laststandonzombieisland

Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, May 8, 2024: Surigao Torpedo Slinger and Overall Slugger

Above we see, 80 years ago today, a great original color shot of one of the trainable 21-inch quintuple MK 15 torpedo tube stands on the Fletcher-class destroyer USS Halford (DD-480), complete with helmets on top of the crew shield and a greyhound with a steel fish in his grill.

A Fletcher, equipped with two such mounts, could rocket out 10 24-foot torpedoes in a single salvo, each with up to an 823-pound HBX warhead.

Just five months after the above images, Halford’s squadron, DesRon 56, would famously charge the onrushing Japanese battleline during the overnight Battle of Surigao Strait, leaving the 35,000-ton Fuso-class dreadnought Yamashiro with several holes poked in her hull.

The Fletchers

The Fletchers were the WWII equivalent of the Burke class, constructed in a massive 175-strong class from 11 builders that proved the backbone of the fleet for generations.

Coming after the interwar “treaty” destroyers such as the Benson- and Gleaves classes, they were good-sized (376 feet oal, 2,500 tons full load, 5×5″ guns, 10 torpedo tubes) and could have passed as unprotected cruisers in 1914.

Powered by a quartet of oil-fired Babcock & Wilcox boilers and two Westinghouse or GE steam turbines, they had 60,000 shp on tap– half of what today’s Burkes have on a hull 25 percent as heavy– enabling them to reach 38 knots, a speed that is still fast for destroyers today.

LCDR Fred Edwards, Destroyer Type Desk, Bureau of Ships, famously said of the class, “I always felt it was the Fletcher class that won the war . . .they were the heart and soul of the small-ship Navy.”

Meet Halford

Our subject is the only U.S. Navy warship named for Coxswain William Halford who, at age 30 when the sloop-of-war USS Saginaw ran aground near Midway on 29 October 1871, volunteered with three others to sail the ship’s 25-foot sail gig an amazing 1,500 miles to Honolulu for help, with Halford the only one to survive the brutal 31-day voyage.

USS Halford (DD-480) was laid down six months before Pearl Harbor on 3 June 1941 at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, was launched on 29 October 1942 with the late LT Halford’s daughter, Eunice, as the sponsor, and commissioned 10 April 1943.

Of interest, Halford was one of only three destroyers (out of six originally planned) that were built with a floatplane catapult shoehorned in place of the standard 2nd set of torpedo tubes and Mount 53 (3rd) 5-inch gun mount. In effect, trading half of their torpedo tubes and a fifth of their main battery for a single floatplane. Her floatplane-carrying sisters were USS Stevens (DD-479) and USS Pringle (DD-477).

From July through September 1943, she would spend an extended shakedown period testing out the feasibility of her somewhat novel seaplane fit.

Halford’s embarked naval aviator was LT Bob Schiller, who had flown SOC-3 Seagull biplanes from (and almost went down with) the heavy cruiser USS Astoria (CA-34). Surviving the loss of his ship at the Battle of Savo Island, he eventually reached the west coast and, after 30 days leave, was ordered to Oregon to join Halford as her destroyer aviator.

As detailed by Schiller in a 2006 Naval History article. 

“The guys firing torpedoes would have preferred another set of torpedo tubes,” Schiller said. “The guys on the antiaircraft guns didn’t like it either. They had to give up one of the 5-inch guns to make room for the plane. The ship lost 20 percent of its firepower right there. The skipper [Lieutenant Commander Gustave N. Johansen] wasn’t in favor of the plane, either; he wanted a fighting destroyer.”

