Down to the Sea (5 page)

For a week after the invasion,
Hull
stood by
Nevada
as the battleship provided devastating fire support. At one point, when U.S. troops were stalled by stiff opposition from an entrenched enemy on higher ground, the Rangers ashore radioed quadrants to
Nevada,
whose big guns soon found the range and “wiped out an entire mountainside” filled with Japanese troops.

After intense fighting during which the Japanese attacked in one of the largest banzai charges of the Pacific campaign—ultimately it became necessary to land 12,000 U.S. troops—Attu was secured by the first of June. With the exception of twenty-eight prisoners, the entire Japanese garrison of some 2,600 troops was wiped out (hundreds committed suicide with hand grenades rather than surrender). American casualties were 600 dead and 1,200 wounded.

Following the fall of Attu,
Hull
joined a destroyer blockade around Kiska, a narrow, 22-mile-long island with an east-facing harbor midway down its length.
Hull
steamed several miles off the harbor, where most of the Japanese installations were located. Each night around midnight, the destroyer moved closer to shore and fired at least a hundred rounds of 5-inch shells, outbursts which were often met by return artillery fire from ashore. With all deck-gun batteries firing simultaneously, the noise was deafening and “the whole ship vibrated, with dust and debris flying everywhere.” Then
Hull
turned and steamed out of range, resuming her patrol. This went on until they ran out of ammunition and stores and were relieved by another destroyer, at which point they headed for Dutch Harbor to take on more ammo and supplies before going back out. For weeks, as “fog hung over the island like a shroud of
mystery,” Kiska was shelled by the patrolling destroyers, which regularly faced blinding snowstorms and pea-soup fog that obscured rocks, barrier reefs, and treacherous shallows and made maneuvering hazardous even for ships equipped with radar and sonar.
*

On patrol off Kiska shortly after midnight on June 22,
Monaghan
's radar picked up a contact at a range of 14,000 yards. Steaming to investigate, the destroyer closed to within 2,300 yards. With the night “thicker than coagulated ink,” the target still could not be seen visually. The destroyer's guns, directed by radar control, opened fire. There was an immediate response from the unseen foe: machine-gun fire raked across
Monaghan
's decks.

Several slugs missed Seaman 1st Class Joseph Guio's head “by three feet” as he and his deck-gun crew fired away. “But I guess that's as good as a mile because I came out of it safe,” Guio later wrote to his younger brother, Bill, back home in West Virginia. “I trembled like a leaf on a frosty morning. Will tell you all about it some day.”

The blind duel continued for twenty minutes, the destroyer's salvos lighting the night with blinding flashes and sending booming echoes across the harbor, until a
Monaghan
lookout reported a “glowing mushroom” on the horizon. Radar reported the target blip was still on the screen but moving toward the enemy-held harbor. The destroyer broke off contact, ending a surface action in which her gunners never once glimpsed their target. Aerial photographs taken later revealed a large enemy transport submarine piled up on the jagged rocks outside the harbor “like a dead whale.”
†
Monaghan
's reputation as a sub killer—first earned at Pearl Harbor and enhanced weeks later when the
destroyer attacked and damaged an enemy submarine—went up another notch.

Based on the stiff enemy resistance at Attu, there was reason to believe that the Kiska invasion would be a costly action. But when D-Day arrived in early August and 35,000 troops landed on Kiska, they found the island abandoned. Under the cover of impenetrable fog, thousands of enemy troops had been evacuated over a period of weeks by surface ships and transport submarines—a “remarkable exploit” that succeeded in spite of the watchful patrols by radar-equipped U.S. warships. For the lack of a fierce fight for Kiska, however, U.S. military strategists were unapologetic. The Japanese were out of the Aleutians for good without the loss of additional American lives.

Hull
and
Monaghan, Farragut
-class sister ships launched two months apart whose hull designations were separated by only four numbers (350 and 354, respectively), had shared similar experiences since the opening day of war, when they had been moored not more than 200 yards apart at Pearl Harbor. For a few weeks more they continued escort and antisubmarine patrol duties along the cold, foggy Aleutian chain. Then, with their crews worn down from the “long, tedious grind” of conducting operations in “possibly the world's worst weather,”
Hull
and
Monaghan
received new orders.

