Down to the Sea
Page 40
Sebec
Sellers, William I.
Sendai
Severn
Shalkowski, Louis
sharks
Sharp, George H.
Shaw; and
Sherman, Frederick C.
shipbuilding
Shiratsuyu
Shupper, Burton H.
Sibuyan Sea, Battle of
Slaughter, Layton
Small, Norman
Smith, Ralph C.
Solomon Islands
sonar; and
Spanish-American War
speeds, on naval ships; and
Spence
abandon-ship drill
Battle of Cape St. George
Battle of Empress Augusta Bay; and
Bismarcks operations
capsized
commissioning of; and
crew muster roll for
fuel
launch of
overhaul of
survivors; and
typhoon and
Spence, Louis
Spence, Robert T.
Stahlberg, Ernest
Stanley
Stanton
Stassen, Harold E.
Stealey, Thomas A., Jr.
Stephen Potter
Stockham
storms See also typhoon (1944)
Story, James T.
Strait of Juan de Fuca
Strand, Robert
Strauss, Maury M.
submarines; and
Japanese; and; and; and
Sumner
Sumner-class destroyers
Sundin, Lawrence D.
Surdam, Robert M. “Dusty”
urigao Strait, Battle of
Swearer; and
Tabberer; and
christening of
mascot
Navy Unit Commendation awarded to
typhoon and search for survivors; and; and
Tabberer, Charles Arthur; and
Tarawa invasion; and
Task Force 38
Tassafaronga, Battle of
Taussig
Thatcher
Thompson, Frank
Thurber, Harry R.
Time magazine
Tokyo
Tokyo Rose
Toland, E. M.
Tonga
Torkildson, Keith
torpedo boats
torpedo juice; and
torpedoes
Traceski, Edward F.
Trippe
Truk
Tucker, Ralph E.
Turner, Claude
typhoon (1944)
casualties
court of inquiry investigation and findings
Hull in
Kosco’s forecast on
Monaghan in
Spence in
survivors; and; and; and
Tabberer and search for survivors; and; and
typhoon (1945)
Ulithi
U.S. Air Force; and; and in.
U.S. Army
Seventh Infantry Division
U.S. Army Air Corps
weathermen; and
U.S. Naval Academy; and
U.S. Naval Reserve Midshipman School
U.S. Naval War College; and
U.S. Navy; and at-sea collisions
Attu and Kiska invasions
Battle of Cape St. George
Battle of Empress Augusta Bay; and
Battle of Komandorski Islands; and
Battle of the Philippine Sea
court of inquiry on 1944 typhoon
Guadalcanal campaign; and; and; and
Guam invasion
Leyte invasion; and; and
Little Beavers
Luzon invasion; and
Marshall Islands invasion
Mindoro invasion
nighttime tactics; and
U.S. Navy (continued) in 1944 typhoon, see typhoon (1944) in 1945 typhoon
Pearl Harbor attack; and
Tawara invasion; and
Wildcats, F4F fighters
See also specific ships and officers; typhoon (1944); U.S. Navy
Utah
Valverde, John
Vaughan, Archie L.
Wake Island; and
Ward; and
War of 1812
Warrington
Washington
Wasp
Watkins, C. Donald
WAVES, 100
weather forecasting, military; and; and; and
Weaver, William D.
Webb, Carl
Wedderburn
Welles
Wendt, Waldemar F.
West Virginia
Wilson
Wiltsie, Irving D.
Wohlleb, Charles
Wordan
World’s Fair (1939)
World War I
World War II See also Pacific War; specific battles
Wrigley chewing gum; and
Wyoming
Yamamoto, Isoroku
Yamato
Yap
Yarnall
Yorktown
Yosemite
Yugiri
Zasadil, Ramon
Zero fighters; and
Zimny, Stanley M.
About the Author
BRUCE HENDERSON is the author or coauthor of more than twenty nonfiction books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller And the Sea Will Tell, which was made into a highly rated network miniseries, and True North, about the discovery of the North Pole. He served as a U.S. Seventh Fleet weatherman aboard an aircraft carrier in the Vietnam War, during which his ship rode out a typhoon in the South China Sea. Henderson, who teaches writing at Stanford University, has four children and lives in Menlo Park, California, with his wife, Laura Jason.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Credits
Jacket design by Nick Bilardello.f
Jacket photograph of stormy sea by Allan Davey/Masterfile;
American flag by Garry Black/Masterfile; USS Hull, U.S. Navy
Copyright
DOWN TO THE SEA. Copyright © 2007 by Bruce Henderson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061866531
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* All ship speeds are given in knots, a nautical unit of speed; one knot equals approximately 1.16 miles per hour.
