Benefiting from the latest radar and from the development of Wylie’s combat information center to collect and evaluate fresh information, Captain Arleigh A. Burke and Commander Frederick Moosbrugger improved night fighting tactics and handed destroyers the methods they needed to operate independently. Hugging the Kolombangara coastline to cloak the movements of his six destroyers, in the August 6 Battle of Vella Gulf Moosbrugger surprised four Japanese destroyers running a thousand reinforcements into Kolombangara. As Burke had suggested, he split his ships into two columns, launched his torpedoes near midnight, and executed a fast turn to the side, from where he directed a cascade of fire that ripped into the enemy. “The havoc caused the enemy by the torpedo attack was terrific,” reported Moosbrugger later. “The whole area was a great mass of flames and explosions which continued without interruption under the continuous pounding of our forces until all the enemy except a few survivors had perished.”
Within fifteen minutes of commencing the attack, Moosbrugger sank three of the four enemy destroyers, killing nine hundred, while absorbing no casualties. He concluded that “our destroyer doctrine is sound,” claimed that “surprise throws the enemy into utter confusion,” and recommended that destroyers should operate as independent units.32
Halsey disseminated Moosbrugger’s report to every commander. Although Desron 21 skippers were absent from the battle, the outcome vindicated their views. Their hope was that other commanders would emulate Burke and Moosbrugger in future contests.
Emperor Hirohito wished the opposite. He expressed his growing dissatisfaction when military advisers informed him of the deteriorating conditions in the Solomons. “When and where on earth are you ever going to put up a good fight?” he asked his military. “And when are you ever going to fight a decisive battle?” When an army general apologized for the turn of events, Hirohito replied, “Well, this time, after suffering all these defeats, why don’t you study how not to let the Americans keep saying ‘We won! We won!’”33
Captain Thomas P. Ryan, the commander of Destroyer Division 41 and the officer who would soon succeed Captain McInerney as the commodore of Desron 21, incorporated Moosbrugger’s success in the next engagement, the August 18 Battle off Horaniu. A mid-August Marine landing on Vella Lavella returned the squadron to intercept Japanese barges, torpedo boats, and destroyers, including Hara’s Shigure, and prevent them from bringing in more troops to meet the Marine land advance.
Ryan commanded O’Bannon, Nicholas, Taylor, and Chevalier. Hara launched his torpedoes first, and within ten minutes thirty-one Long Lances were speeding toward Ryan. He outmaneuvered each torpedo and ordered his ships to commence fire.
Shells from O’Bannon and her three sister ships straddled Hara’s Shigure, “kicking up pillars of water and spray.” When another barrage a few seconds later bracketed Hara’s ship, and a third barely missed Shigure, sending water into Hara’s face, Hara strained into the darkness for the telltale gun flashes that would divulge the American position. “I realized now that we were confronted with the enemy’s new flashless powder we had all heard rumored about. That, combined with his radar-controlled guns, presented a formidable opposition.”34
While the Japanese screen kept the American destroyers occupied, the barges crept toward shore and successfully landed four hundred troops, although Ryan’s four Desron 21 destroyers sank two sub chasers, two torpedo boats, and one other craft. Both sides claimed victory, but the destroyers, operating as a separate unit, had accounted themselves well.
October handed Desron 21 its next major surface engagement, the Battle of Vella Lavella, when O’Bannon, Chevalier, Taylor, La Vallette, and two other destroyers rushed to the Vella Lavella area to intercept nine enemy destroyers intent on extricating its forces from the island. The American destroyers had just started back to Tulagi from patrolling the Slot throughout the night of October 5–6 when they received orders to return to Vella Lavella. “We were all fairly tired from having been up all night and under the strain that always goes with the anticipation of battle,” wrote MacDonald. He delivered his usual talk over the loudspeaker, cautioning the crew that the ship might soon again be in battle against nine Japanese destroyers. “Nine ships against three destroyers,” said Yeoman Roupe of the Chevalier. “The odds now were more than overwhelming. They were astronomical. If we had any sense, we were the ones to turn tail and run.”35
The odds improved when three of the Japanese destroyers veered toward shore, leaving six destroyers, including Hara’s Shigure, to meet the Americans. When the two forces pulled within seven thousand yards of each other, O’Bannon and Chevalier, joined by Selfridge, launched thirteen torpedoes, one of which tore into a Japanese destroyer, and followed half a minute later with salvos from the five-inchers.
