Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  Ensign Clem C. Williams, at his station on De Haven’s fantail 40mm antiaircraft gun, also wondered why Tolman maintained his speed and course. Anxious gun crews wanted to open fire, but they had to refrain until Tolman gave the assent from the bridge. Lieutenant Archie R. Fields, De Haven’s assistant engineering officer, saw that the main batteries were tracking the aircraft, “and we were waiting for permission to commence firing, but the order never came.”36

  On the bridge, Tolman told Seaman 2/c Albert L. Breining to ask lookouts to report to the bridge as soon as they identified the aircraft. When no response arrived, Tolman exclaimed, “Damn, tell them to hurry up!” Breining again relayed Tolman’s request, at which one lookout shouted, “They’re Japs, we can see the meatballs!”37

  Six planes peeled away and attacked on the starboard quarter. Lieutenant Fields followed the tracers as they ripped toward the first aircraft, which he thought looked “like a pretty toy” until a descending bomb changed his opinion: “Unfair, why are they using such big ones?!” As the bomb came down, Fields, who thought it was heading toward him, shoved the man next to him into the lookout station and followed behind. “There was a thump and a blast,” he said.38

  Tolman had belatedly ordered top speed and left full rudder to evade the aircraft, but the bomb crashed amidships on the port side in the forward engine room. Men aboard Nicholas saw a bomb blow out the port side of the ship, a burst of flame engulf De Haven’s midsection, and steam coming from below.

  “All hell broke loose at that point,” said Ensign Bernard W. Frese Jr., stationed in De Haven’s fireroom. A jolt hurled the man to his right, Fire Controlman 3/c Charles N. Biegel, straight into the air, flipped apparatus onto another sailor, and threw Frese into the fire control switchboard, pinning his legs under overturned electronic equipment. “Everything turned pitch black with an acrid smell. All I could hear was a tinkling sound like the glass icicles on the Christmas trees used to make.”39

  Torpedoman 3/c Leonard Elam had been scraping paint on the deck when the alarm came, and he rushed to his station at the torpedo director on the starboard side of the bridge. When the first bomb struck, it demolished the area he had only moments before been scraping.

  In rapid succession a second and then a third bomb struck the reeling De Haven. The second toppled the forward stack and lifted the five-inch gun director off its foundation, while the third ignited ammunition magazines and covered the ship with thick yellow smoke that billowed three hundred feet into the air. The explosion knocked Elam onto a pile of potatoes, and bounced Lieutenant Fields around as if he were a marble in a cup. He rose to his feet to find that “the ship was a pile of steaming, oil-smeared junk.”40 Hill and Hailey, aboard Nicholas, feared that De Haven had ruptured in half and would soon sink.

  Ensign Williams remained at his fantail 40mm gun, directing his crew, as the Japanese planes neared. Operating at the ship’s end, they felt more exposed to the aircraft swooping down than they would have had their gun stood amidships, and Williams saw that the experience unnerved some of his young sailors. He replaced those most rattled and kept his guns firing until he looked behind him and saw that the bridge area had been demolished. “There was no sign of life forward and the bow was sinking rapidly,” he recalled.41

  Williams remained at his station awaiting orders, but none came. Unwilling to linger any longer, Williams told his men to abandon ship, checked to ensure the depth charges had been set on safety so they would not explode on the way down and maim the men in the water, directed the removal of the wounded into two cork nets flung onto the water, and jumped over the side.

  With time running out before the ship went under, Ensign Frese struggled to free himself in the fireroom. He pushed against the switchboard to free his wedged head from between the switches, and as the room filled with oil gushing from a ruptured fuel tank, he ripped his pants while unsuccessfully trying to slide from beneath the equipment. When the oil and water reached his neck, Frese unzipped his pants and wriggled out.

  “At that point I started praying,” Frese said, for De Haven was about to go down. In the dark he could hear but not see the men near him, but when someone cried, “She’s going down fast!” Frese sloshed through the waist-high water, scrambled onto a deck that “was a shambles of twisted metal,” and jumped overboard.42

  Only Lieutenant Rowan and Quartermaster 2/c Dale W. Beemus survived the destruction of the bridge. A disoriented Rowan sat up to find that his right leg was dislocated at the knee, with the lower half resting on his lap. He felt no pain, thanks to being in shock, but in the acrid air he sensed the ship tilt as if ready to embark on her death plunge. Rowan crawled over debris cluttering the deck to the starboard side and, to protect his leg, dropped headfirst ten feet to the water. Lieutenant Fields almost waited too long but, with the onrushing water swirling two feet away, stepped into the water and swam from the ship to avoid being caught in the suction as she went down.

