Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  The innocent choice carried life-and-death implications.

  “The Japs Were Here for the Kill”

  Since arriving in the South Pacific the previous September, O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas, the trio of ships that would later become the anchors of Destroyer Squadron 21, had carried the load. De Haven’s appearance in December boosted the number to four, and five more joined their ranks in January. When USS Chevalier arrived shortly afterward, for the first time the squadron’s core ten ships operated together.

  Three—Chevalier, La Vallette, and Taylor—tangled with the enemy before January ended. The action started when American aerial reconnaissance noticed increased activity at the major Japanese terminals of Rabaul, on New Britain, and Buin, on the island of Bougainville in the Solomons. American intelligence erroneously concluded that this was yet another run by the Tokyo Express.

  Halsey combined two operations. While transports removed most of the Marines who had been fighting on the island since August, cruisers and destroyers would lie in wait near the transports and surprise the Japanese surface vessels.

  His opponent, Admiral Yamamoto, would not be trapped, however. The man who had planned the successful attack on Pearl Harbor had subsequently seen his navy absorb catastrophic losses at Midway, a reversal in the Coral Sea, and continued pounding in the Solomons. With fuel supplies running low, he could neither mount a vast naval operation nor afford to lose many ships. Instead, Yamamoto organized an aerial attack involving Lieutenant Commander Joji Higai’s thirty-two torpedo bombers from Rabaul’s airfields.

  Halsey scraped the bottom of the South Pacific barrel to collect a unit he could throw into battle. Rear Admiral Robert C. “Ike” Giffen’s Task Force 18 consisted of the heavy cruisers Wichita, Chicago, and Louisville, the light cruisers Montpelier, Cleveland, and Columbia, and a screen of six destroyers, including La Vallette, Chevalier, and Taylor. A separate unit of battleships, whose screen included MacDonald’s O’Bannon, supported Giffen’s cruisers.

  Ike Giffen was not new to command. He had battled German U-boats in the Atlantic Ocean and operated in North African waters, but he had never seen action in the Pacific, where air assaults on ships at sea were more common than they were in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. “They were quite inexperienced in fighting the Japs,” said MacDonald, “and this, of course, is one of the reasons they ran into so much trouble.”24

  Giffen arrived fifty miles north of Rennell Island, which stands 120 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, late in the afternoon of January 29. Because of his experience operating against German U-boats, Giffen stationed his destroyers in a semicircle two miles ahead of the cruisers. While appropriate for the Atlantic, where air assaults at sea rarely occurred, this formation was ill suited for the Pacific’s air attacks. Giffen’s disposition exposed his cruisers’ after beams and quarters, making them vulnerable to torpedo planes and dive-bombers attacking from behind.

  Shortly after twilight, Lieutenant Commander Higai approached with his thirty-two torpedo bombers from Rabaul. Though radar picked up the force, Giffen failed to change course, alert his aircraft, or issue orders to his ships about what they should do in case of attack.

  Within twenty minutes Higai and his pilots had descended toward their targets. Lieutenant (jg) Chuck Witten, La Vallette’s radar officer, was in the wardroom with other officers when a shrill voice announced over the loudspeaker, “This is no drill. General Quarters. General Quarters. All hands man your battle stations. No shit!” Witten dropped what he was doing and raced to his post on the secondary gun control, fully expecting enemy planes to be closing in, but instead “the planes ignored us and went for the big boys.”25

  On the Chevalier, Yeoman R. H. Roupe heard the call to general quarters and thought, “Our baptism of fire had come.”26 The officer of the deck stepped over to Roupe’s gun and told the crew that once they received word to open fire, they were to keep the shells going even if they could see no target.

