Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  Two years later MacDonald reported to the battleship USS California (BB-44), where he gained additional experience by administering the junior officers’ mess, commanding the Number Four gun turret, and serving as the catapult officer. This lasted until the fall of 1937, when he was assigned to the USS Salinas (AO-19), a Navy oil tanker whose job was to keep the shore-based oil farm tanks full for the Navy’s ships and aircraft. The vessel operated along the East Coast, transporting oil from Houston refineries to a fuel farm.

  Being a young, single naval officer had its benefits, and the handsome MacDonald took full advantage of the many opportunities for fun that a life of travel and glamour offered. He was comfortable in the presence of women, popular at parties, and conversant with dignitaries. “Life was very pleasant then for a naval officer. You were accepted wherever you went, not exactly always respected, but at least accepted. Naval officers were almost looked upon as catches for the daughters, because we had a little bit of stability and also independence.”

  The ship’s base, Charleston, South Carolina, especially came alive during Christmas season. “I seemed to be very popular,” he said. “I had a very hectic social schedule.” He had just been advanced to lieutenant, junior grade, “and we were very much in demand by the parents of daughters they would like to see marry into the Navy at the time.”3 Debutante balls and parties followed one after the other, with the fun-loving MacDonald on each list.

  So far, MacDonald had been exposed to relatively routine matters, but that changed in April 1938 when he received orders to leave Salinas and report to Washington, D.C., to work in the Navy Department’s coding room. For the first time in his young career, as an assistant communications officer for coding arrangements, MacDonald worked closely with the Office of Naval Intelligence and with top naval officials, including the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark and his assistant, Rear Admiral Robert L. Ghormley.

  It was heady company for an officer only a few years out of Annapolis, but his simultaneous duties as an aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House were even more impressive. Roosevelt used MacDonald as a source of information for what came into the decoding room. If MacDonald read anything he judged important, especially pertaining to Great Britain’s struggle with Germany after war in Europe flared in September 1939, he was to send it directly to Roosevelt.

  MacDonald deciphered most of the messages darting back and forth from Winston Churchill to Roosevelt, many which related to the president’s desire to help the British at a time when a majority of the people in the United States opposed intervention in what they considered a foreign war. MacDonald was authorized to phone the president directly, so that Roosevelt would have the information as soon as possible. Wherever MacDonald went in Washington, he had to leave his phone number in case an important message needed deciphering. Eleanor Roosevelt sometimes invited him and other aides to dine at the White House, where they engaged in friendly banter while enjoying a top-notch dinner. He once attended a banquet given on behalf of the king and queen of England, and at the request of the president or his wife often appeared at balls and dances hosted for Roosevelt nieces.

  “It was a wonderful life. We were there so frequently that they almost got to know us like their own children. We were invited to lots of parties,” he recalled. Long at ease in the presence of beautiful women, MacDonald, splendidly attired in his uniform, moved gracefully from guest to guest; “my social life was very busy in the evenings.”4 He especially looked forward to the times when Colonel George S. Patton, the commanding officer at nearby Fort Myer, hosted an affair, more for the presence of Patton’s daughters than the officer. In late summer of 1940 MacDonald jumped from the social pleasures of peacetime Washington, D.C., to the perils of wartime London when he crossed the Atlantic to be the assistant naval attaché and special naval observer under Ghormley, the naval attaché. He went from deciphering messages sent by a troubled Winston Churchill to the scene of the fighting those messages described, at a time when Churchill could not be certain his nation would withstand Hitler’s assault. A German invasion seemed all too possible, and the German air arm blistered London and other British cities during the Blitz.

