The Fletcher-class destroyer William D. Porter (DD-579) earned a reputation as a “hard-luck” ship during her first operational cruise. While she cannot claim to have had a lock on good luck—she was sunk by a kamikaze in 1945—not all of her alleged bad luck has a basis in fact.
Her reputation was cemented on the sunny afternoon of 14 November 1943. She was part of a three-ship escort—with the USS Cogswell (DD-651) and Young (DD-580)—for the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61), which was transporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the first leg of his trip to the Tehran Conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. While the Iowa was engaged in antiaircraft target practice, the destroyers were practicing torpedo attacks, with the Iowa as the target.
As the President’s party watched weather balloons being popped by the battleship’s 40-mm cannon from the port side, general quarters sounded, and the repeated call of “Torpedo! Torpedo on the starboard beam!” emanated from the 1MC speakers. At the President’s request, his valet moved him in his wheelchair to the starboard side elevator to better view the torpedo.
The William D. Porter’s deck log is succinct: “1436 Torpedo accidentally fired from #2 mount while torpedo battery was exercising at drills. Investigation being held. . . . 1503 Iowa resumed firing AA practice.” The Iowa recorded receiving notice of the torpedo at 1438 and made an emergency turn to port at full speed, 28 knots. Two minutes later, observers on board “felt [a] slight concussion” because of a “deep depth charge or torpedo exploding in the near vicinity of this ship.” The Iowa’s high-speed wake had detonated the torpedo at a distance that reports put at between 100 and 1,000 yards.
The Porter had first attempted to alert the Iowa of the inadvertent launch by signal lamp because of radio silence requirements. The initial message wrongly said the torpedo was approaching from the port side. It was followed by one that erroneously stated the destroyer was in full reverse. The Porter finally broadcast in the clear: “Lion, Lion, Lion [the Iowa’s code name]! Come right, come hard right!” The battleship had no time to follow this instruction.
Once the torpedo exploded and it was clear there was no U-boat attack, the destroyer provided clarification: She acknowledged she inadvertently had launched the torpedo because a primer had not been removed from one of the tubes. At this point, hyperbole and fiction begin to mix with fact.
One report stated, “all of her [the Iowa’s] guns were trained” on the destroyer. It added that the career of her skipper was “over” and the ship and her crew “were placed under arrest” and ordered to Bermuda for trial. It has been claimed that this was the “first time in history a complete U.S. Navy ship’s company had been arrested.”
There is no record in the Iowa’s deck log of taking aim at the destroyer. The Porter’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Wilfred A. Walter, remained in command through 30 May 1944. He later retired as a rear admiral. The ship’s official Navy history cites neither the arrest of the destroyer nor her entire crew. The Porter was dispatched for Bermuda with the two other destroyers at 0900 on the 15th, when they rendezvoused with three relief destroyers.
An inquiry was held at Bermuda, and Chief Torpedoman’s Mate Lawton C. Dawson was transferred for a general court-martial. It is known that Dawson was reduced by one grade to torpedoman first class. With no readily available proof, multiple sources say he was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor, but Roosevelt intervened and requested that no punishment be meted out for what he viewed as an accident.
Further embellishments have been added to the story. It has been claimed that the day before the Porter’s 12 November departure from Norfolk, her anchor scraped down the side of the Cogswell, ripping out her rails, life rafts, ship’s boat, and other equipment. (Some versions state it happened during the departure.) None of the deck logs of the three ships—the Porter, Cogswell, and Young—moored together at various times during the two weeks preceding the departure, note this occurrence. Another story has the Porter accidentally releasing a depth charge on the 13th, triggering the convoy to jump into antisubmarine maneuvers. The deck logs of all four ships are silent on this as well.
Just before the Porter’s “year” of supposed “banishment” to the Aleutians was up at the end of 1945—she actually was there eight months ending in September 1944—a crewman is said to have gotten drunk and fired a 5-inch round while in port that landed in the “front yard” of the base commandant’s home. (Other versions place it in the back garden during a party.) Documentary evidence is nonexistent.
While it is true that the William D. Porter did launch a live torpedo at the Iowa, the only other factual evidence of her hard luck concerns her sinking. At 0815 on 10 June 1945, while on radar picket duty off Okinawa, the destroyer was attacked by a lone, obsolete Val dive bomber. Although shot down close aboard by the destroyer’s gunners, the plane continued underwater until beneath the ship, where its bomb load exploded. Lifted from the water, the ship crashed down in flames. The crew fought for three hours to save her but to no avail. The supposed hard-luck ship went down with a bit of luck: Every man on board survived.