  The torpedoes from Higai’s first wave missed Giffen’s zigzagging ships. Giffen, who assumed the Japanese attack had ended, halted the maneuvering and returned to a steady course, a move that made them easy pickings for Higa’s second wave. “The Japs were out in full force,” wrote Seaman 1/c James J. Fahey on the cruiser Montpelier; “they were here for the kill.”27

  Japanese scout planes dropped parachutes from which dangled yellow-white flares. As they slowly descended to the ocean, the flares brightly illuminated Giffen’s two cruiser columns, perfectly silhouetting them for Higai’s aviators. Giffen put out over the TBS what MacDonald described as “a very hectic call” that Japanese aircraft were about to attack and that he required assistance.28

  All the ships in Giffen’s force opened fire as Japanese aircraft charged in from every angle. Bombs propelled towers of water skyward, torpedoes sliced through the waters, and Japanese machine guns sparked streams of ammunition toward the ships. Red tracers and shell bursts further lit the sky, turning the battle arena into a daytime matinee. One torpedo missed Chicago by yards. A second smacked into Louisville but failed to explode. Higai charged through thick antiaircraft fire until an American shell burst sent his plane plummeting to the Pacific off Chicago’s port bow, killing the commander.

  The good fortune did not last, however. Minutes after Higai’s death, two torpedoes ripped a huge gash on Chicago’s starboard side, flooding the forward engine room. Chicago floated aimlessly on the surface as Captain Ralph O. Davis and his crew frantically attempted to regain control and save the ship.

  After Higai’s second wave departed, Chevalier’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Ephraim R. McLean Jr., announced to his men that Chicago had been badly hit. McLean promised payback for the deed and told his men to stand easy at their guns. “The loudspeaker hummed and faded” as another cruiser began pulling Chicago away at four knots, recalled Roupe. “The captain’s cool, steady voice had affected us like a shot in the arm. ‘Let the Japs come!’ we thought jubilantly. We’d be ready!”29

  Chicago intended to reach Espiritu Santo, but the cruiser never made it. After receiving orders from Admiral Halsey to return to Efate, Giffen split Task Force 18 during the afternoon of January 30. He took most of the ships with him, leaving only his six destroyers to screen the Chicago.

  The Japanese air fleet commander at Rabaul, Vice Admiral Jinichi Kusaka, pounced at the opportunity to finish the damaged cruiser and sent a group of Japanese aircraft to pursue Chicago. Of the screening destroyers, La Vallette stood squarely in the path between the Japanese planes and the cruiser.

  “They came at us directly out of the sun,” said Lieutenant Witten on the La Vallette. “They were going for the crippled Chicago. We were a couple of thousand yards abaft her beam, and some of them had to pass over us to get to their primary target.” The destroyer’s gun crews opened fire at maximum range, but the Japanese charged through the shell bursts and bullets and steadily closed the distance. One plane dropped a torpedo at La Vallette and continued directly over the destroyer toward the cruiser, but La Vallette’s fire sent the invader toward the sea in flames. “The plane passed so close over our stack, almost hitting it, that I could actually see the pilot’s face,” said Witten. “Then ‘bang’ we were hit.”

  The explosion knocked Witten to the deck, and although he suffered a neck injury, the officer continued to direct his guns. “Mr. Witten,” said the lieutenant’s talker, who had developed a reputation for bickering over the incessant drills, “if I ever complain about having to have drills again you can kick my ass from the bow to the fantail.”30

  On the port-side depth charge guns, Jack Wilkes, a torpedoman, wished he could do something to help the gunners, but “you cannot shoot depth charges at planes.” When the torpedo dropped, he ducked behind the depth charges for protection, but shrapnel injured both legs and pierced his right calf. “I was so scared that I felt no pain. The last thing that I remember was the ship almost coming out of the water and I saw nothing but water coming
my way and I was knocked unconscious.”31 Wilkes soon regained consciousness to find that he had been tossed yards from his post. When he tried to rise, jolts of pain shot through both legs, and Wilkes then noticed that blood covered both shoes.

  Watertender Second Class M. W. Tollberg was severely burned and blinded by a spurt of live steam that gushed from a damaged pipe. Though in enormous pain from fleshless hands and blackened feet, the dying Tollberg managed to climb topside to reach an oil valve that needed to be closed. Later the ship’s medical officer found Tollberg still clutching the oil valve in a heroic attempt to close it.