  “Well, when we arrived there, England was in desperate straits, there’s no doubt about it, and this was when Churchill came on the air with his ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ speech,” said MacDonald. “We’d only been there about a week when he came on the air with that one. They were desperate. They had no way of defending themselves, really, because the military equipment, as far as the Army was concerned, was virtually all left on the beaches of Normandy in the Dunkirk arrangement. It was all left over there, so the only thing they had were the volunteers who were called up to bring their shotguns and a few things like that to stand by. England had a terrible time.” He added, “The atmosphere at the time was that maybe England wouldn’t be able to hold out, so we might not be over there too long.”5

  The group stayed at the Dorchester Hotel in a suite of rooms with two bedrooms on the top floor. When German aircraft lumbered toward the big city, rather than hasten to the basement shelters as guests were required to do, MacDonald and the other American military personnel scampered to the roof, where they observed German bombs set fire to warehouses and ships.

  After one of the largest German raids, MacDonald visited the official in charge of the fire equipment in London. The man told MacDonald that his department faced nearly 2,500 fires burning at the same time all over London, and that it was impossible to extinguish them all. When MacDonald asked how he handled the situation, the official explained they had no choice but to let some burn themselves out so they could focus on the most threatening conflagrations. Under desperate circumstances the official and his crews assessed what they were able to do and then executed the tasks. MacDonald was impressed with this lesson in crisis management.

  On another occasion Churchill invited Ghormley, MacDonald, and others to join him for an inspection trip to Dover. When they reached the port city, Churchill grabbed high-powered binoculars to gain a view of the German military installations on the other side of the Channel and noticed that the enemy was constructing additional gun emplacements. In a testy mood, Churchill asked the British commander at his side to fire a few rounds across the water, but the officer advised against it. He explained that they had done that before, but the Germans responded with ten times as many shells.

  Having deciphered so many of Churchill’s messages to Roosevelt, MacDonald was hardly stunned when the British leader nevertheless ordered a shot fired, nor was he surprised when the Germans indeed sent back ten times as many. MacDonald saw why so many Britons rallied to Churchill’s side: their leader never shrank from the aggressive course. No matter how desperate the situation—and things certainly favored the Germans at this stage of the conflict—Churchill acted with composure and optimism. MacDonald admired that quality and made a mental note of it for the day when he commanded men in battle.

  Even more, he admired the resolve displayed by London’s citizenry. Each day men and women left their homes, many residences showing signs of recent bombings, and traipsed to work. Fathers and mothers shook off the numbness that came from bomb-interrupted sleep or from hours spent in bomb shelters, and commenced daily schedules that had long structured their lives. Despite the dangers that had become an all too familiar part of their routines, children attended school and played with neighborhood friends. Almost daily, MacDonald observed examples, not from statesmen or admirals but from men and women, boys and girls, of how to endure under stress.

  “The people over here are standing up remarkably well,” he wrote his parents in February 1941. “The morale is still very high. They are quite confident that they will win.”6 Their example profoundly influenced him when he later faced trying situations against Japanese firepower.

  MacDonald would have to put those lessons to the test sooner than he assumed. During a visit to friends in the English countryside on De
cember 7, 1941, MacDonald listened to a radio broadcast announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He immediately departed for London, where he found Ghormley in his office trying to obtain additional information.

  When a telegram shortly after the Japanese attack informed him that his father was seriously ill, in February 1942 MacDonald boarded an aircraft and arrived home in time to visit his father before he succumbed. After the funeral, the young officer contacted people in the Navy to seek a seagoing command. With the mad naval expansion then in place, both in ships and in men, it was not long before he was named the executive officer, the second-in-command, of the destroyer USS O’Bannon, the second of the Fletcher-class destroyers then being constructed at Bath, Maine.

  Lieutenant Commander Donald MacDonald was off to war.

  “The Deadliest Killer in the Fleet for Her Size”

  Navy men have long been charmed by destroyers. Admiral Halsey claimed he owed much of his success to his destroyer commands between the wars, mainly because, like the man, the ships carried a reputation for aggressiveness and action. Although he eventually directed massive task forces consisting of aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers, Halsey never lost his fondness for the smaller destroyers.