The two destroyers turned their prows toward warmer climes.

Spence
went to war in the South Pacific in fall 1943.

Three months after her launching that brisk autumn day in Bath, Maine, the new
Fletcher
-class destroyer was commissioned in January 1943.
*
A month-long West Indies shakedown cruise followed, with a complement of 350 officers and enlisted men, most of whom had never before been to sea and were “green as grass.” It did not help that
Spence
got
caught in a winter storm off the coast of the Carolinas; so many in the crew became seasick that it was difficult finding enough men to stand four-hour watch sections. In the opinion of 2nd Class Yeoman Alexander “Al” Bunin of Roselle Park, New Jersey, a veteran of three years' sea duty when he became a
Spence
plank owner, “5 percent of us put that ship into commission.” Other than the chiefs and a handful of other senior personnel, the enlisted men with few exceptions were right out of recruit training depots, while most of the officers came from civilian colleges with only ninety days of training at a reserve officer midshipman school before being sent to the fleet (hence the origin of the wartime term “ninety-day wonders”). For weeks, special signs had to be posted showing the way to various compartments and spaces below deck. So “screwed up” was the crew that the first time a 5-inch deck gun—with a range of nearly 10 miles—was fired, the projectile went only a few hundred yards. The novice crew was eventually “whipped into shape” by
Spence
's first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Henry J. Armstrong Jr., an experienced destroyer skipper known as “tough but fair.” Armstrong, forty, a native of Salt Lake City, Utah, told the crew in no uncertain terms that he was training them for war and “some of us won't be coming back.” Adequately preparing his men was a task that Armstrong took seriously. “You have over three hundred mothers' sons aboard this beautiful ship,” he wrote in his journal. “What are you going to do about that responsibility?” The transformation of those mothers' sons from seasick polliwogs to a capable crew took place only after months of hard work.
Spence
's first assignment was escort duty in Caribbean waters, followed by several convoys across the Atlantic to Casablanca. Then, in July 1943, they were ordered to the Pacific via the Panama Canal. En route, the determined Armstrong commenced a “refresher course in battle readiness,” ordering drills and gunnery practice at all hours.

Soon after arriving in the Pacific,
Spence
was assigned to Destroyer Squadron 23, commanded by Captain Arleigh A. Burke, who was destined to become the war's most famous combat commander of destroyers. Before long, it became apparent that the hard-charging Armstrong had turned
Spence
into one of the fastest-shooting and
smoothest operating ships in the squadron. Burke, who possessed his own “hard-driving, meticulous style,” heartily approved.

Born “a thousand miles from the sea on a hardscrabble farm at the foot of the Rocky Mountains” in Colorado, Arleigh “Ollie” Burke gave every indication of belonging to his paternal line of hearty Swedes (his immigrant grandfather had changed the family name from Bjorkegren). This forty-two-year-old American Viking was tall, husky, blue-eyed, and blond. At Annapolis, where he admittedly had to “work like hell” to earn good grades, he competed in boxing, fencing, and wrestling—not surprisingly, all martial arts—and finished in the top 20 percent of his graduating class (1923).

Believing that his squadron needed a “trademark that all the ships can be proud of,” Burke decided that the youthful Navajo character Little Beaver, a courageous, pint-size sidekick to fighting cowboy Red Ryder of a popular comic series of the same name, would make a suitable moniker. His destroyers would be “the little beavers for [the] cruisers” and other large warships. Burke, who following his first destroyer command in 1939 had spent the succeeding years at the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington, D.C., where he built a reputation as one of the Navy's best at ordnance and gunnery, had insignias painted on the superstructure of each of his destroyers. Sporting a cartoonish Indian attired in moccasins and headband and toting a cocked bow and arrow—“how he loved to hunt Japs, day and night”—the eight ships of Destroyer Squadron 23 soon became popularly known as the Little Beavers.
*