  Ensign Williams, the senior unwounded officer remaining aboard, made a final check for survivors. Convinced that everyone had gone over the side, and with the rapidly rising water engulfing the deck, he joined his shipmates in the water. Thirty seconds later the ship’s “stern rose sharply and she went down.”43

  Meanwhile, every gun on the Nicholas was repelling its own intruder, with “the red tracers of the 20-millimeters arching up to a converging cone at the nose of the enemy bomber,” as Hailey wrote. Despite the bullets and shells, the plane drew closer, at which point an ensign standing on the bridge with Hailey grabbed a tommy gun and opened fire. Flames danced along the plane’s wings as the pilot first fired his machine guns and then dropped a bomb. “I had a feeling of detachment,” wrote Hailey, “which is not uncommon, others have told me, as I watched it come down. I was sure it was going to hit.” That bomb missed Hailey and the Nicholas, but in the next few minutes eight more aircraft charged the destroyer, “which was twisting and turning at flank speed” to avoid the bombs that exploded ten yards away.

  When the firing stopped, Hailey heard Chief Radio Electrician Hector Constantino “crying like a heart-broken child.” A patriotic sailor who made no attempt to hide his love for his new country, Constantino had come from Greece before World War I and proudly served the United States in that war. Constantino cried when he learned of the Chicago sinking, and he now cried for two shipmates who had just perished, Sonarman 3/c Robert Lee Moir, telephone talker in secondary control, and Gunner’s Mate 2/c Furman Fox, a member of a five-inch gun crew. “It’s no pose with Hector,” one officer told Hailey. “He cries whenever he hears of one of our ships being lost.”

  Hailey surveyed the ship, now bloodied from the body parts lying around one of the deck guns. Turning seaward, he focused his glasses to where he thought De Haven and the accompanying LCTs (Landing Craft, Tank) were. “The little fellows were all right, circling near where a great cloud of black smoke rose up from the sea to a height of hundreds of feet. I could see no ship at the base of the smoke.”

  Hill noticed Hailey’s quizzical look. “Gone,” he told the newsman. “I saw a bomb hit her just forward of the bridge. It must have penetrated to the magazine, for there was a terrific explosion and she broke right in two. I doubt if anyone came off the bridge. The explosion just blew it to pieces.”44

  Hailey’s surprise paled in comparison to the emotions felt by the De Haven men in the water, who watched their ship slip beneath the waves only ten minutes after they had first sighted their attacker. Ensign Frese flipped over on his back to find the ship’s propellers directly above him and the ship ready to embark on her final plunge. “Needless to say,” he recalled, “I set a record doing the backstroke and getting out of the way as the ship sank.”45 To make it easier for his shattered leg, Lieutenant Rowan floated on his back and propped his right leg with his left, hoping his life belt would keep him afloat until help arrived.

  The LCTs rushed over to pick up the exhausted men. Ensign Herbert Solomon, skipper of one of the LCTs,
lowered his vessel’s ramp and stood at the edge, leaning out to sea to drag in man after man as the waves splashed about him. Ensign Frese tried to stand when an LCT retrieved him from the water, but he collapsed in a heap. One of the young sailors aboard the LCT held Frese’s head in his arms, whispering soothing words to calm the officer, while Ensign Williams administered morphine.

  Williams took charge of the De Haven men in Solomon’s LCT, giving morphine from his meager supply only to the most serious cases. There was little Williams could do for the men with burns but keep them comfortable and out of the sweltering midafternoon sun. Along with the other LCTs, Solomon headed toward Lunga Point when Hill brought Nicholas alongside to retrieve the rest of the survivors. There were few for them to rescue, for as Hailey described, “it was live or die on the De Haven that day.”