  The craft were originally created in the late nineteenth century to combat torpedo boats, which then wreaked havoc with ships. They slowly transformed into the offensive tool the hard-hitting admiral so loved, first by adding self-propelled torpedoes, which could be launched against surface ships, and then by carrying depth charges, to dispatch submarines during World War I. When aerial threats became more prevalent as the world wound its way toward war in 1939, destroyers enhanced their arsenal with antiaircraft batteries. Originally assigned one task, by World War II destroyers had morphed into multipurpose warships that could attack or defend.

  MacDonald was fortunate to join one of the sleek, new Fletcher-class destroyers just then bursting out of American shipyards. Fletcher-class destroyers played a crucial role early in the Pacific war because when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the famed naval architectural firm Gibbs and Cox had already crafted their designs; faced with the instant need for more ships, the Navy turned to those destroyers. Ten were commissioned within nine months, with nineteen more ordered, and a total of 175 left shipyards during the conflict, more than any other class of destroyers. The ships formed the foundation for what would later become Destroyer Squadron 21.

  At 376 feet long—the length of almost one and a third football fields—and forty feet across at the widest, the ships were known for speed and offensive wallop. Two turbine engines propelled the ship at top speeds approaching thirty-seven knots (42.6 miles per hour). While the thin-skinned vessels could be vulnerable to bombs and shells, the real value of the Fletcher-class destroyers rested in the array of gunfire and torpedoes they could bring on an enemy, which made them effective in both offensive and defensive modes.

  The five 5-inch single-barrel gun mounts led the way. The guns, which could be fired automatically or manually, propelled fifty-four-pound shells at surface targets eighteen thousand yards distant or at incoming aircraft from six miles away.

  Five twin 40mm antiaircraft gun mounts, positioned along the ship’s length, supplemented the five-inch batteries. Situated in open gun tubs, the 40mm guns could fire 160 rounds per minute at aircraft to a range of 2,800 yards, or lower their trajectory to pour streams of shells toward close-in surface targets.

  Seven single-barrel 20mm antiaircraft guns, capable of firing 480 rounds per minute, stood from bow to stern. They were generally used against aircraft that had closed to within a thousand yards, but in tight situations they could be turned against enemy crew manning the decks of ships that had drawn uncomfortably close. Crew referred to these guns as “revenge guns,” because if the opponent had already pulled within their range, he had most likely already inflicted serious harm to the destroyer.

  Two torpedo mounts, with five torpedoes each, carried the destroyer’s main offensive weapon. Boasting five hundred pounds of explosives in their twenty-one-inch diameters, torpedoes could put out of action or even sink a cruiser if placed in a vulnerable location. Multiple torpedo hits could do the same to enemy battleships.

  In addition to that firepower, two racks of eight six-hundred-pound depth charges, tasked with demolishing enemy submarines, straddled the fantail to port (left) and starboard (right), and three K-guns, situated forward of the depth charge racks, tossed additional three-hundred-pound depth charges to either side. Smoke screen generators, which emitted thick clouds of smoke to mask the destroyer or the ships she might be escorting, also stood on the fantail near the depth charge racks.

  According to Captain Frederick J. Bell, skipper in the Pacific of the destroyer USS Grayson (DD-435), the modern destroyer was “the deadliest killer in the fleet, for her size—because of the tin fish that she carries in tubes on deck.” He added, “She was made for speed; she was designed to carry the maximum fighting power in her slender hull, and there was no wasted space.”7

  Noted naval expert Bernard Brodie praised the advantages of the Fletcher-class ships and other destroyers. “Destroyers are multiple-duty vessels,” he wrote. “They screen the battle fleet against torpedo attack and shroud it with smoke to protect it against enemy guns. With their torpedoes they attack the mightiest battleships of the enemy fleet. They protect convoys against the U-boat menace, and by that fact become the mainstay of a nation which must carry on a vast shipping in order to survive.”8

  MacDonald was impressed with O’Bannon, which he said “was longer, she was bigger, she was in all respects finer than anything that the U.S. Navy had seen in destroyers prior to this time.”9 He thought the destroyer compared favorably to the small cruisers of twenty years earlier, and he concluded that the vessel’s lighter yet stronger metal could make her more maneuverable and harder to sink than World War I–vintage destroyers. MacDonald never expected, though, that his smaller ship might have to engage enemy battleships and cruisers in a surface duel, where fourteen-inch guns would possess a huge advantage.

