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misinformation that the O’Brien was hit two minutes after the hit on the battleship. If this were true, it would be impossible to reconcile it with the one- sub, one-spread theory, because at the moment the O’Brien was hit, she was about 1,000 yards closer than the battleship to the Wasp force and hence to the firing position of the 1-19. (Nonsynchronization of timepieces, reflected in the action reports of two of the ships, including the O’Brien's, appears to account for this error.) I can attest, and other eyewitnesses will confirm, that the O’Brien was hit less than a minute before the North Carolina, thus helping to support the one-sub theory.
On the other hand, there is the question of what role, if any, the 1-15 played in the attack. There is previously mentioned evidence provided by the Mas tin and O’Brien that more than one sub may have been present in attack positions. There are reconstructed Japanese records which reveal that no less than eight submarines, including both the 1-15 and 1-19, were patrolling southeast of Guadalcanal in the general area (several hundred square miles) of the 15 September attack. The same testimony shows, however, that all eight of these boats survived that patrol and returned to port.This would appear to rule out the theory that a sub scored on the battleship or destroyer without living to tell of it. Prime suspect 1-15, along with the 1-19, is recorded as undergoing maintenance at Truk as of 23 September. The absence of any reconstructed record that the 1-15, or any other sub except the 1-19, claimed success on 15 September leads to the conclusion that none did.
Is it really possible then that the 1-19 alone, with one spread of torpedoes, did all that damage? Figure 2, taken from the action reports of the U. S. ships involved, should solve the mystery to the satisfaction of even the most critical naval sleuth.
The one-submarine theory conforms almost exactly to the established facts of the tactical situation that applied to all six U. S. ships from which torpedo wakes were seen. The series of near misses was, by itself, extraordinarily coincidental. That the North Carolina and O’Brien were struck by stray torpedoes reveals, when a graphic plot is examined, that the two ships, entirely by chance, ran into the torpedoes! Adding to the luck enjoyed by the skipper of the 1-19 is the fact that the torpedo which struck the mighty North Carolina was almost at the end of its run.
Lucky or not, this incredible accomplishment by the 1-19 ranks among the all-time record successes of submarine warfare in any navy.
Captain Kinashi, I salute you!
Captain Blee, a graduate of George Washington University, served as a line officer from 1940 to 1967. He has commanded three ships, the Meredith (DD-890), Shadwell (LSD-15), and General W. A. Mann (TAP-112). He has served on the staffs of Cin- CNELM. CinCLantFlt, and CinCPacFIt in naval intelligence and as the naval attache in Singapore and Malaysia. He presently resides in Jacksonville, N.C.
As I Recall . . . “Sink the Waspl”
By Vice Admiral William R. Smedberg III, U. S. Navy (Retired)
When the destroyer Lansdowne (DD-486) was commissioned in late April 1942, Lieutenant Commander Smedberg was her first commanding officer. For the next few months, she was involved in shakedown training, escort duty, and antisubmarine warfare in the Atlantic. While operating in the vicinity of the Panama Canal on 12 July 1942, she attacked the German U-135 and was later credited with the kill. In mid-August, the Lansdowne and the other three ships of Destroyer Division 24 were assigned to escort the USS South Dakota (BB-57), which was the flagship of Rear Admiral Willis A. Lee, Jr., Commander Battleship Division 6.
We rendezvoused with the South Dakota, took her down to Panama, and went through the canal with her on 21 August. When we arrived in Balboa, Admiral Lee, the skippers of the four destroyers, and our division commodore, Commander Thomas J. Ryan, were ordered to report to the Commandant Fifteenth Naval District, who was Rear Admiral Clifford E. Van Hook. When we got to his office, Admiral Van Hook got up, closed his door, locked it, and said, “Gentlemen, I have the most terrible thing to tell you. We have just lost the cruisers Vincennes, Quincy, Astoria, and the Australian cruiser Canberra. This is very highly classified, but since you’re on your way out there, I feel I have to tell you about it.”
I remember Admiral Lee asked, “God, what did we do to the Japs? How many Jap ships did we sink?”
And Van Hook said, “As far as I can tell, we didn't do anything to the Japs. They suffered no damage, as far as I know.”
That really shook us, because we wondered what the Japs could have that we didn’t have that could do something like this. The dispatch said it was in a night action. Here we were, starting out for the Solomon Islands and that was a thoroughly shaking thing. We drilled all the way out, making the best speed we could. The destroyers fueled from the South Dakota; so we went nonstop all the way. We went way south of the Marquesas—way, way into the South Pacific. We didn’t even zigzag, going out. We were so far south that we figured the Japs couldn’t possibly be down there, and they weren't. We went first to Tongatabu and then to Espiritu Santo.
