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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday Nov 26, Marilyn’s Tin Can

Here we see the Fletcher-class destroyer USS Benham (DD-796) as she appeared during WWII where she earned an impressive eight battlestars in just over 21-months at sea. She is all made up in her Camouflage Measure 31, Design 2C war paint.

One of the last pre-WWII destroyer designs of the U.S. Navy, the amazing 175 Fletchers proved the backbone of the fleet during the conflict. These expendable ‘tin cans’ saved Allied flyers, sank submarines, duked it out with shore batteries, torpedoed larger ships, screened the fleet, and shot down wave after wave of enemy aircraft, keeping the carriers and transports safe behind their hail of fire. With the ability to float in just 17.5-feet of seawater, these ships crept in close to shore and supported amphibious landings, dropped off commandos as needed, and helped in evacuations when required. Small ships with long legs (5500-nm un-refueled at 15-knots) they could be dispatched to wave the flag in foreign ports, provide gunboat diplomacy in times of tension, and race just over the horizon at 36.5-knots to check out a contact.

This particular ship was named for U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Andrew Ellicot Kennedy Benham (1832-1905), a storied veteran of the old pre-Civil War Navy that included catching a pike to the leg from a crazy fisherman off Macao while still a Midshipman before achieving command of the gunboat Penobscot during the War Between the States and retiring as head of the North Atlantic Station in 1894.

The first USS Benham (Destroyer No. 49/DD-49) was an Aylwin-class tin can built for the United States Navy prior to the American entry into World War I and scrapped in 1935. The second USS Benham (DD-397) was the lead ship of the her class of destroyers and served as the escort to the USS Enterprise on the Doolittle Raid and at Midway, saving the lived of over 700 sailors from the stricken Yorktown before being sunk at the Battle of Guadalcanal, 15 November 1942.

With big shoes to fill, the new Benham (DD796) was laid down just five months later on 23 April 1943 at Bethlehem Steel Company, Staten Island, NY. A war baby, she was built in less than eight months, being commissioned 20 Dec of the same year.

By May 1944, she was part of Task Group 52.11, a small force of two escort carriers and three destroyers just in time for the invasion of the Marianas and the Battle of the Philippine Sea. She shot down a number of enemy bombers and used her quartet of 5-inch guns well in gunfire missions against Japanese forces on Tinian and Guam. Joining the big boys of TG 38.2, she was the screen for the large fleet carrier USS Bunker Hill off Okinawa during raids there before striking at Japanese installations in the Philippines and helping support the landings along that massive archipelago. Just before Christmas, she was damaged, along with much of the Third Fleet, in a Typhoon off the Philippines, losing a man over the side.

In April 1945, Japanese kamikaze planes and friendly fire from another destroyer damaged her. One man was killed and two officers and six men wounded. Of the four planes shot down that day by antiaircraft fire, the Benham was credited with two, with assists on the others.

Later, while a part of Task Force 38, she pursued and depth charged a Japanese submarine and supported the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, helping to take wounded from the extensively damaged USS Franklin. Fighting in Japanese home waters, she was part of the massive Allied fleet in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945 when the war ended.

Decommissioned on 18 October 1946 in San Diego, she spent five years on Long Beach’s red lead row before being recalled to the colors in 1951 to participate in the new war in Korea. Just after new life was brought to the veteran ship, a young starlet named Marilyn Monroe, who had done her part as a war industry worker herself in the previous conflict, visited her stateside.

On June 19, renowned Hollywood photographer John Florea accompanied Marilyn on a trip to the Benham at Long Beach, where she was being made ready to sail for the East Coast.

 

She was visiting the ship for a special screening of the new Richard Widmark film, The Frogmen,  about Navy UDT teams, and was yet to become a household name. In the visit she wore the same studio wardrobe black netted dress seen in ‘As Young as You Feel’ filmed earlier that year in which she had a bit part.

The thing is, Marilyn was known to see other destroyers on the side…

Sailing to the East Coast, she underwent a modernization that saw her trading in her 20mm and 40mm guns, Benham picked up some new 3-inch AAA mounts in exchange. At this time, the port aft depth charge rack and all “K” guns were removed but she did pick up some Hedgehog devices forward. The old SC air search radar was replaced by the SPS-6, and other improvements made.

Her service during the Korean conflict was not as exciting as it was during WWII, never seeing the Pacific again until she circumnavigated the globe during a 1954 cruise. She was put out to pasture again after being transferred to the Atlantic, decommissioning at Boston on 30 June 1960.

Stricken in January 1974, she was transferred to the Marina de Guerra del Perú (Peruvian Navy) where she was recommisoned there as BAP Almirante Villar (D 76)—a traditional Peruvian Naval name held by a number of that country’s warships to honor the one-eyed sea dog Contralmirante Manuel Villar Olivera.

She gave a good six hard years service to that fleet until she was stricken in turn in 1980 at age 37.

Painted pink, she was disarmed and used in a series of Exocet missile tests before she was scrapped at the end of her life.

The very active USS Benham Association who intend to have their 23rd annual reunion in Norfolk, VA in 2015 keeps Benham’s memory alive.

To do your part to remember the old girl (Benham, not Marilyn), you can visit one of the four Fletcher sisterships have been preserved as museum ships, although only USS Kidd was never modernized and retains her WWII configuration:

-USS Cassin Young, in Boston, Massachusetts
-USS The Sullivans, in Buffalo, New York
-USS Kidd, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
-AT (Destroyer of Hellenic Navy) Velos former USS Charrette in Palaio Faliro, Greece

Specs:

(As commissioned, 1943)
Displacement: 2,050 tons (standard)
2,500 tons (full load)
Length: 376.5 ft (114.8 m)
Beam: 39.5 ft. (12.0 m)
Draft: 17.5 ft. (5.3 m)
Propulsion: 60,000 shp (45 MW); 4 oil-fired boilers; 2 geared steam turbines; 2 screws
Speed: 36.5 knots (67.6 km/h; 42.0 mph)
Range: 5,500 miles at 15 knots
(8,850 km at 28 km/h)
Complement: 329 officers and men
Armament: 4 × single 5 inch (127 mm)/38 caliber guns
6 × 40 mm Bofors AA guns, 10 × 20 mm Oerlikon cannons
10 × 21 inch (533 mm) antiship torpedo tubes (2 × 5; Mark 15 torpedoes)
6 × K-gun depth charge projectors (later Hedgehog)
2 × depth charge racks

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