  “How You Going to Win a War with a Mob Like That?”

  The experiences of the first three ships before leaving the United States were shared by every destroyer crew that steamed to war. After shipyard workers constructed their destroyers, a commissioning ceremony preceded the shakedown cruise in the Caribbean, where sea trials tested ship and crew. When complete, they received their assignment to either Pacific or European waters.

  After a course at the antisubmarine warfare school in Key West, Florida, where American naval officers studied the Royal Navy’s tactics against German U-boats, in March 1942 MacDonald traveled to Bath to help Commander Edwin R. Wilkinson prepare the O’Bannon for service. Named after Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, the ship and crew faced a stern challenge in living up to the heritage established by the Marine officer. In 1805 O’Bannon commanded a Marine detachment that charged through heavy enemy musket fire to engage Barbary pirates in bitter hand-to-hand combat at Tripoli. After the victory O’Bannon’s contingent raised the Stars and Stripes over foreign soil for the first time. Their exploits were later commemorated by the verse “to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Corps Hymn.

  Bath, Maine, had once been a thriving fishing center and the home for whaling captains, but in early March, before warming temperatures had a chance to melt a hard winter’s snowy residue, it left much to be desired. The town resounded to the noise of welders and other shipyard workers, who in their off-hours crowded Bath’s two main streets to do their shopping or seek out food or beverages.

  Wilkinson and MacDonald, as did the officers of Fletcher and Nicholas, recognized the challenges they faced. In these lean years the skipper of every destroyer earmarked for the combat zones had to rely on a small core of experienced officers, chiefs, and petty officers to work their magic in molding into a workable crew the youth who came out of Navy training camps. Only four of Wilkinson’s officers had served aboard destroy
ers before coming to O’Bannon; only four were regular Navy.

  At least the nucleus crew, the group of experienced officers and enlisted who arrived in Bath to prepare the ship for service, would help. Most had compiled years of service in the Navy and had come to O’Bannon from ships that had been damaged or sunk, mainly at Pearl Harbor. Men such as Chief Quartermaster John T. Sexton and Chief Boatswain Robert J. McGrath provided what MacDonald called the backbone of the ship’s organization during training and in the battles that were to come. MacDonald wondered, though, if service aboard a ship at Pearl Harbor compared with the ordeals he observed in London. “Some of them had been at Pearl Harbor, this had made an impression but, on the other hand, so many of them did not seem to have any idea of what a real war might mean.”10

  The officers and nucleus crew spent hours at Bath, familiarizing themselves with the ship and training the few enlisted who were present. They interspersed baseball games, dances, and parties whenever they could.

  MacDonald spent his few leisure hours at the Bath home he rented with three other naval officers—Wilkinson and two others from their sister ship, USS Nicholas. The living arrangements came naturally, as for the next year both O’Bannon and Nicholas were built side by side, making them two of the first three Fletcher-class destroyers launched and commissioned. The men played poker and relaxed from the rigors of training, unaware that the two ships and their crews would be inextricably linked throughout the entire Pacific war.

  On June 26 O’Bannon’s engines turned over for the first time, and the nucleus crew took her to sea under her own power. Wilkinson set a course south for the Boston Navy Yard, where the rest of the crew would board, the ship would officially join the Navy in an impressive commissioning ceremony, and O’Bannon would depart for her shakedown cruise.