Tin Can Titans

by John Wukovits

  All nine destroyers frequently encountered false submarine contacts, such as a whale, porpoises cutting through the waves, a floating log, or an underwater coral formation. “The false submarine echoes are as frequent as an antsy hunter sees deer,” wrote Watertender Wing, on Nicholas, “but there are enough real ones to do a lot of killing.”38

  The most unusual incident involved O’Bannon’s April 5 submarine encounter. When MacDonald’s radarmen picked up a surface contact at seven thousand yards, MacDonald cautiously maneuvered O’Bannon so close to the unsuspecting target that the ship’s cook, who was on deck when the attack started, later told MacDonald that he thought he could have thrown potatoes at the boat.

  MacDonald simultaneously dropped depth charges and ordered his 40mm and 20mm guns to open fire. Crew on deck saw the submarine rise out of the water and settle by the stern moments before feeling a violent explosion, and when the next day aviators reported a thick oil slick at the location, O’Bannon received credit for a probable sinking of the submarine.

  The American press soon picked up the story, but printed it as a tale of a destroyer that attacked a submarine by throwing potatoes at surprised Japanese sailors standing on the boat’s tower. Potato growers in Maine struck a plaque honoring the occasion, and the tale lingered so long after the war that MacDonald admitted, “I’ve been trying to drive a stake through this story for years.” He agreed that he maneuvered O’Bannon close to the submarine, but explained that even the crewmember with the best throwing arm could not have tossed a potato or anything else across the gap. “From that single remark [of the cook] has grown the entire legend of the use of Maine potatoes to sink a Japanese submarine.”39

  Escorting transports to and from Espiritu Santo still occasionally took Desron 21 officers and crews away from the Slot. Skippers hated being yanked from an active combat zone to lumber across the ocean guarding slow-moving transports; they argued that this “sheep dog” duty relegated their offensive capabilities to secondary status.

  Halsey disliked removing destroyers from the Slot as well, but felt he had no choice. Those transports brought the supplies and reinforcements he needed, and he could not send them across Torpedo Junction without an escort.

  “We were under the enemy’s guns, as it were, the moment we stuck our noses out [of Espiritu Santo],” wrote correspondent Norton-Taylor. “Japanese submarines had been active in the Coral Sea in recent weeks and every hour of our progress north brought us closer within the range of the Jap’s aircraft.”40

  MacDonald stifled his anger over the inexperience of some transport skippers and of the newer destroyers arriving in the South Pacific. One rattled captain reported five contacts on one trip, each time forcing MacDonald, as convoy commander, to shift course as an evasive measure. After the final time, when O’Bannon’s sonarmen again failed to detect anything, “I finally had to shut him up, tell him to keep quiet until I told him when to get worried about submarines in the area.”41

  “Roosevelt’s Professional Killers”

  The 1943 operations in the Slot handed Desron 21 crews the experience and confidence necessary to execute their tasks. By year’s end the neophyte crews of untested civilians had been replaced by self-assured sailors ready to match skills with the Japanese.

  “Day by day we were becoming more experienced in the art of warfare against the Japanese and we were beginning to feel like veterans from the old school,” pronounced the Taylor cruise book about the ship’s time running up the Slot. “The whole crew drew predictably closer during these arduous nights up the Slot,” said Yeoman R. H. Roupe of his Chevalier shipmates. “A spirit of comradeship flourished which has no parallel in civilian life. The constant proximity of sudden and violent death, the danger and excitement and sometimes terror of our precarious existence gave an added stimulus to the strengthening of brotherhood among us.”42

  Roupe explained that Chevalier’s crew looked to O’Bannon as the model toward which they strove. “The O’Bannon was a remarkable little ship,” Roupe wrote. “She had been in the South Pacific before our arrival and had been in the thick of the great sea battles off Guadalcanal in those early desperate days when the Japs had hurled their fleet against ours with reckless abandon.” She had emerged intact from those perilous days and nights “still jauntily, proudly, unbelievably afloat. Her luck and courage had made her name a legend. It was said that an angel rode upon her foremast.” Time magazine heralded MacDonald and his ship for being in “almost continuous naval warfare” around Guadalcanal and up the Slot, and Tokyo Rose labeled the ship’s crew “Roosevelt’s professional killers.”43

  MacDonald sensed the emerging confidence among his men, an attitude that he said combined experience with hatred of the enemy. He explained that the transformation took place “through the awful nights of bombing, the exchange of shots with cowardly ships, the sickening vigil, the breaking strain,” and added that because of it, “hate began to emerge: ‘What right have they to be doing this to us? They are pounding at this beautiful little ship until they smash it. We will smash them. We are not here until we are dead. They are here until they are dead.’”

