Ah! 13 November: 80th anniversary of the day USS William D Porter dropped a depth charge by accident, almost giving away, in U-boat infested waters, the location of a convoy carrying President Roosevelt. Mind you, the following day, they accidentally fired a torpedo at him.
The fun had started for the Willie D, as the ship was known to its crew, on 11 November (the day before it set off from Norfolk, Virginia, on its top secret mission) when it got too close to a sister ship, and its anchor tore railings and life rafts off the other vessel.
By 13th, it had rendezvoused with the battleship USS Iowa, which was carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and a number of other Top. Men. to meet Churchill and Stalin at the Big Three Conference in Tehran.
If they were not to alter the course of world history in a way they didn’t want, it was vital to avoid German submarines, so speed and radio silence were the order of the day. No one on the convoy, then, really expected a massive explosion in the water nearby, which is what the account in the June 2010 edition of Naval Historical Review describes:
All of the ships commenced anti-submarine manoeuvres. This continued until Willie D sheepishly admitted that one of her depth charges had fallen off her stern and exploded. The ‘safety’ had not been set as instructed. Captain Walker was watching his ‘fast track’ career become side tracked. Shortly after, a freak wave inundated the ship, stripping away everything that was not lashed down. A man was washed overboard and never found. Next, the boiler room lost power on one of her boilers. The Captain, by this point, was making hourly reports to Iowa on his ship’s difficulties. It would have been merciful if the force commander had detached the hard luck ship and sent her back to Norfolk. But no, she sailed on.
It continues:
The morning of 14th November dawned with a moderate sea and pleasant weather.
Just off Bermuda, they decided to test the Iowa’s defensive systems, and launched some weather balloons as targets.
…Over on Willie D, Captain Walker watched the fireworks display with admiration and envy. Thinking about career redemption and breaking the hard luck spell, he sent his impatient crew to battle stations. They began to shoot down the balloons Iowa had missed as they drifted into Willie D’s vicinity. Down on the torpedo mounts, the crew watched, waiting to take some practice shots of their own on the big battleship, which even though 6,000 yards away, seemed to blot out the horizon.
The thing about a practice firing is that it’s important to remove the primers, which, once installed, “would explode, shooting the torpedo out of its tube”. On the Willie D, one Lawton Dawson “had forgotten to remove the primer from tube 3”.
The Willie D, somewhat understandably, decided this was a moment to “break the strictly enforced radio silence”. Initially, the radio operator on the Iowa was more concerned with protocol and “requested that the offending station identify itself first”, but eventually the battleship containing the President of the United States of America got the message and started taking evasive action. The leader of the free world himself, however, did not, but still escaped harm.
Meanwhile, on Iowa’s bridge, word of the torpedo firing had reached FDR, who asked that his wheelchair be moved to the railing so that he could see better what was coming his way. His loyal Secret Service agent immediately drew his pistol as if he was going to shoot the torpedo. As Iowa began evasive action, all her guns were trained on Willie D. There was now some thought that Willie D was part of an assassination plot. Within moments of the warning, there was a tremendous explosion just behind the battleship. The torpedo had been detonated by the wash kicked up as the battleship increased speed.
US armed forces and defence industry news site Task & Purpose (reprinting a 1994 account by a historian in The Retired Officer magazine) says:
The entire crew was placed under arrest and sent to Bermuda to face trial.
This was, apparently,
the first instance in U.S. Naval history that the entire crew of a ship had been arrested.
Dawson confessed, was “sentenced to 14 years of hard labor” and the rest of the crew were told their careers were over.
Roosevelt stepped in, insisting that, since they’d found this was simply A Series Of Unfortunate Events, no one should be punished, and the Willie D was reassigned to “a relatively simple patrol mission” in the Aleutian Islands in the northern Pacific, far away from trouble.
Later in the war, it was reassigned to Okinawa. This was after it had
accidentally shot a five-inch artillery shell which landed on the commandant’s front yard on the American base in the [Aleutian] islands.
Whether these two facts are connected is unclear.
In Okinawa, the luckless ship
finally did a fine job destroying many different Japanese aircraft … oh, and three American aircraft. Those who greeted the ship’s crew often joked, “Don’t shoot, we’re Republicans!”
And then…
On June 10, 1945, the ship ran out of any luck it ever possessed. When a fully-loaded kamikaze plane — a Japanese bomber constructed mostly from canvas and wood — snuck into U.S. airspace, it attempted to crash into a ship near the William D. Porter. However, at the last moment, it veered away and crashed alongside the Willie Dee. The plane sunk, but still managed to explode underneath of the ill-fated destroyer. This tore open the ship’s hull and caused the ship to sink. In a final twist of much-deserved luck — all of the crew survived.
Still, at least it had enjoyed a memorable career. A memorable two-year career, that is. The ship had been commissioned in June 1943.
