Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  That night MacDonald told the master-at-arms to confine the pair in the paint locker. After one night inside, “they came up on the bridge practically on their hands and knees” and begged to return to their posts. MacDonald agreed, and the pair turned into reliable crewmen. “It just took this type of treatment to get them over what had happened in the past” and divert their attention from the dangers and drudgery of the Slot.19

  In a strange quirk, the superstitious among the crew supported MacDonald’s handling of the incident, for the last thing they wanted was for more men to be transferred off O’Bannon. The ship and crew had served in the Solomons since the previous September without sustaining any deaths, and if MacDonald too greatly altered the ship’s chemistry by subtracting clusters of men from the roster, the departing sailors might take the ship’s good luck with them.

  Some turned to their faith as the trips into the Slot piled up. Catholic crew wore scapulars about their necks or placed medals and rosaries in their pockets. After Chevalier returned to Tulagi from a run up the Slot, the crew carried shells and powder cans from an ammunition barge to the handling rooms. Near their ship’s bow stood a Catholic chaplain giving each man a communion wafer as he walked by. “I guess he didn’t think we needed to go to confession after being up the Slot,” said engineering officer Lieutenant George Gowen, “and he didn’t ask us if we were Protestant, Jewish Hebrew, Muslim, Catholic or whatever—we were all one faith going into battle.” Religion helped the men deal with the pressures of daily operating in the Slot, but as MacDonald wrote, “still it was tough, even with humor and religion. It was tough to be out there until you were dead.”20

  Despite the handful he had to transfer, MacDonald—like his fellow Desron 21 skippers—found most men capable and conscientious, even after weeks at their posts. In that way they reminded him of those London citizens who withstood the German storm. He felt certain his men would now do the same.

  “These guys were so loyal they were dying on their feet,” wrote MacDonald. “They were getting so tired, some of them, really, because it was hot up there. We were pretty close to the equator and we had no awnings, no rugs. It was pretty hard even to rest. People lost weight. They were tired, but, boy, they certainly went to their stations and carried on beautifully when they were called upon.”21

  Ensign Warren H. Gabelman aboard Nicholas provided another explanation: “The above experiences would suggest that we lived a hectic life. We did. But human beings adjust to all kinds of stress. It helped to be young.”22

  It also helped to have a skilled commander. La Vallette men boasted that in Commander Robert L. Taylor they had the finest skipper around. Fair yet demanding, the dashing officer looked the part, with a cigarette dangling from his lips and hat tilted slightly to one side. Some claimed that if Hollywood made a film about destroyers, they would select the good-looking Taylor to play the role of skipper.

  On the other hand, some of the Fletcher crew complained about Commander Robert D. McGinnis, who succeeded Lieutenant Commander Johnson in April 1943. Seaman Chesnutt’s diary for the last eight months of 1943 is sprinkled with references to McGinnis’s inability to run a ship or crew. He cited McGinnis’s failure to grasp military tactics and his ineptness at navigation, which resulted in more than a few minor collisions with other vessels as the captain tried to dock the ship. “The Skipper wasn’t the guy he should be,” Chesnutt wrote on August 28, after McGinnis refused to allow his crew to go aboard a tender the Fletcher was tied to and mingle with that crew. “The other skippers would let us.” Chesnutt blamed McGinnis for lowering the morale of a battle-tested crew. “Showers on only half hour each day and wash face one hour each day—like a prison.”23 On the other hand, some of his shipmates shrugged off McGinnis’s orders as nothing more than a commander exercising his rights.

  The steady MacDonald served as the stabilizer for the squadron skippers. He had gained their admiration first for suffering through the London Blitz and then for his roles in the November naval clash and the many skirmishes that followed. MacDonald rarely lost his composure, but when he did, as in the case of the two sailors who failed to report to their posts, the men readily accepted it. O’Bannon crew compared him to that rare football quarterback who led his team to win after win.