  His men were better able to match talents with the Japanese when they loosened the shackles binding them to civilian life. “Then the men of the O’Bannon really began to fight. They no longer thought of the green hills, the sodas, the pretty girls. They became hunters. They were no longer the hunted. The steel in their hearts was at last tempered.”

  He saw evidence of this the night that O’Bannon received a rare night off from Slot duty. A young sailor walked by and asked MacDonald, “Aren’t we going, too?”

  “Not tonight,” MacDonald replied.

  “What’s the matter, Captain? Are we slipping?”

  MacDonald appreciated the remark, which came from a sailor who in the early days off Guadalcanal had trembled at the sound of explosions. “I knew then the tide had turned. The boys of the O’Bannon were jealous of the privilege of fighting the Japs.”44 This was no longer the young crew he had first seen gather at Bath, Maine. Boys then, they had in the intervening months become battle-hardened men.

  The O’Bannon crew, still without a casualty, agreed that a guardian angel protected them, and other crews called them “the Galloping Ghost of the Solomons Coast” because, as MacDonald said, “it was felt that we had some sort of a protector there. They felt very strongly that someone was looking out for us. I don’t think there were any atheists on board, I’ll tell you that.”45

  In 1942 and 1943, MacDonald’s crew had “reached the point of perfection. All I had to do was say, ‘Commence firing!’ and they put on a wonderful show. They all knew their job and they did it well. They really had arrived at the peak of fighting form. We really had extreme confidence and only dared the enemy to come out and play with us.”46

  Time magazine summed it up for home-front readers: “Around South Pacific bars, MacDonald’s O’Bannon became a legend.”47

  Time also printed words indicating that Desron 21’s work was far from complete. Military analysts expected that surface engagements would soon embroil the destroyers in decisive battles against skilled enemy warships and crews.

  “But as South Pacific fighting went into its second spring,” declared Time in March 1943, “one paradox grew plain: though the Allied position in the past year had improved infinitely, Japan’s position was not correspondingly worse. The fighting had only taken up the slack in battle lines. Now each adversary had a firm foothold. The next blow would be to the other’s body.”48

  The ships and crews of Desron 21 would be directly in the middle of those body blows, which together delivered a knockout punch that left the Japanese clinging to their final defense line in the Solomons.

  CHAPTER 7

  KULA GULF CONFRONTATIONS

  Lieutenant Hugh B. Miller was already accustomed to being on the first team, although his prior unit had consisted of eleven football players at the University of Alabama. In 1930 he quarterba
cked the squad to an undefeated season and a share with the University of Notre Dame of the national championship. The next year he led his squad to a shutout 24–0 win over Washington State to capture the Rose Bowl.

  Gridiron glory had accustomed Miller to the cheers of thousands. But the football star now listened to a different call—the one issued by his country in wartime, a call that would pit not athlete against athlete on football fields but adversary against adversary on the high seas. He had proven his leadership skills during fall football weekends, but as his ship, the destroyer USS Strong, wound toward the South Pacific, Miller faced a new arena. When bombs and shells replaced opposing tacklers, would he react with the same coolness?

  Since the Strong’s January 1943 arrival in the South Pacific, the ship had performed the usual functions of Halsey’s destroyers in those 1942–1943 days: escorting convoys, bombarding enemy land installations, hunting submarines, and laying mines across Blackett Strait. But the crew’s impatience at missing a surface engagement concerned Miller. He had seen similar impatience during football games, and not once had it helped his team. If it had been up to him, Strong would have avoided all such duels with enemy battleships and cruisers. He had scrambled for his life during gridiron contests, and he did not relish being involved in one where bullets instead of linemen came at him.