The Japanese responded by planting a torpedo into Chevalier’s port bow opposite an ammunition magazine. The torpedo ripped off the bow back to the bridge, hurled crew into air, and stunned the skipper, Lieutenant Commander George R. Wilson.
“I looked around to find that the pilothouse was a mass of wreckage,” said Yeoman Roupe. “The radio had been blasted off the bulkhead and lay on the deck in twisted ruins. The binnacle was smashed. The navigator’s desk hung grotesquely by a single remaining shred of steel. A 20mm gun mount had crashed through the forward bulkhead. Pieces of glass and other unrecognizable debris covered the deck.” Roupe left the bridge to look over the side. “The whole forward structure of the ship was gone, clear back to the bridge. Dark whirlpools of water gurgled along the crumpled steel plates below. The bridge itself hung precariously over the water.”36
The damaged bow caused Chevalier to swerve out of control and into a minor collision with the next ship in line, MacDonald’s O’Bannon, which was partially blinded by her own gunfire smoke. Machinist’s Mate 1/c Burt Gorsline of Chevalier had just started toward the depth charges when “something made me turn. I saw the USS O’Bannon crash head on into our starboard side at the 20mm mounts, just where I had been. She knocked those guns and shield up against the after deckhouse and on top of the after engine room’s forward escape hatch on the main deck, jamming it shut. Her overhanging bow wiped out the K-guns on the starboard side as we slid past her.”37
With a damaged ship wedged into Chevalier, MacDonald expected the Japanese to finish what they had begun, either with a Long Lance or with bombs dropped by aircraft that “were just buzzing around us like mad. Why they didn’t drop bombs right down our stack, I have no idea.”38
When MacDonald backed O’Bannon off, the action created a whirlpool that sucked some of the men into the water. MacDonald attempted to bring O’Bannon alongside once he saw men abandoning Chevalier, but Chevalier’s warped bow made that operation too risky. MacDonald lowered two of his boats to bring wounded across while uninjured crew jumped over the side and swam to the boats or to O’Bannon itself.
Lieutenant Gowen leaped over the port side of Chevalier and reached a life raft. When O’Bannon picked him up, he received an unexpected greeting from one of the O’Bannon crew with whom Gowen had swapped movies. O’Bannon’s engineer had asked him for a movie featuring Veronica Lake, a popular Hollywood actress and pinup favorite, and when O’Bannon rescued Gowen, “I climbed the Jacob’s ladder covered with oil and soaked to the skin, glad to be still alive, and the engineer came running up to me and asked, ‘Did you bring the Veronica Lake movie?’”39
After he had picked up Chevalier survivors, MacDonald hugged the coast to keep O’Bannon out of open water and to make his ship a less detectable target for Japanese aircraft. He relied on guts and instinct to guide him by uncharted, submerged reefs and navigate unused channels to reach Tulagi, damaged but whole.
MacDonald’s efforts saved 250 of the 301 men aboard Chevalier. While MacDonald left with his damaged O’Bannon, La Vallette remained behind to search for survivors, after which Commander Taylor fired a torpedo into Chevalier’s aft magazines and sank her.
Even though Japan claimed a victory after
sinking Chevalier, her navy could ill afford to lose even the one destroyer sunk by Desron 21’s torpedoes. The Japanese were becoming more hard-pressed to find substitutes, which forced them to be more selective in deciding when to send out the fleet.
This battle ended the naval fighting in the Central Solomons and concluded Desron 21’s labors in those islands. During the destroyers’ tenure, Halsey had forced a Japanese retreat to Bougainville, the northernmost island in the Solomons, and had advanced 250 miles up the chain.
With the final surface action, naval headquarters in Tokyo ordered Japanese forces to withdraw to Bougainville. In the face of an already superior and constantly enlarging US military, the Japanese could only delay the inevitable. In late December, after failing to halt an American landing at Bougainville and after losing control of the waters between New Guinea and New Britain, the Japanese navy withdrew completely from the Solomons and, after more than a year of bitter fighting, yielded control of the South Pacific to Halsey.