On November 1, 1943, the Third Marine Division landed on the enemy-held island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea—the opening gambit of an operation designed to put pressure on the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul by building an airfield on Bougainville (200 miles away) from which air strikes could be launched against Rabaul. The landings were supported by four light cruisers and Burke's destroyers. The Japa
nese answered with air attacks from Rabaul, and a naval unit composed of two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and six destroyers raced toward Bougainville to break up the nascent landings. In the early hours of a moonless November 2, the ships of the two opposing forces sliced through the pitch-dark sea toward a showdown in Empress Augusta Bay, west of Bougainville. The lead U.S. destroyer made radar contact with the Japanese force at 2:29
A.M.
from a range of 20 miles. While the four U.S. cruisers—
Montpelier, Cleveland, Columbia,
and
Denver
—took positions to block the enemy ships from attacking the beachhead, Burke declared on the short-range TBS radio to anyone listening: “I'm heading in!” Rear Admiral A. Stanton Merrill, in command of the twelve-ship force and flying his flag in
Montpelier,
was not surprised by Burke's pronouncement.

At the beginning of a surface battle, U.S. destroyers traditionally had been kept close to the main battle line of bigger ships (cruisers and battleships). Such a defensive strategy had come at a high cost in the Battle of Tassafaronga, fought a year earlier in the channel between Guadalcanal and Savo Island when an American force of five cruisers and four destroyers was badly mauled by a squadron of eight Japanese destroyers. The commander of the U.S. task force withheld permission for his destroyers to launch their torpedoes and instead kept them closely tied to his column of cruisers. As a consequence, the Japanese destroyers “administered to the U.S. Navy the most humiliating defeat in its history.” One U.S. cruiser was sunk and three others were so badly damaged they were out of the war for a year, against the loss of a single Japanese destroyer. (Casualties totaled 395 Americans and 197 Japanese.) U.S. Navy officers from the highest echelons in Washington, D.C., to the smallest ships of the most backwater fleets had analyzed the tactics and tragic results of Tassafaronga, in which a “superior cruiser force was defeated by an inferior destroyer force,” with the hope of preventing further lopsided naval losses.

Burke had studied Tassafaronga, too, and as a result had developed strong notions about how destroyers should be used more independently and aggressively in battle. He had discussed his ideas at length with Merrill, who agreed that when the opportunity presented itself
the Little Beavers could go in first, firing torpedoes—a destroyer's most lethal weapon against other ships. Before departing for their first major battle, Burke had gathered his skippers and issued a standing order: once they were detached from the task force, their destroyers were “to attack upon enemy contact” without awaiting further orders. Burke wanted his destroyer commanders to know they had freedom of action at such times. He did not want them steaming around aimlessly awaiting orders. If they erred on the side of being overly aggressive, he would stand by them. Burke made it clear he would brook no excuses for inaction by anyone in his command.

As more images came into focus on the radar screens, Burke, flying his command flag aboard
Charles Ausburne,
realized they were about to face down three enemy columns. He picked the nearest one, consisting of three ships—he did not yet know their type—and ordered his destroyers to prepare to fire half their torpedoes. Minutes later, when the three enemy ships came within torpedo range at about 4,000 yards off the port bow, some two dozen 25-foot-long torpedoes—each packed with 500 pounds of explosives—jumped from their port launch tubes amid hisses of highly compressed air and dove into the sea with their foot-long propellers whirring. When an enemy ship fired star shells skyward, the U.S. destroyers and the telltale torpedo wakes were illuminated in bursts of white light. The Japanese column wheeled to a new course, causing the torpedoes to miss.

Opening up with 5-inch guns,
Spence
was “the first to put a Japanese cruiser on fire.” The cruiser
Sendai
also came under devastatingly accurate fire from other U.S. ships, including the cruisers. Still in midturn,
Sendai
was “wracked by a murderous salvo…that virtually disemboweled her.” As other Japanese ships maneuvered desperately to avoid the same fate, the destroyers
Samidare
and
Shiratsuyu
collided with each other. At almost the same instant, the heavy cruiser
Myoko
rammed her escorting destroyer,
Hatsukaze,
slicing off her bow.