On a shakedown cruise to San Diego, the ship practiced aircraft launch and recovery. It was necessary to smooth the sea—turn sharply in a circle—to prepare a landing zone for the plane. The aircraft would taxi into the zone where Schiller gunned the engine just enough to push the nose up on a sled deployed from the destroyer. A crane then angled out over the plane and dropped a large hook to slide through an eyebolt on the top of the fuselage. “An experienced radioman-gunner [in the rear seat] could hook it himself,” Schiller said. “Otherwise, it was up to the pilot to engage the hook. You have to stand up on a seat that is pretty slippery and take your parachute off with nothing to hang onto. You’d have to stand up and catch that swinging hook. There was no real way to brace yourself except with your feet and sometimes you’d lose your balance and fall over the side to the amusement of those on the ship.” Occasionally, Schiller took shipmates and officers aloft, and on one flight he allowed a Hollywood cameraman to film the destroyer launching torpedoes. Most of the time Schiller, however, had nothing to do. “They flew the plane very, very rarely,” he said. “Every time we joined a new group, I would get to fly at least once. The captain or the admiral would want to see it fly. So, we would fly around for his curiosity.”

As noted by DANFS, all seemed to agree that it was a bad idea: “Because of tactical changes and our growing aircraft carrier strength Halford returned to Mare Island 27 October 1943 for alterations which replaced the catapult and scout plane.”

Likewise, her similarly-equipped sisters were rebuilt as well. 

By 6 December 1943, completed with a full set of five 5″/38 guns and 10 21-inch tubes, Halford set off for the West Pac, to get in the big show. Meanwhile, Bob Schiller converted to Wildcats and would soon join Composite Squadron VC-78 aboard the jeep carrier USS Saginaw Bay (CVE-82) for the duration.

War!

Escorting the 18,000-ton Maston liner turned troopship SS Lurline with Marine reinforcements to Guadalcanal just in time for Christmas 1943, Halford soon became flagship for VADM Theodore Stark “Ping” Wilkinson’s Green Islands Attack Force and was on hand for operations there in February 1944.

While on an anti-shipping patrol as part of DesRon 45 off the west coast of New Ireland a week after Green Island’s D-Day, on the early morning of 25 February Halford and her sister USS Bennett (DD-473) got in a surface gun battle with a Japanese convoy, reportedly sinking two coastal ships and damaging a patrol vessel. Halford pumped out 219 5-inch shells in just 20 minutes then was given the green light to turn around and plaster the beached patrol boat with another 42 rounds.

These were likely the twin 839-ton cargo ships Tatsukiko Maru and Tatsugiko Maru, listed as lost on this date off New Ireland.

Shipping to the Marianas for Operation Forager: The Battle of Saipan, Halford was at sea for 75 days including bombardment of Tinian’s defenses, screening Task Force 58 for the Marianas Turkey Shoot, covering beach demolition units for the landings on Guam and Angaur Island.

Notably, on 10 July 1944, Halford, responding to a report from a pilot off USS Wasp, closed with and destroyed what was reported to be a beached submarine (possibly an Unkato supply container) on the sand bar at the mouth of the Umatac River on Guam’s Umatac Bay. She sent 386 rounds to the beach that day.

Then it was on to the Philippines. Attached to RADM Jesse Barrett “Oley” Oldendorf’s Task Group 77.2, the Fire Group of the Southern Attack Force, Halford was one of 28 destroyers screening Oldendorf’s massive force of six battleships and eight cruisers, intended to provide all the naval gunfire support that would be needed for the landings.

The thing is, on the night of 24-25 October, VADM Shoji Nishimura’s Southern Force, sailing to the Philippines from Brunei with the battleships Yamashiro and Fuso along with a mix of cruisers and destroyers, made an appearance.

With the benefit of radar and a screen of 39 massed PT-boats that went in on an early (but unsuccessful) torpedo attack on Nishimura’s force, the destroyers were tasked to make a torpedo run of their own. One of the nine tin cans of DesRon 56, Halford was split off with sisters USS Robinson (DD 563) and USS Bryant (DD 665), under Capt. Thomas Conley, for their run, while the squadron’s other six destroyers were to make their own runs in two other 3-ship sections. Lined up with the Japanese phantoms on the horizon by 0345, it was all over by 0359, each firing a half-salvo of five torpedoes.

