its great commanders by naming three fleet little gun brigs—the destroyers of the era of sail—after Decatur, Preble and Dale.

There had indeed been a Somers and a Trippe already, during the War of 1812, but a system of nomenclature did not come into being until 1819, when a Federal statute provided that first-raters, or ships of the line, should be named after states; second-rate ships, or frigates, after cities and towns. The names were to be chosen jointly by the President and the Secretary of the Navy. However, America’s first first-rater, the eighty-six-gun North Carolina, was not launched until half a dozen years later. Meanwhile, a class of heavy frigates began to be named after rivers, Hudson, St. Lawrence, Brandywine, etc., and the city names, originally reserved for frigates, came to be bestowed on so-called sloops-of-war, Boston, Fairfield, Falmouth, Warren, all of which were really third-rate fighting ships, usually carrying no more than eighteen guns.

As new classes of ships developed, new series of names were added. For a group of fast little schooners added to the Navy’s roster in 1821 names like Dolphin, Shark, Grampus, were chosen. Today it is the submarines that are given fish names, usually in series, so that the Mackerel and Merlin, the Tuna, Trout, and Thrasher, the Grayling and Grunion, are all identified as members of their respective classes.

When sail was definitely displaced by steam, it had already become traditional with the Navy to name its fastest little ships after its illustrious sons. Today, almost all of our DD’s and DE’s are named to honor naval men. The very few exceptions to the rule are reserved for such men as Boyle and Ordronaux, famous privateers of 1812, or for men like George Bancroft, the historian who became Secretary of the Navy.

Destroyers get into the blood not merely of the men that serve in them, but of anybody who has been given a chance to get acquainted with them. Even a master of the hard-boiled school of writing like John Steinbeck can wax dithyrambic over a little ship. After spending part of his correspondent’s tour of duty aboard a DD he wrote:

"A destroyer is a lovely ship, probably the nicest fighting ship of all. Battleships are a little like steel cities or great factories of destruction. Aircraft carriers are floating flying fields.

Even cruisers are big pieces of machinery, but a destroyer is all boat. In the beautiful clean lines of her, in her speed and roughness, in her curious gallantry.

2. Torpedoboat No. 1

There’s many a DD that has spent her lifetime in the service without ever participating in one of the seagoing cavalry attacks that the layman envisions to be her daily task. Yet it is just such an attack that is the classic role for which the destroyer ultimately was cast. Of necessity, destroyers, or their immediate forerunners, torpedoboats, could not come into existence until Whitehead, in the early 1870’s, devised the first serviceable torpedo.

Not that torpedoes had not existed before. Any infernal machine that would explode upon contact with the bottom or sides of a vessel—whether the contraption be floating free, anchored or arranged in layers in elaborate underwater timber structures and breastworks, in short, everything that might today pass as a marine mine—was up to the time of, and during, the Civil War known by the generic term of torpedo. It was that kind of an anchored torpedo which Farragut damned when he gave his famous order at Mobile Bay. Not until the Scotch inventor had given the formerly stationary torpedo a propelling mechanism which converted it, in Whitehead’s own terminology, into an automobile torpedo, did the need develop for a new type of craft that carried special apparatus through which the torpedo could be launched and started on its way to the target.

It was neither mere accident nor whim of a Department designer that gave the name of Cushing to the first of our naval vessels to resemble in shape and purpose the modern destroyer. The man whose name she bore had died thirty years earlier, yet he had irrefutably demonstrated that a torpedo did not need to be a stationary mine but could be carried to the enemy. When U.S. Torpedoboat No. 1 was launched from the yard of the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company at Bristol, R. I., it was but a belated acknowledgment that prompted its christening as the Cushing.

Put alongside either one of our present-day destroyer dreadnoughts, a DD of the Bristol class or even a medium-sized DE, the Cushing, with a length of 137.5 feet, a beam at the water line of 14:10, a displacement of slightly more than ninety-one tons, and her crew of four officers and twelve men besides a few machinists, would cut no very great figure. But to our people of five and a half decades ago she was a very novel toy indeed, and public acclaim and patriotic excitement ran high.

The revival of shipbuilding in the middle eighties had left the nation immensely navy-conscious.