  In between missions, MacDonald would often sit in his chair on the bridge and “while away the hours thinking about theoretical problems of strategy” and crafting solutions to problems he might face in the future.24 Unlike McGinnis, MacDonald handed his best men increased responsibility, told them what he wanted done, and stepped away to allow them to perform their tasks. He relied on his petty officers, figuring they knew the crew better than anyone because they so closely worked with the men during their daily duties. Following the adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, MacDonald was so insistent that his men receive the best food possible under the circumstances that they boasted they were the best-fed crew in the squadron.

  “Dead Japs and Destruction Behind Us”

  Munda Airfield, on New Georgia’s southern coast, standing 180 miles northwest of Henderson Field, and Vila Airfield, twenty miles farther to the northwest on Kolombangara’s southeast side, had long been thorns in Halsey’s side, receiving additional reinforcements and aircraft in spite of American aerial attacks. He turned to naval bombardments, usually involving Desron 21 accompanied by other ships, to neutralize these problems.

  The task required the destroyers to race north of the Russell Islands up the Slot toward New Georgia, continue to Kula Gulf, and enter the dangerously narrow water bounded by Japanese bases on New Georgia on one side and Kolombangara on the other. The ships left Tulagi in the evening in order to arrive at their destination after dark, conducted their bombardments, and rushed out of the gulf for the speedy dash back to Tulagi.

  In the three months following the formation of Desron 21, squadron destroyers bombarded the Vila and Stanmore area in March and May, as well as Vila in early July. Each time he steamed to Kula Gulf, MacDonald expected to encounter opposition, for barreling into Kula Gulf and bombarding Japanese airfields was akin to poking a lion in the eye. He and his crew had avoided harm since the previous October, but their luck, as De Haven proved, could not last forever during a period he called “a pretty hectic life.”25 O’Bannon and the force had to navigate close to land, through mined waters masking uncharted coral reefs, only to turn into a gulf guarded by enemy land artillery on both sides, backed by Japanese aircraft and submarines or warships.

  “This is going to be a very ticklish operation,” wrote Seaman 1/c James Fahey, aboard the cruiser Montpelier during one of the bombardments into the gulf, “and it is going to take place right in the Japs’ living room.”26

  Hailey accompanied Nicholas on many of these bombardment runs. The officers and crew hated full or partially full moons because they silhouetted the ships for enemy aircraft and guns. During bombardments, Hailey felt the ship rock back and forth from the gun recoil. Since the ships lacked flashless powder, “the blinding flash of the four destroyers’ guns blinded those of us who were watching from the bridge.”27 Hailey learned to count the seconds between salvos and close his eyes moments before the guns fired, then reopen them as the shells raced shoreward.

  The ships walked shells up and down the targets, hoping to pockmark the airstrips and make them unusable to the Japanese. Fiery red balls, interspersed with multicolored tracer shells from the different destroyers, arced through the air. Seconds after each muted explosion, sounds rent the sky and rumbles reverberated across the gulf.

  MacDonald and the other skippers were especially wary of any plane that approached without quickly identifying itself. De Haven had been lost, in part, because her skipper withheld fire while he tried to identify the planes. When similar incidents occurred in an early March bombardment, Lieutenant Commander Johnson of Fletcher vented his complaints in his report. “As usual the insatiable curiosity of friendly planes (Black Cats) caused more conce
rn, grey hairs, palpitations of the heart, and pressure-relieving cussing than all the potential and actual Jap counter measures available in the Solomons,” he wrote following the bombardment. He explained that the last thing he wanted was to shoot down a friendly plane, but “if they continue to make unnecessary harassing approaches on this ship within gun range, they will be taken under fire when the slightest doubt exists of their true identity.”

  The pilots’ failure to identify themselves “has gone beyond the stage of ‘note with concern,’” he added, and called their actions “sheer stupidity.” He noted that in the previous six weeks, he had had to deal with twelve separate approaches that were “dangerously threatening in nature,” all by friendly PBYs assigned to work with them and who knew in detail the exact ship locations. Johnson pointed out that while his ship twice opened fire, he kept his guns silent the other ten times, mainly because he did not want to divulge his position; “the decision was made to accept possible bombing instead of opening fire.”