“Destroyer Squadron Twenty-One Always Will Be Remembered”
Victory in the Solomons proved to be a critical turning point in the Pacific war. In August 1942 the Japanese had controlled those islands, appeared to be on the cusp of invading Australia, and threatened to sever the crucial supply lines leading from the United States to that continent. Through a combination of Army-Marine landings, airpower, and daring naval actions, Halsey flipped the scenario on its head. Vital to that success was the role of MacDonald’s O’Bannon and the other destroyers of Desron 21. Lacking the glamour of the sleek aircraft carriers or the power of the imposing battleships, the destroyers darted up the Slot and sliced through Solomons channels, keeping the enemy off guard and its own crews on station.
“Like the infantry, the destroyer crews fight a dogged, determined, unromantic war,” wrote Commander W. W. Hollister of the Navy Department in June 1944, “and since steady hard cruising with the constant threat of having to swap punches with adversaries three and four times their size is the rule rather than the exception the war diary of a destroyer is seldom monotonous.”40
A scan of their war diaries would yield ample evidence of Hollister’s assertion. In 1943 alone, Desron 21 destroyers engaged in more than one hundred major actions and countless minor ones, including bombardments, mining operations, antiaircraft duels with fighters and dive-bombers, submarine hunter-killer missions, and major surface engagements. They ranged from the multiple-warship Kula Gulf battles to a handful of vessels mining Blackett Strait, from bombardments at Vila-Stanmore to the rumored O’Bannon potato attack against a submarine. Those one hundred actions do not include the innumerable runs Desron 21 destroyers made up the Slot, the escorting of troop transports, the patrolling of harbor entrances to shield anchored ships from enemy submarines, and the other tasks handed to them by Halsey. The intervals between the actions offered little respite, as ship maintenance and resupply swiped additional hours from their already overtaxed schedules.
In recognition of their contributions, in January 1944 Admiral Nimitz paid homage to the Desron 21 crews who had helped force the Japanese from the Solomons. He said their record was “in a sense the record of one entire phase of the Pacific war.” Commissioned fewer than eighteen months earlier, the ships and their inexperienced crews had no sooner arrived in the South Pacific than they went toe-to-toe with Japanese warships in November, and the crews “did not get much rest after that.”
In January, continued Nimitz, the destroyers had bombarded Munda and Vila-Stanmore plantation. In February the destroyers had been “busy helping derail the ‘Tokyo Express,’ which was trying desperately to reinforce Guadalcanal,” and in March they had returned for more bombardments of Munda and Kolombangara. In between, they had fended off air attacks, escorted ships, and nightly plied the Solomons for signs of enemy activity.
Nimitz mentioned hunter-killer missions in February, air attacks in April, and mining operations in May. He added that the record of the destroyers through June 1943 alone “would have been an impressive one,” but it was only enhanced when they again slugged it out with Japanese cruisers and destroyers in Kula Gulf and rescued hundreds of Helena survivors in a daring operation.
Nimitz ended his praise with stirring words: “With little time to rest or to overhaul, and with a great variety of missions to accomplish, our destroyers, generally, have performed magnificently, and with little of the publicity which has accompanied the exploits of other units of the Naval Service. Our destroyers have truly been the silent part of our service, but their exploits and their capabilities are well known to those who have to know.”41
They were so well known, in fact, that three of the ships—O’Bannon, Nicholas, and Radford—received Presidential Unit Citations, awards reserved for only those crews who excelled as a unit. Nicholas and Radford earned theirs for their roles in rescuing Helena survivors, while the Navy honored O’Bannon for their entire body of work performed by the officers and crew from September 1942 through October 1943.
After operating in the Solomons for more than a year, the destroyers of Desron 21 finally enjoyed a breather at the end of 1943. Nicholas, Fletcher, Radford, Jenkins, Taylor, and La Vallette participated in the massive November 1943 Central Pacific landings in the Gilbert Islands, where they covered the Marine landings at what became known as “Bloody Tarawa” and where Radford was credited with sinking a submarine, and then continued as a unit to the United States for a much-deserved respite from the war.
Damaged during the October surface engagement, O’Bannon left Espiritu Santo in November on her way to the Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco, California. MacDonald stepped to the loudspeaker to address his men. This time, however, he did not prepare them for another fight or mission. “I have just received word that we are to proceed, as soon as temporary repairs have been made, to the West Coast,” MacDonald told his crew.
