FIGHTING SHIP
BY JOHN A. STROTHER, CAPTAIN
For almost twenty years the United States had added no new battleship to its Navy. When in 1941 the NORTH CAROLINA and WASHINGTON were commissioned, they were so greatly different from their predecessors as to captivate the imagination of every officer and man in the service. Perhaps it was their speed that attracted the most attention. Traditionally the battleship was a relatively slow and cumbersome fortress. These new sister ships were capable of twenty-seven knots. They were long, with the sleek lines of a light cruiser, and handled like one. They were huge vessels in every respect. The main battery of nine 16 inch guns fired the heaviest broadside of any ship afloat, and they bristled with anti-aircraft guns Their armor and compartmentation gave them a capacity to take punishment beyond any rival.
On May 15th the crew marched aboard the WASHINGTON. The pier swarmed with the men who had built her, gathered to see the flag raised on a piece of their handiwork of which they were immensely proud. The band played, the speeches were made, and the job of shaking her down commenced. There was still a big task ahead. We had to learn to live in her, to run her, and to fight her. There were endless drills. Man and machine alike had to be broken in. We worked all week and put to sea week-ends. As the war drew nearer the tempo increased. There was none of the leisure of peace-times in the air, for we knew what was ahead, knew that we carried a responsibility beyond leisure. We made our shakedown cruise to Guantanamo Bay and our liberty port was Port au Prince. It was not a wonderful trip as such trips go, but the best that could be arranged. We had some fun, and the ship ran like a top. On our return we dropped anchor in Hampton Roads.
And there we were on December seventh when the news came of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The word went through the ship like wildfire. We fully expected to be racing for the Canal before another sun had set, and were eager for the fray. We felt we were ready, and nothing remained but to weigh anchor. The papers rumored that we were on our way. The High Command, however, had other plans.
We drilled in Chesapeake Bay until Christmas, then cruised in the Gulf of Mexico for thirty seven days with out anchoring while we fired a whole year of gunnery practices one after another. After 3 few days in the Yard we sailed for Casco Bay in Maine. We had been to New York, and had run our standardization trials at Rockland, and at last we joined the Fleet. By now it was March, and the war was three months old.
One bleak day in March we weighed anchor, slipped through the net and stood out to sea. After days of battling North Atlantic gales we came to anchor in Scapa Flow. Here we were in the war for certain. The German airfields of Norway were less than three hundred miles away. Scapa had been bombed. Ships had been sunk here. The surrounding waters were alive with enemy submarines. There were barrage balloons, hundreds of anti-aircraft batteries dotted the bare islands about the Flow. The Home Fleet was all about us, and we were a part of it.
These British ships and the officers and ratings that we grew to know, had been at war for two and a half years. They were veterans of scores of battles: of Cape Matapan, Dunkirk, Malta, Narvik, and the sinking of the Bismark. They had been bombed and shelled and torpedoed. We learned a great deal from them of what was ahead of us, and profited thereby. They freely passed on their experience. The Home Fleet guarded the Atlantic while our special task was to cover the Murmansk convoys against the giant Von Tirptiz which was in a Norwegian Fjord. She had to be kept hold up there, or destroyed if she ventured forth.
For four months we covered these convoys. In company with a strong force of our own and British ships under the Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet we put to sea each time a convoy went through. We seldom saw the convoys themselves, but we kept interposed between them and the main danger that beset them. Our forays took us deep into the still and lonely Arctic, to eight hundred miles from the Pole, farther north than any but a few ever had been. We dodged torpedoes, saw ships sunk, and were harassed by German planes. It was a conditioning in war and the ways of the sea that gave us a priceless confidence in ourselves and in our ship.
We anchored in Hvalfjord, Iceland, in July, and while there we received orders to return to New York. So our trick in the Home Fleet was ended, and we had completed our first war cruise. We were a seasoned crew.
In New York we found that our overhaul was to be a quick one. We scarcely had a chance to see our families and glance at civilization again before we found ourselves on our way.
Our Marines had landed on Guadalcanal, and as the battle raged, we arrived at Panama and set out across six thousand miles of open water for Tonga Tabu, where we arrived September 14th, 1942. At last we were in the theater where we felt the real war was being fought.
Twenty-four hours later we had fueled and were on our way again. We were then the only fast battleship in the South Pacific. Our few carriers had been reduced almost to the vanishing point, and these and our cruisers, destroyers and ourselves were all that stood between the entire Japanese Fleet and our precarious beach head in the Solomon's.