  Most alarming to Johnson, though, was not that his crew might down a friendly plane and kill a pilot but that, if unchecked, the situation would make it impossible for ship commanders to withhold fire on any plane. He stated that he would not accept the “potential destruction of his ship” by delaying out of fear that the aircraft was friendly, “and 325 lives and $8,000,000 of ship will not be sacrificed to save a few friendly planes and crews from their own foolhardiness.” He begged that aviators be acquainted with the “facts of life.”28 McInerney responded by telling his skippers that should a similar circumstance arise in the future, they were to shoot first and query second.

  Desron 21 skippers on the line, as well as Halsey in headquarters, regarded the Kula Gulf bombardments as successes. “What we did,” confided Seaman Fahey to his diary, “was like having some enemy warship go up the Hudson River and bombard New York City and its shipping, then turn around and head for the open sea. We really rubbed it into the Japs, they will never get over this one.” He said they struck the Japanese “like a streak of lightning” and hit “troop barracks, ammunition dumps, radio towers, [and] airfield planes”; “broken bodies were everywhere.” He concluded that with the bombardments, “we were a very happy group of warships as we made our way out of the Gulf with dead Japs and destruction behind us.”29

  Each of the crews earned praise. Johnson stated that on his destroyer, “all hands cooperated to score another victory for the Fletcher combat team,” while Halsey complimented Admiral Ainsworth and said the success of his units, including Desron 21, “has become a habit.”30

  “Why Couldn’t They Stay at Home at Least One Night?”

  Lieutenant Commander William T. Romoser, skipper of the USS Radford, had no doubt that he preferred Pacific action to European duty. For most of the past four years he had been the commanding officer of destroyers that operated in the Atlantic, and while that had provided the thirty-nine-year-old Baltimore native useful experience in managing a crew, he saw little of the combat faced by MacDonald’s O’Bannon. He expected that to change once Radford joined the other South Pacific destroyers in January 1943. First as part of the Cactus Striking Force and subsequently as part of Desron 21, with any luck he would find that sea activity.

  The promising start boosted his hopes. Radford had participated in four separate bombardments, attacked an enemy submarine, and fought off eight air attacks in the brief time since her arrival. Some might hesitate to place such actions in the same category with a major surface engagement, but Romoser and his fellow squadron commanders considered those more frequent actions to be better tests of their crews’ proficiency and courage than those few surface engagements in which a ship might be involved.

  Minelaying missions lacked the glamour of headline-grabbing naval battles, but the endeavor could be one of the most effective and safe ways to sink Japanese ships without endangering American vessels. During those actions, destroyers watched the sea and sky for the enemy while minelayers planted a string of mines across the entrance to a strait or other path in the Kolombangara–Vella Lavella area frequented by the Tokyo Express.

  Typical was the night of May 7–8, when Romoser led three minelayers through Blackett Strait, the southern entrance to Kula Gulf between Kolombangara and New Georgia, to mine one of the main supply routes to Vila and Munda. With Radford on guard, the trio of vessels laid a mine every twelve seconds as they steamed across the strait at fifteen knots. Seventeen minutes later, after planting 250 mines in three rows across the entrance, the four ships departed and returned to Tulagi.

  Later that day four Japanese destroyers, under the command of Captain Masao Tachibana, entered the strait with supplies bound for Vila. Within half an hour three of his ships struck the mines Romoser’s unit had dropped; one sank and the other two were damaged. The next day American aircraft finished the task, sending Tachibana’s two cripples to the bottom and damaging the sole survivor.

  Romoser avoided an air attack during his mission, but enemy aircraft were a constant source of danger in the Slot. “It is a terrible sensation,” wrote Commander MacDonald, “when these planes start coming down on you and you know you are a target.”31 Unlike German bombs, which indiscriminately hit London targets, Japanese fighters and bombers barreled straight toward his ship.