  Lieutenant Eli Roth perished at his post in the forward engine room, but he had so thoroughly trained the ship’s repair parties that they prevented the destroyer from sinking. Metalsmith 2/c J. A. Masi, Machinist’s Mate 2/c H. M. Marsh, and Machinist’s Mate 2/c P. A. Gregory ignored the danger of a weakened bulkhead to race into the damaged fireroom and plug a fourteen-inch hole through which water poured. In the radar room, Seaman 1/c William T. McGee and Seaman 2/c Joseph P. Essick, according to the executive officer, J. A. McGoldbrick, “remained cool and collected” under fire and continued to deliver accurate information to gun control and to the bridge. Lieutenant Commander Harry H. Henderson, La Vallette’s skipper, praised Seaman 1/c Albert V. Conte, who, “although young and relatively inexperienced and in his first engagement, handled the wheel throughout like a veteran.”32

  The explosion killed one officer and twenty-one men, flooded the aft fireroom, stopped the engines, temporarily cut off electrical power, and interrupted communications. Within two minutes Henderson had power and was under way until another vessel came alongside and towed the ship to Espiritu Santo.

  The tug Navajo had come to Chicago’s aid, but before the tug could offer help, five torpedoes ripped into the cruiser’s starboard side. With the cruiser badly listing and sinking, Captain Davis ordered the ship abandoned. Six officers and fifty-six men went down with the cruiser, while other vessels retrieved 1,049 survivors from the water.

  The Japanese government claimed her aircraft sank one American battleship and three cruisers and damaged others. The Japanese had scored a minor victory in sinking Chicago, but they lost twelve aircraft and one of their top torpedo bomber commanders with the death of Higai. In addition, because attention had been focused on Giffen’s force, the transports were able to land their troops on Guadalcanal without interference.

  Admiral Giffen had been so concerned with the threat from Japanese submarines that his ships steamed in poor formation for defense from an air attack. American naval superiors, especially Halsey and the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, were irate over the loss of Chicago, which Halsey described as a devastating blow caused by errors in judgment.

  Nimitz at first intended to include a harsh condemnation of Giffen in his official report, but he watered it down to the less strident conclusion that the loss of Chicago was regrettable. However, he ordered that the cruiser’s sinking be withheld from the public and vowed in a staff meeting that he would discipline any officer who divulged the loss.

  La Vallette safely arrived at Espiritu Santo, where a heartwarming sight awaited. “As we were slowly towed through the nets and into the harbor,” explained Lieutenant Witten, “we saw that the other ships there, including some of the [squadron] destroyers, were manning their rails and cheering us as we inched along.”

  The next task, removal of the bodies of their dead shipmates, was not as uplifting. Aided by volunteers from other ships, the crew carefully retrieved the bodies, some little more than mangled chunks of flesh, and placed them in body bags for burial. “After several days in tropic waters the bodies were quite bloated and discolored and the stench was really bad,” wrote Witten.33

  Most of the officers and enlisted men then marched over to the burial grounds for a ceremony, where they buried their shipmates in a common grave. A chaplain from another ship conducted the services, after which a bugler sounded taps.

  When the ship entered drydock and Henderson, Witten, and others examined the damage, they wondered how the ship had survived. A hole stretched from the cracked bulkhead in the forward fireroom above the waterline all the way to the keel. Since Espiritu Santo lacked the facilities to correct the damage, Henderson took his patched ship on a slow voyage across the Pacific to Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco.

  The actions of La Vallette in the South Pacific had been brief but impressive. She was not finished, however. Her squadron mates would see her back in the Solomons by October.

  The End of De Haven

  On New Year’s Eve Emperor Hirohito met with Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and top military commanders to consider recent developments on Guadalcanal. The year had started in heady fashion with a victory-marked expansion from the Home Islands, but events in the Coral Sea, at Midway, and now in the Solomons forced them to reexamine a deteriorating situation. After much discussion, they decided to evacuate the remaining troops on Guadalcanal, erect a new defensive line on New Georgia to the north, and wage the battle from there.