Although ablaze and turning in circles with a jammed rudder,
Sendai
was still dangerous. The enemy cruiser released a spread of deadly 30-foot-long Model 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes—the most advanced tor
pedo in the world—each packing more than 1,000 pounds of explosives, double the charge of U.S. torpedoes, and with nearly quadruple the range (11 miles at 49 knots for the Model 93 compared with 3 miles at 46 knots for U.S. torpedoes). One Long Lance hit home, blowing the stern off
Foote,
killing nineteen, wounding seventeen, and leaving the destroyer with no power or steering and her main deck awash aft. With
Foote
out of action, her crew would have a long struggle on their hands to keep her afloat until she could be taken under tow later.
*

At 3:10
A.M.
, Burke radioed his destroyers to execute a turn to starboard on his count. Upon Burke's command—“Execute turn!”—Armstrong ordered “right standard rudder,” then checked to make sure that the rudder-angle indicator confirmed the rudder had gone over to the desired position.
Spence
began a smooth swing to starboard, which, if the other destroyers made the same maneuver simultaneously, would keep adequate spacing between them.

Lieutenant Jared W. Mills, standing at the open port hatch of the bridge, suddenly cried out: “Ship approaching sharply on port side, close aboard!”

“Full right rudder!” Armstrong yelled.

As added rudder was applied,
Spence
's turn tightened. But it was too late—
Spence
and the destroyer
Thatcher
were on “roughly parallel courses headed in opposite directions” in frightful bow-on positions. The two ships struck bow to bow, and “sparks flew wildly into the night” as they raked each other's hull from stem to stern at a combined speed of 60 knots.

The impact sent men and loose gear flying, and for some terrible moments there was the screeching sound of steel against steel.
Spence
carried a “handsome silver St. Christopher's medal affixed to her fore-mast,” and Armstrong surmised later that “the good saint must have been working overtime” to prevent the ships from slicing the bow off
each other. Neither vessel was put out of action by the mishap, although the list of damage to
Spence
would fill two typed pages. At-sea collisions had long been considered career-ending occurrences for commanding officers, but Burke would subsequently attach no blame to either skipper due to the incident taking place “in night actions while operating at high speeds under enemy gunfire.”

Slugging it out at close range with
Sendai
,
Spence
was hit by an 8-inch round on the starboard side. The projectile bounced off and fell into the water without exploding. However, an 18-by-6-inch hole was punched into the ship at the waterline, causing a crew compartment below to flood and salt water to leak into two fuel oil tanks. A mattress and blankets were stuffed into the hole as a makeshift measure, but the fuel contamination was a larger problem. The fires in two of the four boilers went out, reducing the destroyer's speed accordingly—potentially a death sentence in a sea battle. Hustling boiler room personnel shifted fuel oil suction for the two boilers to a standby tank. Then, with their ship's fate and their own hanging in the balance, they rapidly restored the fires to the boilers.

In the aft engine room, Machinist's Mate 2nd Class Robert Strand, twenty-two, of Ridgway, Pennsylvania, was experiencing his first major battle and learning how loud the sounds of combat could be even so far below and while working next to one of the ship's two powerful General Electric steam turbines that generated
Spence
's combined 60,000 horsepower. Strand, fine-boned but well-coordinated and athletic—back home he played on a traveling all-star baseball team and was competitive in tennis, basketball, and especially bowling (and hoped one day to own his hometown bowling alley)—knew his way around motors of varying sizes. After graduating from high school in 1938 and working as a butcher's apprentice, he had been hired by one of the town's biggest employers, the Elliott Company, an electric motor manufacturer that had a contract to provide motor drives for submarines. When the war began, Strand was given a draft deferment because of his job in the defense industry. One day he found that someone had slapped a fresh coat of yellow paint on his lunch box, no doubt implying cow
ardice on his part for not going into the military. Strand immediately went to the Navy recruiting office and enlisted, and left a few weeks later, in August 1942. With the skills he had learned working with motors, he was sent to a Navy school following boot camp and graduated with high enough marks to earn his machinist's mate 2nd class rating. His assignment to
Spence
had followed in March 1943, and he boarded the new destroyer at Boston's Charlestown Naval Base shortly after
Spence
returned from her shakedown cruise.