  Chief Machinist’s Mate R. C. Andrews, a muscular man in his forties with a thick black mustache, climbed aboard Nicholas with one finger hanging by only a thin piece of skin. “Here, son, cut this off,” Andrews barked to a Nicholas sailor. When the seaman replied that their doctor might be able to save it, Andrews replied, “Nope, she’s too far gone,” cut the piece of skin himself, and tossed the finger over the side.46

  The doctor aboard Nicholas treated the seriously wounded. After examining Ensign Frese, he covered the body with a blanket and erroneously declared Frese dead. Frese heard the words and nudged the blanket from his head enough for a sailor near him to alert the doctor.

  Lieutenant Rowan, who now had the dubious distinction of twice in five months having been aboard ships that sank, told Williams that “he is getting quite tired of the water around Savo Island.”47 The only moment he later wished to remember was when Lieutenant Commander Robert Montgomery, the famed Hollywood film star now serving as Briscoe’s communications officer, came over and asked if he could do anything for Rowan.

  Back on Guadalcanal, for the first time the survivors realized the extent of the losses. Shipmates they had known since commissioning were dead or missing. Correspondent Hailey recalled Tolman’s invitation to join De Haven and was thankful that a snap decision had placed him aboard Nicholas instead. Had he boarded De Haven, he would have been on the bridge with Tolman and the other men who perished at that spot.

  Lieutenant Rowan lay in a field bed underneath a palm tree for two days, each night praying that neither the Japanese bombers attacking Henderson nor the shrapnel plunging to earth from American antiaircraft guns would kill him. On February 3 a plane took him and the other seriously wounded men to Espiritu Santo.

  While De Haven’s survivors were still being rescued, reports flooded in of a powerful Japanese cruiser-destroyer force barreling southward down the Slot. Halsey ordered Briscoe’s destroyers, joined by a handful of PT boats, to halt rescue efforts and steam north to check the enemy. “There was no time to mourn the dead or comfort the living,” Hailey wrote. “The squadron and half a dozen PT boats were the only force available to stop them. We had to be about it.”

  Crew from the Nicholas placed the De Haven wounded into Higgins boats and turned north. As they left, De Haven men cheered the Nicholas, telling its crew to get in a few licks on their behalf. Gunner’s Mate 3/c Lewis Samuels, a Nicholas sailor whose hand had been shattered during the fighting and had to be left behind with the De Haven survivors, shouted to his shipmates as Nicholas pulled away, “Keep her floating, you guys.” Samuels continued to wave with his good hand until his destroyer steamed out of sight.

  “It was an emotionally and physically exhausted crew that took the Nicholas out west of Savo that night,” wrote Hailey. “Few of them had had any sleep for forty-eight hours, since we had been out on patrol all the previous night. They had seen their shipmates killed and wounded and a sister ship destroyed in exactly six minutes. The deck was still slippery with blood in places. There had been no time to clean up. Now they were going out to intercept the Tokyo Express. Three ships against twenty. All other American ships in the area—freighters, tenders, corvettes, and the escorts—had been ordered to leave.”48

  Briscoe in Fletcher led the squadron north, followed by Nicholas and Radford. Briscoe figured his best chance at stopping the superior enemy force was to launch a surprise torpedo attack. When at midnight PT boats spotted the Japanese near Savo Island, they immediately attacked, losing two of their craft to enemy gunfire while sinking a Japanese destroyer with their torpedoes. Dive-bombers from Guadalcanal joined in, treating Hailey to a spectacle as gunfire, explosions, and flares lit the nighttime sky.

  Instead of that night’s version of the Tokyo Express, the Japanese force arrived to complete the Guadalcanal evacuation. American aircraft and mines sank a few more destroyers, but the rest boarded the final land troops and raced away before Briscoe could advance close enough to launch torpedoes. Briscoe pursued up the Slot but turned back before he came within range of enemy air cover.

  Admiral Ainsworth recognized what he had asked of O’Bannon, Fletcher, and their destroyer companions. “Briscoe’s little force really had a grim time of it,” Ainsworth concluded in his report, “but these operations marked the first time we had been able to keep a surface force in the area. With the complete defeat of the Japs on Guadalcanal in early February we were now definitely on the offensive in the Solomons.”49

  If MacDonald on O’Bannon or Hill on Nicholas thought they had been busy, the remainder of the year proved that they had seen nothing yet.