* Five inches refers to the width of the barrel; 5-inc
h guns were the largest weapons on World War II destroyers. U.S. cruisers were armed with 8-inch guns, older battleships with 14-inch guns, and newer ones with 16-inch guns. The largest ship guns on Japan’s mighty Yamato-class battleships were 18-inch guns. The bigger the gun, the heavier the projectile it can fire, the longer the range, and the greater the destruction upon impact. A bigger ship, therefore, could disable or sink a smaller surface ship in battle before the latter came in range to fire its guns.
* On December 7, 1944, three years to the day after firing the opening salvo of World War II, Ward was taking part in the invasion of Leyte when attacked by several Japanese planes, one of which made a suicide dive into the old destroyer. When the resulting fires could not be controlled, Ward’s crew abandoned ship. To prevent Ward from falling into enemy hands, she was ordered sunk. Carrying out the task was the destroyer O’Brien (DD-725), whose skipper, William W. Outerbridge, watched from the bridge as O’Brien’s guns sank his first sea command.
* Owing to “unexplained and almost incredible laxness,” the gate to the antitorpedo net at the entrance to Pearl Harbor, which had been opened at 4:58 A.M. for the entry of two minesweepers, was not closed until 8:40 A.M.—in spite of Ward’s report two hours earlier of attacking an intruding submarine near the harbor entrance. None of the five two-man Japanese midget submarines—launched by full-size submarines a few miles off Pearl Harbor—assigned to sneak into the harbor and sink ships succeeded in their mission. All were lost or captured, three of them without firing a torpedo. One small sub beached on Oahu, and a surviving crewman was taken prisoner.
* Recruit training in the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard is called boot camp. In the Army and present-day Air Force, it is known as basic training.
* The U.S. Navy soon discovered it had devoted insufficient practice to nighttime tactics. In contrast, the Japanese practiced night actions “on a scale unheard of in other navies,” most of which avoided night warfare at all costs. As a result, the initial nighttime engagements of the war favored the Japanese, as in the opening months of the Guadalcanal campaign in 1942. By day, the U.S. Navy controlled the seas around Guadalcanal. By night, the waters were controlled by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which when it came to night fighting was “still a couple of semesters ahead of the U.S. Navy.” It took the U.S. Navy time to disseminate the necessary training and equipment and to learn how to fight effectively at night.
* Approximately forty antiaircraft shells from U.S. guns fell on Honolulu during the attack, including one that landed on the porch of the governor’s mansion. Rather than explode in the air among enemy planes, the shells detonated on impact, with tragic consequences in some cases.
* Tom Stealey never learned the fate of his fellow civilian workers who boarded the ship on December 5, 1941, for Wake Island, one of the loneliest atolls in the Pacific, some 2,300 miles west of Honolulu. The Japanese bombed Wake on the same day as Pearl Harbor and, in spite of a heroic stand by Wake’s defenders, captured the island two weeks later. In addition to 470 military personnel, 1,146 civilian workers at Wake became prisoners of the Japanese. The Wake POWs were so brutally treated—98 civilian workers were killed in one mass execution in 1943—that after the war the Japanese Army garrison commander was convicted of war crimes and executed.
* Shaw survived to fight another day. After temporary repairs were made at Pearl Harbor, the destroyer sailed to San Francisco, where the work—including installing a new bow—was completed. Shaw returned to service with the Pacific Fleet in fall 1942. The destroyer saw extensive action during the war, earning eleven battle stars.
† Nearly twice as many Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor as died in the first twenty-four hours of D-Day following the Normandy invasion, during which 1,465 U.S. servicemen were killed.
* Ranking thirteenth in the class of 1904 was Husband E. Kimmel, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Thereafter, Kimmel was immediately relieved of his command (replaced by Chester Nimitz) and placed on the retired list in March 1942. Halsey later said although he knew the disaster would be formally investigated, he never would have “guessed that the blame would fall on Kimmel” because his Annapolis classmate did not deserve “any part of it.”
* Bath’s wartime record from keel laying to launching of a destroyer was 124 days.