After a year of continuous action, he and the ship were returning to the United States, where the destroyer would be overhauled and the men could visit loved ones. They boasted an enviable record since arriving in the Solomons in September 1942, but almost as remarkable was that she had accomplished her tasks without losing a single member of the crew, a record that earned her the appellation “Lucky O.” When it came time to leave the South Pacific, she departed not because of anything the Japanese had done, but because of a collision that occurred when she rushed to the aid of a squadron mate in distress. As MacDonald took O’Bannon out of Tulagi on her way home, one of the crew, accustomed to steaming in the opposite direction toward the enemy, remarked to an officer, “Don’t seem right not meeting any Japs tonight, Mr. Pfeifer.”42
The ships of Desron 21 had earned their break. O’Bannon, Nicholas, and Fletcher, plus the other seven destroyers that constituted first the Cactus Striking Force and then Desron 21, helped reverse the nation’s military fortunes with their stirring actions in the Solomons. Operating at a time when the country’s battleships had yet to recover from the debacle at Pearl Harbor and before the vaunted fast carrier task forces had been organized, the ten destroyers stepped in, sharing the risks with similar vessels until American shipyards could rebuild the fleet with new battleships, cruisers, and especially the fast carriers that dominated the war’s second half. In the crucial moments of late 1942 and throughout 1943, when some at home wondered if the war could be lost, O’Bannon and the destroyer crews provided the answer, holding a tenuous line in the South Pacific to give the nation and its military the time they needed to rebound. The majestic aircraft carriers and the sleek cruisers were the glory ships of the Pacific war’s latter half, but Desron 21 and other destroyers made their work possible by thwarting the Japanese in the war’s initial half.
The squadron lost three ships, emerging from this period bruised and battered but proud. Desron 21 had manned the South Pacific front lines for Halsey, in the process checking the Japanese advance toward Australia as well as reversing the fortunes of war in that vital area.
Admiral Halsey had been scraping the bottom of the military barrel in those trying days in the Solomons, but when he most needed an antidote to the Japanese poison, and when the country’s morale begged for good news from the Pacific, Desron 21 stepped in. As the squadron departed the South Pacific, the veteran destroyerman acknowledged his debt to those crews.
“On your detachment from the South Pacific Fighting Forces I wish you Godspeed,” Halsey wrote. “Your habit of getting into winning scraps with the Japs made history. Destroyer Squadron Twenty-One always will be remembered when Cactus, Munda, Kula, Vella, and ‘the Slot’ are mentioned. You may be sure I will welcome you back with open arms anytime, any ocean.”43
A voyage back to the United States handed the crews a chance to recharge their batteries and prepare for an inevitable return to action. They would need that pause, as a frightening form of warfare involving a single enemy pilot in a single airplane awaited.
PART III
DESRON 21 SWEEPS TO VICTORY
CHAPTER 8
CLIMBING THE NEW GUINEA LADDER
Few in the Navy, officers and enlisted alike, had ever met a man like Lieutenant Dow H. “Doc” Ransom Jr. The ship’s doctor aboard La Vallette, Ransom displayed amazing intellect at an early age, breezing through high school classes on his way to being accepted into Stanford University’s premed program at age sixteen. It seemed natural that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, a highly esteemed physician in Madeira, California, who made house calls at all hours in the California countryside. His father loved his occupation and made a comfortable living with it, but what most appealed to the younger Ransom was that his dad helped people. That powerful aspect was hard to ignore.
Ransom was more than the sum of his talents in the classroom, however. He loved sports, and the good-looking young man was popular with male and female students alike. His piercing brown eyes transfixed classmates, especially girls, and his broad smile and appealing laugh made people gravitate toward him. He certainly had reason to boast, but what most attracted others, in and out of the Navy, was that, despite his many attributes, he avoided praise and attention. He served in a noble profession, to be sure, but once in the Navy he felt that his duties were no more noteworthy than those of the seaman scrubbing the decks or the machinist’s mate laboring below. He insisted that everyone call him “Doc” rather than the more formal “Dr. Ransom,” whether he was in the wardroom helping his patients or in an officers’ club sharing a drink with comrades. His medical skills, concern for the men under his care, and affability led one sailor to write that “‘Doc’ Ransom was a giant amongst men.”1
Tin Can Titans Page 21