  The former quarterback relied on what he knew best—practice. Like his Alabama coaches, who stressed repetition as the best way to improve, Miller drilled his 20mm gun crews with such proficiency that an impressed skipper, Commander Joseph H. Wellings, said, “The way he trained and drilled our 20mm gun crews, one would think he was still calling signals for his beloved Alabama football team in a bowl game against the University of Oklahoma.”1

  MacDonald and other Pacific commanders longed to improve destroyer tactics but were stymied by resistance from above. Commander Arleigh A. Burke, a compatriot of MacDonald’s who would gain acclaim for his exploits with his own destroyer division, believed promptness in launching torpedoes was crucial to victory. His widely circulated statement that the difference between a successful destroyer officer and a poor one was ten seconds referred to destroyer skippers being hampered by having to wait to launch their torpedoes until the division commander ordered it. That brief interval handed the enemy the opportunity to seize the initiative and launch first. Burke suggested that destroyers strike upon contact with the enemy rather than wait for orders. Rather than learn from earlier surface actions or listen to prescient observations, some senior commanders still declined to use destroyers as intact units. MacDonald and the other destroyer skippers were alarmed at such misuse of their vessels.

  In May he submitted a written document outlining his tactics. He advocated placing his destroyers in one unit, split into two parallel columns. After launching torpedoes, the first column would turn away and draw enemy fire to them. The second column would then counter with a torpedo attack from a different direction.

  MacDonald hoped that senior commanders would seriously consider Burke’s tactics. Maybe the June 1943 appearance of a new manual, Current Tactical Orders and Doctrine, U.S. Pacific Fleet, which promoted similar revisions, would prod commanders into change.

  The Japanese Long Lance torpedoes were another prominent topic of conversation. Rear Admiral Ainsworth was cautioned about their enhanced range and was advised to open fire as quickly as possible to avoid running into a wave of Long Lances and being knocked out of the fight before he could fire.

  Answers would come from four brutal surface engagements that erupted from July to October. Like opposing heavyweight boxing foes, the US and Japanese navies steamed into battle off New Georgia–Kolombangara in a quartet of slugfests. At the end, one foe limped away, in the process yielding control of the Solomons to the victor.

  After months of escorting troop transports, bombarding land targets, and the myriad tasks Halsey handed to them, MacDonald and the skippers of Desron 21 soon found themselves trading punches with Japanese warships.

  “The Japanese Were Really Stirred Up”

  Control of vital New Georgia was the prize of the four battles. If the Japanese retained its hold on the island, including its airfields at Munda, they could halt the American advance up the Solomons and confine Halsey to the Russell Islands–Guadalcanal area. If the United States seized New Georgia, they could restrict the Japanese to the northern Solomons, assert control in the central Solomons, and take a large step toward pushing the Japanese out of the islands for good.

  Halsey collected a joint Navy-Marine expedition for the first operation, the New Georgia landings. While Marines rushed ashore at Rice Anchorage, on New Georgia’s western coast, the Navy would block Japanese attempts to bring reinforcements from Kolombangara across the Kula Gulf to Munda. Three cruisers escorted by nine destroyers, including O’Bannon, Nicholas, Strong, and Chevalier from Desron 21, accompanied seven destroyer-transports ferrying the Marines to Rice Anchorage.

  For MacDonald and his crew, it was once more “into the dangerous waters of the Solomons.” The week before Independence Day had been particularly hectic, and “we had been going up almost every night for a week and we felt due for a rest. But there we were heading northward.”2

  Correspondent Duncan Norton-Taylor had first thought of joining MacDonald’s O’Bannon in June. He had heard of the ship’s accomplishments, which earned O’Bannon praise as one of the “most courageous of the Tin Can Fleet,” and MacDonald and his young officers, most of whom had been in the Navy two years or less, impressed him. “A few years before most of them had been peaceful young citizens,” he wrote. “Now they were tough veterans.” After an initial inquiry, Norton-Taylor concluded that he “already knew the O’Bannon’s reputation for sticking her sharp nose into things,” and so instead he chose St. Louis, “one of Ainsworth’s large and more heavily armored and gunned cruisers.”3