The Guadalcanal campaign was the turning point of the war. For six months the battle raged back and forth. In action after action our Navy fought against odds through these desperate times until the waters around Savo Island were so littered with hulks as to be renamed "Ironbottom Sound".
The WASHINGTON was there all through it. Our gallant cruisers and destroyers bore the brunt of the fighting in those narrow waters, but we had our share also. In the Night action of November 15th, WASHINGTON sank a Japanese battleship off Savo in seven salvos and came off without a scratch. The story of the Solomon's is too long to tell here, but we remained through the Russell's and Munda campaign and until our forces went ashore at Empress Augusta Bay. After our big action in November the enemy never again Sent his heavy ships into these waters, but kept them on the outskirts at Truk.
Through the spring and summer and fall of 1943 things were slow on board the WASHINGTON. It was the turn of the tide. We had halted the Japanese advance, yet were not sufficiently strong to take the full offensive ourselves. While our amphibious force made steady progress up the Solomon's, we rounded out a series of twelve war patrols in their support.
In the late fall, our real offensive began, almost two years after the beginning of the war. The immense building program had borne fruit, and scores of new ships had joined the Fleet. The lessons learned in the early days had been studied and turned into new tactics which fitted the expanse of ocean in which the campaign to come would be fought. There were new carriers loaded down with the latest types of planes, new destroyers, new cruisers: a force of which we dreamed in the hard days of the Solomon's. The tide had indeed changed, we were off for Tokyo.
This was the Gilbert's campaign, and Makin and Tarawa Atolls were to be captured by Marines that the Amphibious Assault Force would put ashore. The WASHINGTON was a part of the Support Force, whose position was at the spearhead of the attack. We were to gain and maintain control of the sea and control of the air; a large order, but one we were designed to accomplish. The force of which we were a part had to be able to meet and defeat the entire enemy fleet and air force in any combination he could bring to bear. It had to be the most powerful naval surface and air force in the world: and so it was. The WASHINGTON and her sisters were the battleline.
We slipped during the night into the body of water between the Gilberts and the Marshalls, between our objective and the enemy's supporting bases, straight across the line his reinforcements would have to take, and at dawn we struck. Our planes swept his airfields, destroyed his planes and cratered his runways until they were useless.
We sank the light naval forces which we found there. Then we stood ready and waiting for his reaction. But the anchors of his fleet remained firmly embedded in the coral sand of Truk Lagoon, and he sent only submarines to harass us. By air, his reaction was violent. He staged in torpedo bombers by the dozens, night and day; and we were under air attack until the islands were captured, and we could withdraw.
On our way back to base, we gave our guns their first real test in shore bombardment when we raided the enemy held island of Nauru. It was a terrific pounding that was meted out that day, and Nauru never recovered from it.
Our plans then called for the capture of the Marshals just as we had taken the Gilberts, and the WASHINGTON'S job was to be much the same. The heart of the Marshalls was a small sea which was bounded by the atolls of Kwajalein, Jaluit, Mille, Maloelap and Wotje, all strong enemy bases. Into this barrier we steamed one night, and at sunrise our air squadrons struck them all at once. In an hour we had control of the air, and in almost the same span we had control of the sea. For again the enemy fleet refused to do battle. Next day the WASHINGTON'S guns were leveling the defenses of Kwajalein. A day later the Assault Forces arrived and commenced landing, and in a week the Marshalls were ours.
The WASHINGTON had been constantly in the front lines for twenty months and we now returned to Puget Sound for a well-earned rest. Both man and machine needed overhaul. Except for three days of leave in New York in August, 1942, our crew had been at sea in one war zone or another since the beginning. Only one who had experienced it can know what that rest meant!
The WASHINGTON left Puget Sound in May and stopped off in San Francisco for two days. Then, with everything aboard for another year in the lonely Pacific, she passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and headed westward. In Pearl Harbor, she received her orders to proceed to Majuro in the Marshalls, there to join the Fleet.
The lagoon, miles across and twice as long, was filled with ships as far as the eye could see, all busy with last minute preparations for the campaign to come. It was to be the Marianas, Saipan, Tinian and Guam - a thousand miles ahead of our most advanced base, and fortress of the inner defense line of Japan. These were not low, coral reefs but hilly islands of some size, heavily defended and well protected by air bases such as we had not met before. It was a thrust far into enemy territory, with the Carolines to the south, Marcus to the east, the Philippines to the west and the Empire itself only 1500 miles away, connected to our objective by the island chains of the Nanpo Shoto.