Our first assignment upon arrival in the war zone was some convoying. My division was
assigned as escort for the carrier Wasp (CV-7). The Lansdowne, Duncan (DD-445), McCalla (DD-488), and Lardner (DD-487) were our four destroyers. We were in a circular screen around the carrier on a beautiful afternoon, 15 September 1942, and she had just completed recovering planes. We were turned into the wind, and the signal went up on the Wasp to resume base course, so we all began turning. I had my binoculars on the Wasp so that I could turn with her. All of a sudden, I saw a terrific explosion, then another, then a third. Some airplanes were thrown up off her deck, a huge explosion of flame went up, and we realized that she had been torpedoed. First we thought she'd blown up inside. Shortly after that, we saw a torpedo coming right from her at us in the Lansdowne.
I gave a “left, full rudder,” to try and head into it, and my exec jumped to the pelorus and took a bearing on it. To this day, I don’t know how he did it, but he subtracted in his head 180° to get the true bearing of the torpedo, picked up the voice radio, and gave the heading of the torpedo to the whole task force. As it got to about 20 or 30 feet from us, I could see it running 3 or 4 feet under the surface. The Lansdowne had a draft of 18 feet. But the torpedo dove just as it got to us, went between my flagstaff and my number one stanchion, went down the whole length of the ship, came up and knocked the bow off the O'Brien, the next destroyer over. (When we put that ship in commission. I announced that she was going to be known as “the Lucky L,” the Lucky Lansdowne. All through the war, she never had a scratch.)
Then we went to rescue Wasp survivors. The Duncan picked up something like 500. We got 447, of whom 41 were officers. Seven of the officers wound up stretched out on the deck of my cabin. We had 40 men who were severely wounded or badly burned. Some had been burned on board the Wasp and others by the oil afire on the water around her. Of the 40, only the four who died that first night failed to survive.
For a while at least, there was some question whether the Lansdowne herself would make it. We’d been out there a long time and were due to fuel from the Wasp either that afternoon or the next morning. I had gotten the tank ready for fueling by pumping the ballast water out. So 1 was kind of top-heavy with all these extra folks on board; there were about 750 altogether, counting my crew. It was a very, very unpleasant situation. Then came an order from Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, the task force commander who had been in the carrier and was now on board the Duncan: “Lansdowne, remain with the Wasp. Sink her with your topedoes. Do not leave her until she has sunk.”
Among the survivors I had rescued was the assistant engineer of the Wasp and a considerable number of his men. They apparently abandoned ship together, so we got that group. He said to me, “Sir, I secured the engineering plant of that ship and there’s no fire aft or amidships of the ship. I think we can go back on board. I can get that ship under way and we can get that fire out.”
1 reported to Admiral Noyes that I had the assistant engineer in my ship, and he felt certain
he could go back on board, start the engines, and either get the fire out or get the ship going astern, which would keep the fire in the forward part of the ship while they fought it. I requested permission to put him back on board and then take her in tow. The answer came back negative, “sink her.” So I got the torpedo officer up to the bridge. It was the first time we were to fire a torpedo from my ship. We had fired slugs, but we’d never fired a live torpedo. Apparently, there weren’t enough torpedoes to let us fire any in the early days when we were training. So we got about 1,000 yards abeam of the Wasp, read the instructions, which were so secret that only the torpedo officer and I knew that we had a magnetic explosive device in the torpedo. When you fired it under the keel of a ship, it was supposed to explode without having to hit the ship.
I said, “Set it for 15 feet under the keel.” We set it, we fired, the torpedo made a perfect flight down to the middle of the carrier, and nothing happened. So we took the next one and got in to about 800 yards. This time, I said, “Set it at keel depth,” so we’d just hit the keel. We had a good angle, right at her broadside, but the second torpedo went right under the middle of the ship, and we never heard a sound. Nothing happened.
In frustration I said, “Can you make that magnetic exploder inoperative? Can you get rid of it? Obviously it isn’t working.” He said he knew how to do that, so he and his torpedoman did something, and I said, “We’ll fire these set at ten feet.” We fired the last three. I had only five torpedoes. They all hit. They blew holes in the side of the Wasp, and she began slowly to fill with water.
The carrier had been torpedoed by the submarine at 1445 in the afternoon. It got to be pitch dark after we fired our torpedoes, and the Wasp was still blazing but refused to sink.
That left the Lansdowne in her overloaded condition with the obligation of remaining near a burning ship that was outlining us for the benefit of the Jap sub that I knew was around there watching us. I steamed on zigzagging courses in order to keep the submarine from lining me up. Finally, at 2100 that night, the Wasp sank. I had already been getting as far south from her as I could while still keeping the fire in sight. When I arrived at Espiritu Santo, I had practically no oil left in the ship. If anybody had overtaken me, I couldn’t have run away. I had insufficient fuel oil to make my escape at any speed higher than 15 knots.
When the war was over and we read the enemy’s records, we found that a big Jap cruiser- destroyer task force had the burning Wasp in sight from the north and was coming down at full speed. If she’d stayed afloat another hour or two, they would have been down there and had me. They got there just after she sank.
This account is an edited excerpt from the Naval Institute oral history of Admiral Smedberg. He was interviewed by Dr. John T. Mason on 2 October 1975.