  CHAPTER 6

  STRUGGLE FOR THE SLOT

  Now that the Japanese had withdrawn from Guadalcanal, Halsey focused on the central and northern Solomons. The victory terminated the opening phase of the war, but hard combat, on land and at sea, lay ahead to sweep the enemy out of the Solomons for good.

  In the months since he had been named South Pacific commander, by necessity Halsey had to rely on defensive tactics until he gained a lodgment on Guadalcanal and until additional ships and troops filtered into the region. The first two months of 1943 had given him the opportunity to stage limited offensive strikes with the Cactus Striking Force, and as March arrived he intended to expand from those initial forays. Offensive operations, small at first, began replacing his defensive tactics. His first step was to seize the Russell Islands, fifty-five miles northwest of Henderson Field, so that he could move his air arm closer to the enemy airfield at Munda on New Georgia.

  Halsey’s second step was to reorganize his burgeoning destroyer force into a squadron. On March 10, for the first time in the war, O’Bannon and her companion destroyers appeared on the roster of the Pacific Fleet as Destroyer Squadron 21 (Desron 21), under Captain Francis X. McInerney, based initially at Espiritu Santo. McInerney’s orders included not merely halting Japanese surface forces cutting southward from Rabaul but also staging offensive thrusts to the north. No longer handcuffed to Guadalcanal waters, Halsey’s destroyers would be free to strike deeper into Japanese waters and hit enemy bases and airfields.

  In McInerney, Halsey chose wisely. Born in 1899, the native of Cheyenne, Wyoming, graduated from the Naval Academy in 1921. After serving aboard four vessels, two of which were destroyers, McInerney earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School in 1935. Skipper of a destroyer at the time of Pearl Harbor, McInerney participated in strikes in the Solomons and Coral Sea before being handed his new assignment. His years of experience with destroyers made him a good fit to lead the new squadron.

  His squadron at first comprised two divisions of four destroyers each, with his flagship attached as a fifth destroyer to one. In Destroyer Division 41 McInerney’s flagship Nicholas operated with O’Bannon, Chevalier, Strong, and Taylor, while Fletcher, Radford, Jenkins, and La Vallette constituted Destroyer Division 42. McInerney possessed a good mixture of experienced ships in the original three destroyers, as well as more recent arrivals, the last being Chevalier the month before. He split the original three destroyers so that at least one battle-tested ship and crew anchored each division to lend guidance and stability. When
at sea, he operated from his flagship, which was most often Nicholas, where he commanded the squadron while the skipper ran the ship.

  In plying the Slot, a watery vein sixty miles across at its widest that separated the two Solomon island arms leading to Bougainville in the extreme northwest, McInerney faced an imposing task. He often ventured beyond the range of American airpower into waters where he could be attacked by aircraft operating from a string of airfields peppering islands from Bougainville in the northern Solomons all the way south to Munda.

  Day after day the crews lived and worked with their shipmates, inevitably creating a special bond with them, but over the course of the next few months, in so freely intermingling with the crews of the other squadron ships, they also developed a sense of pride in the unit. They embarked on nightly runs into the Slot together, docked in Purvis Bay or Espiritu Santo at the same time, drank beer and gambled and fought with those sailors. Their first loyalty would always be to their ship and shipmates, but a second link, forged from the pride each felt in belonging to the unit, fashioned the ships into a squadron. They sometimes operated as an entire unit, while at other times they steamed out on missions alone or with one or two other squadron destroyers, just as various platoons in a company received different assignments, but the men enjoyed the recognition they received from being part of Destroyer Squadron 21, a fighting unit that gained a reputation for being a superb squadron. That squadron pride, forged in 1943, lasted through the war’s final day, which saw them leading Halsey’s fleet into Tokyo Bay.

  In a freewheeling style reminiscent of Civil War blockade runners or sixteenth-century English pirates, for much of 1943 McInerney’s destroyers barreled to the north in almost nightly forays, plunging deep into enemy-held waters to stage bombardments, lay minefields, hunt submarines, and counter Japanese actions. After completing their assignments, the destroyers whisked southward to reach the protective umbrella provided by American fighters.