  In January, in a daring move spread over three nights, their destroyers evacuated the final thirteen thousand troops from Guadalcanal, abandoning the island to the American infantry closing in on them. “It is still one of the miracles of the war to me,” wrote Commander Hara, “that this should have remained such a successful secret.” He was surprised that the ships had swiped the men out from under the noses of American air superiority, but he was too realistic to get carried away. The six-month struggle had “left 16,800 Japanese bodies strewn in the tropical jungle, and scores of warships sunk with their thousands of sailors around this bitterly contested island. The many pages of reports on the subject all boiled down to one fact: Japan had lost the Battle of Guadalcanal.”34

  Once Halsey realized what had occurred, he knew that the bitter days at Guadalcanal had at last ended. The Japanese Empire had reached its southernmost point and had been turned back. This moment marked the start of a slow but inexorable Japanese retreat that ended in Tokyo Bay. “From here on they retreated at our will,” Halsey wrote after the war. “I am immensely proud of the Guadalcanal campaign. It started with a frayed shoestring and little repairs were made to that shoestring during the campaign. The shoestring was tough and it did its job. The Japs were halted in their tracks and thrown from the offensive to the defensive. They never regained the offensive role.”35

  O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas were a key part of that shoestring. In the company of the other Fletcher-class destroyers that arrived in late 1942 and early 1943, these little-heralded destroyers and their crews would become even more vital to American success in the Solomons.

  Japanese land forces might have retreated from Guadalcanal, but the Cactus Striking Force still faced the dangers presented by the Slot. Over the previous three months the original three Fletcher-class destroyers—O’Bannon, Fletcher, and Nicholas—had escorted transports, hunted submarines, battled air attacks, and fought in the major November surface engagement without suffering a loss to either ship or crew, an anomaly that most sailors believed was bound to end.

  Lieutenant (jg) John J. Rowan aboard De Haven hoped the luck would continue. A graduate of the Naval Academy, Rowan already boasted a full war resume. As an ensign he had been aboard the cruiser USS Vincennes (CA-44) as part of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle’s audacious April 1942 Tokyo bombing raid. Four months later he floated in the waters off Guadalcanal for five hours when his cruiser was sunk in the Battle of Savo Island. He figured that with the Vincennes’s sinking, he had punched that ticket. What were the odds of having two ships shot out from beneath you within six months?

  When he joined the destroyer in mid-January, De Haven looked to be a good ship manned with a solid crew. Even though this destroyer was his first command, Commander Charles E. Tolman had gained significant experience with the submarine fleet, and his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander John P. Huntley, had served aboard
the carrier USS Yorktown (CV-5). The ship’s doctor, John H. Bates, kept everyone loose with his sharp wit and delightful sense of humor, something that would be especially helpful in the difficult days ahead.

  The nagging concern among some of the officers was that, in order to rush the destroyers to the Pacific, the ship’s shakedown cruise had been shortened. They needed additional time to drill and train the young crew, but time was at a premium in the South Pacific in late 1942.

  They would also have liked to train some of those irritating aviators who failed to identify themselves. Lieutenant Commander Andrew J. Hill Jr., Nicholas’s skipper, attended regular conferences with Captain Briscoe, during which Briscoe discussed upcoming operations with his officers. In one of those meetings, the commanders of the first four destroyers shared their disgust at the alarming number of American aircraft that flew dangerously close to their formations without properly identifying themselves. Almost every night, one or more swooped in as if they were inspecting the destroyers, inviting death from itchy gun crews and skippers who had to protect their ships. The tense moments could be eliminated if the pilots identified themselves, as procedure required. The commanders feared that because almost every intruder turned out to be American, air alerts might not be taken seriously and gun crews might relax their vigilance. That could lead to tragic results if enemy aircraft appeared.

  On the morning of February 1 transports escorted by Nicholas and De Haven finished emptying their cargoes and headed north toward Cape Esperance, where they veered east toward Tulagi. In midafternoon an air alert southeast of Savo Island called everyone to stations, but when the alert was canceled five minutes later, gun crews aboard both ships griped that another of those pesky American pilots had forced them to man their posts.

  Thirteen minutes later came another air alert. Hill on Nicholas ordered top speed and began maneuvering, but he noticed that De Haven continued her slower pace. Had Commander Tolman assumed this was another false alert?