Their target ended up being Yamashiro, with Nishimura aboard.

Halford’s skipper, in the ship’s war diary, felt that at least two of his fish may have hit a target.

While it will never positively be known whose torpedoes hit Yamishiro that morning, it is known that she picked up at least two hits, if not four, from the destroyer attack, slowing her down enough that she was soon the sole target of Oldendorf’s battlewagons and cruisers and she vanished from radar by 0421, taking 1,626 officers and crew to the bottom, some 600 feet down.

Halford continued her duties in the Leyte Gulf for the rest of the year, covering landings, escorting cripples and slow convoys, and fighting off Japanese air attacks.

11 January 1945 saw Halford, in a fast column of Fletchers that included USS Bush, Stanly, Stembel, and Dashiell, slow to just 5 knots and then own San Fernando Bay, 40 miles north of Manila, where they leisurely destroyed three small Japanese Sugar Charlie or Sugar Fox cargo ships, a landing craft, and several beached barges, with the destroyers firing just over 1,500 5-inch shells (244 from Halford alone) in 34 minutes and an overhead combat air patrol reporting “no craft, left afloat…”

Halford’s war came to a pause when, on Valentine’s Day 1945, while patrolling Saipan amid a nighttime smoke screen, she rammed type EC2-S-C1 Liberty ship SS Terry E. Stephenson. Although there were no injuries, she suffered enough damage to her bow to have to pull out for Mare Island to have it carved off and rebuilt– knocking her out of the war over three months.

Getting back to the West Pac in June, Halford drew quiet duty escorting transports from Eniwetok to Ulithi then, in August, as part of the Northern Pacific Fleet’s TF 44 (six jeep carriers and eight destroyers/escorts), made for Ominato on Northern Honshu where her task force occupied the Japanese naval base there on 12 September.

Returning to Alaska, Halford spent Navy Day 1945 in Juneau then was ordered back to Bremerton and then San Diego, for mothballs. She was decommissioned on 15 May.

Halford earned 13 battle stars for her war, a remarkable achievement considering she only served with the fleet in combat for 15 months, suffering half a year lost in floatplane experiments and subsequent rebuild, and another three months in repair.

Stricken 1 May 1968, Halford only left mothballs for a tow to the breakers, sold 2 April 1970 to National Metal & Steel then taken the short distance to Terminal Island, where she was dismantled.

Epilogue

Halford’s war diaries and plans are in the National Archives. 

Oral histories of Bob Schiller— the destroyer aviator– and Seaman Green Day are in the collection of the National Museum of the Pacific War.

Sadly, there has not been a second U.S. Navy ship to carry the name.

As for Halford’s Fletcher-class sisters, 24 were sunk or evaluated as constructive total losses during WWII. These ships were sent into harm’s way. 

The rest of her surviving sisters were widely discarded in the Cold War era by the Navy, who had long prior replaced them with more modern destroyers and Knox-class escorts. Those who had not been sent overseas as military aid were promptly sent to the breakers or disposed of in weapon tests. The class that had faced off with the last blossom of Japan’s wartime aviators helped prove the use of just about every anti-ship/tactical strike weapon used by NATO in the Cold War including Harpoon, Exocet, Sea Skua, Bullpup, Walleye, submarine-launched Tomahawk, and even at least one Sidewinder used in surface attack mode. In 1997, SEALS sank the ex-USS Stoddard (DD-566) via assorted combat-diver delivered ordnance. The final Fletcher in use around the globe, Mexico’s Cuitlahuac, ex-USS John Rodgers (DD 574), was laid up in 2001 and dismantled in 2011.

Today, four hard-charging Fletchers are on public display, three of which in the U.S– USS The Sullivans (DD-537) at Buffalo, USS Kidd (DD-661) at Baton Rouge, and USS Cassin Young (DD-793) at the Boston Navy Yard. Please try to visit them if possible. Kidd, the best preserved of the trio, was used extensively for the filming of the Tom Hanks film, Greyhound.

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Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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