  With Norton-Taylor aboard St. Louis, the force left for New Georgia at sunset on July 4 and moved up the Slot to Kula Gulf, a narrow body of water standing 180 miles northwest of Guadalcanal. Twenty-five miles long and anywhere from ten to twenty-five miles wide, the gulf separated New Georgia on the east from Kolombangara to its west. The ships would enter the gulf from the north, steam southward along the coast of Kolombangara to bombard Vila at its southern tip, execute a U-turn to blast Bairoko Harbor and Rice Anchorage on New Georgia’s western coast, and depart through the gulf’s northern exit for the return to Tulagi. The high-risk plan required the ships to steam within range of enemy coastal batteries and operate in waters frequented by Japanese submarines.

  Once in the Slot, MacDonald informed the crew that on their nation’s birthday they were headed toward New Georgia, where they would help land the Marines and conduct a fireworks celebration of their own. After speaking to them, he made certain that the St. Christopher medal his fiancée had handed him in Boston was safely ensconced in his left breast pocket. MacDonald liked the medal’s presence, almost as if Cecilia were with him.

  Deck crews donned steel helmets and life jackets, while in the wardroom O’Bannon’s doctor laid out instruments he hoped he would never have to utilize. A chief pharmacist’s mate checked men posted at an aft station to handle casualties there, then made certain that boxes of dressings and other medical supplies were properly placed at all battle stations. In the coding room, the communications officer stuffed code books and other top-secret documents into a bag, secured it, and weighted it with bricks to ensure that, should the ship sink, the material would not land in Japanese hands. Wooden shores and plugs of various sizes stood belowdecks in case crew needed to patch leaks or cover holes. Repair parties waited at different locations to battle fires and floods should the destroyer be hit.

  As the unit neared Kula Gulf that night, Lieutenant Miller aboard Strong checked on his men. They were familiar with the area around Guadalcanal, which Miller called “our baby. We knew it and its adjacent waters as we knew our own backyards at home,” but once they neared Kula Gulf, t
hey entered unknown waters.4

  Around midnight his ship and Nicholas pulled ahead of the other vessels to search the gulf with their radar and sonar. While they expected a hot greeting, they found only stillness.

  The cruisers and destroyers followed, steaming down the east coast of Kolombangara until they arrived at their bombardment stations. Lieutenant Pfeifer, aboard O’Bannon, felt as though he could cut the tension with a knife as he and others waited for the Japanese to rain shells their way. “If the Japs had spotted us,” he later wrote, “we could expect all hell to break loose from torpedo boats, midget subs, surface craft, planes, shore batteries and mines.”5

  Once at their bombardment stations, the main batteries from Helena, Honolulu, and St. Louis lit the skies with thundering salvos directed at Vila, followed by more from O’Bannon and Chevalier’s five-inch shells. Observing through a pair of binoculars, Norton-Taylor noticed that the guns bathed the ships in a pinkish glow as they boomed shells shoreward. He wrote that as the shells raced toward their targets, “they look more like Christmas tree balls and it is possible to follow them with the eye until they reach the end of their trajectory, where they simply vanish in the pockets of the darkness with no apparent effect.”6 Thunder from distant explosions rolled across the ships, and flames from shore indicated that their shells had struck.

  After blasting Vila, the bombardment force veered east toward New Georgia, turned north along its coast, and bombarded Bairoko Harbor before covering the Marine landings at Rice Anchorage. Aboard O’Bannon, Ensign John J. Noonan, a battery officer on a small gun, nearly jumped when the guns broke the stillness. The destroyer lurched, and “a great mass of yellow flame shot out from the guns,” leaving him momentarily blinded. As he “watched the trail of light streaking into shore, made by tracer powder,” Noonan glanced across the waters toward Helena and saw a “perfect arc” streaming from the cruiser to the island, “as though a hose of fire was being played on the target.”7 So numerous were the shells flowing toward the island that one officer thought they looked like snowflakes in a New England snowstorm, and eruptions on Kolombangara outlined the trees against burning barracks and ammunition dumps.