* In all, Bath Iron Works built 31 Fletcher-class destroyers, more than any other shipyard. A total of 175 ships of the Fletcher class—“the heart and soul of the small-ship Navy”—were commissioned by the Navy between 1942 and 1945, forming the core of the World War II destroyer force. Twenty-five Fletcher-class destroyers were lost or damaged beyond repair in the war; 44 earned ten or more battle stars; 19 were awarded Navy Unit Commendations, and 16 received Presidential Unit Citations.
* Thwarted in their supply mission, the Japanese returned to Paramushiro. Their commander—unaware of Salt Lake City’s predicament—broke off the attack because his ships were running low on ammunition and fuel, and also for fear of being attacked by U.S. land-based aircraft. The Americans fought a “brilliant retiring action against heavy odds,” according to naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and Komandorski “should make a proud name in American naval history.” The Japanese made no further attempts to supply their Aleutian bases by surface ships.
* For six months Guadalcanal was bitterly contested by naval, air, and ground forces of the United States and Japan. There were numerous pitched battles in the jungle interior of the 2,510-square-mile island, as well as six major naval engagements fought in the surrounding waters, which became the ocean graveyard for so many ships that American sailors dubbed the region Ironbottom Sound.
* Radar, an acronym for “radio detection and ranging,” was developed independently in the United States, England, France, and Germany during the 1930s. The foundation for this discovery was half a century of radio development, plus early suggestions that because radio waves are known to be reflected, they could be used to detect obstacles in fog or darkness. World War II led to fast-track research to find better resolution and more portability.
* In the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, hand salutes are traditionally given only when a cover (hat) is worn, while the U.S. Army gives salutes both covered and uncovered. In wartime on many smaller ships where officers and enlisted men were constantly passing each other in tight spaces, saluting was not required.
* Sonar, an acronym for “sound navigation and ranging,” uses sound propagation under water to detect submerged submarines as well as to navigate around sunken obstructions. Although developed by the British in 1912 and improved during World War I, sonar was not put into fleet-wide service by the U.S. Navy until World War II.
* The Farragut-class destroyer Worden (DD-352), Hull and Monaghan’s sister ship, had been lost in January 1943 due to the same impediments. Leaving Dutch Harbor, Worden struck a submerged rock, tearing a huge gash in her hull. Floundering in heavy surf, the vessel was pounded against the rocks until her seams split open. When the flooding could not be stopped, the crew abandoned ship; all but fourteen were rescued by nearby ships.
† The Japanese submarine engaged by Monaghan was the I-7, a 2,500-ton long-range fleet submarine with a crew of 100 that could transport another 100 combat troops and a Yokosuka E14Y seaplane for reconnaissance flights. Eighteen months earlier, the I-7 had participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
* A ship’s commissioning is a ceremony where the officers and crew formally take charge of a vessel on behalf of the Navy. It differs from a launching and christening ceremony in that the new warship is deemed fully operational and ready for service. By long tradition, members of a new ship’s first crew are called plank owners. In the days of wooden ships, plank owners upon transfer or retirement were awarded a piece of wood from the ship.
* In addition to Spence, the other seven ships—all Fletcher-class destroyers—of Arleigh Burke’s renowned Little Beavers squadron were Stanly (DD-478), Converse (DD-50
9), Foote (DD-511), Thatcher (DD-514), Charles F. Ausburne (DD-570), Claxton (DD-571), and Dyson (DD-572).
* After major repairs in San Pedro, California, Foote returned to the war in time for the invasion of Leyte in late 1944, and saw action at Okinawa six months later. The destroyer received four battle stars for World War II service.
* Rear Admiral Sentaro Omori, in charge of the Japanese forces in the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay, was relieved of his command upon his return to Rabaul, so displeased were his superiors with his failure to get at the American transports or otherwise disrupt the landings. U.S. Navy Rear Admiral A. Stanton Merrill’s victory was credited to his releasing Burke’s destroyers to fulfill a primary offensive function as well as the task force’s “swift continuous turns to avoid enemy torpedoes” while “pouring out continuous rapid fire”—tactics characterized by naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison as “masterpieces of maneuver.”
* Admiral Halsey was not present at his New Caledonia headquarters on November 24, 1943, as he was in Brisbane, Australia, for one of his periodic conferences with General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific Area. Standing in for Halsey at New Caledonia was his operations officer, Captain Harry R. Thurber.
* Onami and Makinami went down with all hands and a large complement of military personnel from Buka, other than a few who managed to reach shore on rafts. After the battle, Japanese submarines rescued from the water 289 survivors from Yugiri, which carried a crew of 197 as well as 300 soldiers being transported on her deck.