  “I don’t think a day went by that we didn’t have an air raid,” wrote Seaman Chesnutt on Fletcher. “There were air raids all day and nuisance raids at night. They would come over and drop one or two bombs just to keep everyone awake.” During one attack involving the Nicholas, Lieutenant Johnny Everett Jr., the torpedo officer, muttered to correspondent Hailey, “Damn them, why couldn’t they stay at home at least one night?”32

  Antiaircraft crews battled frequent Japanese air strikes between January and June 1943; Nicholas and Fletcher tallied the most, with nine and eight, respectively. Even when Desron 21 destroyers did not have to fend off an actual air attack, multiple alerts sent everyone to quarters, where they remained until the intruders were identified as friendly.

  The largest air strike occurred June 16, when 120 Japanese fighters and bombers struck O’Bannon, Nicholas, and Strong off Guadalcanal. Waves of dive-bombers charged in from all directions while American fighters from Henderson rose to intercept, and near misses sprayed waterspouts that drenched their targets. On Nicholas, Hailey looked up to see “the red-hot tracers from the 5-inch guns and automatic weapons arching out across the star-studded sky in a beautiful if terrible pattern, reminiscent of some of the fireworks displays at the New York World’s Fair.” Suddenly two aircraft swooped down, apparently “guided by our foaming white wakes,” and dropped two bombs that splashed fifty yards astern and two other near hits that doused Hailey.33

  Antiaircraft crews on the three destroyers joined the aviators to send 80 percent of the attackers into the sea. “The boys on the machine guns had a great time shooting the planes at close range and then shifting their fire as the planes got out of range or out of sight,” wrote MacDonald of his gun crews. Their group produced such a heavy volume of fire that MacDonald warned the American fighters to stay clear of the destroyers: “They are putting up a lot of lead.”34

  They would occasionally encounter downed Japanese pilots floating in the water. After the first few enemy pilots rebuffed the Americans’ efforts to rescue them, MacDonald adapted. “So these were the treacherous beasts who had made life almost unbearable?” he wrote. “Well, the men of the O’Bannon would see about that. They did. Their hate grew. They trusted no Jap. And the Japs no longer trust them. They swim away when boats try to pick them up.”35

  Threats in the Slot also came from under the surface. Submarines bothered crews more than did enemy aircraft. Lookouts could spot a fighter or bomber coming at them, but submarines operated out of sight, lurking in the depths to rip their ship apart with their deadly Long Lance torpedoes. Japanese submarines usually operated at night after lying on the bottom during daylight near the Russell Islands, New Georgia, or Santa Isab
el Island, but Desron 21 crews could never dismiss the threat.

  Correspondent Duncan Norton-Taylor, who often accompanied some of those destroyers as they sliced through the Solomons and southward, “was impressed with the terrible efficiency of this rolling, bucking mechanism of destruction.” He added, “We were a spear without a shield. Our thin skin would hardly stop a 50-caliber bullet.”36 He feared what a Long Lance could do to those meager hulls.

  In hunting submarines, Desron 21 destroyers formed a fifteen-hundred-yard line and swept sections of water at fifteen knots. Sonarmen listened to pings, the electrical impulses emitted by the sonar projector attached to the hull below the waterline. If an impulse struck a solid object, it bounced back with an echo, allowing sonarmen to determine the distance to the object by the length of time it took for the ping to return. The bridge calculated the submarine’s course, speed, and depth and planned an attack to bracket the submarine with charges ahead of, behind, and on either side of the boat.

  Upon receiving the order, torpedomen fired depth charges one hundred yards out from each side and dropped others off the fantail. When the charges exploded, deep rumbles shook the destroyer as bubbles and foam broke the surface. If the strike was successful, debris and oil from the submarine soon appeared.

  The tricky maneuver demanded skill aided with luck. “Imagine you are leaning over the roof of a twenty-story building with a fistful of grenades in your hand,” said one destroyer skipper in describing a depth charge attack, “trying to hit an automobile that is cruising around a large parking lot at twenty-five miles an hour.”37