It was a dangerous adventure. The Japs would surely fight with every resource at their command. We should be attacked by sea and by air as long as the enemy had the means to attack us. Our force again had the mission of absorbing these attacks from whatever quarter they might come and enabling the Amphibious Force to proceed with its job of assaulting the islands themselves, unmolested by attacks from the sea or air.
We left Majuro and steamed westward at a fast clip, undetected. Four days later in late afternoon, the air over the Marianas was suddenly filled with Grummans, and the battle was on. The Japs never got off the ground. Next day was the same, with bombs falling everywhere and not a Jap plane in the air. The following morning the WASHINGTON and her team of fast battleships appeared off the beaches of Saipan and Tinian and reduced the coast defenses to rubble. As the Amphibious Forces came up, we turned the job over to them and moved on to our covering position in the Philippine Sea.
The Combined Fleet had withdrawn to the anchorage of Tawi Tawi in the Philippines, though a part of it was in Japan. The first reaction came as usual by air. Enemy land-based planes came from the Bonins to the north and the Carolines to the South, but the air groups of our carriers met them all. The enemy was no match for our fighters, and his attacks were ineffective in lending aid to his besieged garrisons. Our task group fell upon his shipping and in short order sank all within hundreds of miles. The Marianas were cut off from all hope of reinforcement, and were being slowly but inevitably reduced.
The Combined Fleet had to act, or concede that the United States Fleet could move on to the shores of the Empire unchecked, taking whatever Japanese territory it chose. There seemed to be no choice but to attack a greatly superior force with little chance of surprise, and in the open sea. There was, however, a plan. The Japanese carrier force, after its defeat at Midway, had been built again to formidable proportions, equipped with the best aircraft Japan could build, and manned by the flower of the nation. The Japanese planes had a range superior to our own, and had the advantage of the use of the precariously operative airfields of Guam, Rota and Tinian. An attack in force could be launched from outside the radius of our planes and might succeed in crippling our ships in sufficient numbers for the enemy to risk a surface engagement. Should the plan succeed, Saipan might be relieved, and the Marianas operation end in defeat for the United States.
On the 19th of June the attack came. We were beset by wave after wave of dive bombers and torpedo bombers, 450 in all. Our fighters met them half-way, and those that got through were engaged by the gunfire of our ships. When the smoke of battle cleared the Japanese carrier force had suffered one of the most resounding defeats in history. The whole Japanese carrier air force was destroyed almost to the last plane, and our ships remained unharmed.
Taking advantage of the total lack of information in the hands of the enemy admiral, our force managed to close the next day to within extreme range of his fleet, and heavy strikes were flown off. With out planes, his only defense was his anti-aircraft guns. Several ships were sunk before our attack was over, a severe blow to an already inferior force. We pursued at forced draft, but it was a stern chase and the remnants escaped to the Inland Sea.
The rest is more fresh in our minds. In September, while United States forces landed on Palau and Morotai, the WASHINGTON lay in full sight of the coast of Luzon with the first surface force to sight those shores since the early part of the war. While our troops invaded Leyte, we struck Formosa and Okinawa. All through the fall the carrier task force, of which we were a part, roamed the waters on the Western edge of the pacific, always between our landing forces and Japan. In January, as we covered the landings in Lingayen Gulf, we entered the South China Sea and attacked Saigon and Hong Kong, the first surface force to come in sight of the eastern shores of the continent of Asia.
Then came the Tokyo raids of February of this year. It was a great moment, after all these years, when we stood on the enemy's doorstep and pounded his capital city, the object and focus of all our effort. We bombarded Iwo Jima on Dog Day, and for three days afterwards as well, as we helped the Marines to blast the enemy out of his caves.
In keeping with the times, this naval war has been greatly different from the wars of the past. There has been no Trafalgar or Jutland in which the giants, drawn up in long lines, have pounded each other to destruction. Nevertheless, the strategic role of the battleship has remained the same. The fleet that would occupy the enemy's inner seas must be prepared to meet the best the enemy can give. It must stand and fight; must take his heaviest blows against its armored sides, and return them twofold. If the enemy, discovering such a fleet, refuses to do battle then he concedes the battlefield and control of the sea is won. The WASHINGTON has performed every manner of task in this war; but through every campaign, above and beyond these more routine duties, she has taken her place at the spearhead and challenged the enemy's best ships of the line. Without the WASHINGTON and her sisters out there in front our fleet could not have driven as it did.
