In 1778, near the close of the American Revolution, red-haired Charles Stewart was born of Irish parents in the city of Philadelphia. He went to sea in the Far East trade at the age of thirteen (because schools could not hold him) and skippered an Indiaman before he was old enough to vote. In 1798 at the start of the Quasi-War with France, he quit the merchant service and entered the Navy as a lieutenant in the frigate United States.
Two years later he founded his reputation as a rugged and skillful fighter in his first naval command, the schooner Experiment. One account of an action during this six- months cruise tells how Stewart led two French vessels to pursue him through an afternoon. At evening, when they had drawn apart in the chase, he turned and captured the Diana after a ten minute fight. Then, leaving her with a prize crew, he took off after her retreating escort.
Later a false report of Stewart’s capture reached Commodore Truxton who commented in his log, “This we fear is too true, as the Experiment was to have joined us before this, and from the known character of Mr. Stewart, we fear many lives have been lost, as we are certain he would never have struck while a possibility of saving his vessel remained.”
When that war ended in 1801, Stewart led the list of 36 lieutenants retained in the cutback Navy. In 1805 after four years of fighting against the Barbary States he came home from the Mediterranean in command of the Constellation. A few months later, at age 27, he was promoted to captain, the highest rank in the Navy until some forty years later.
Captain Stewart asked for a ship in 1812 when war with England was imminent. He was told that the cabinet had decided to layup all of our ships in port to prevent their capture by the all-powerful British Navy. The Philadelphia red-head thought this “a hell of a way to run a railroad” (or a Navy). He appealed to the President so persuasively that the policy was altered. The Navy was ordered out to do the most possible damage to the enemy, and it won notable victories.
Charles Stewart was given his old command, the Constellation, then at Washington, but before he got her to sea the frigate was cornered in the Elizabeth River by a British squadron preparing to attack Norfolk. Stewart landed what ship’s gear could help defend the city and prepared to burn his ship, if need be, to prevent her capture. Before the attack came he was sent to Boston, however, to command Old Ironsides (USS Constitution, 44 guns).
In that ship Charles Stewart won his last and toughest sea-battle on the night of February 20, 1815. Late that day he overhauled two British warships, HMS Cyane (34 guns), and HMS Levant (22 guns). Their combined firepower exceeded the Constitution’s. Their commanders planned a night action in the expectation that one of them would then be able to disastrously rake the American. As in his earlier fight with the Diana, however, Stewart successfully took them one at a time. Professionals considered his performance the most brilliant of the frigate battles. Long afterwards, both experts and Monday-morning-quarterbacks admired Stewart’s skill and the adroitness of his New England crew in so handling their heavier ship that two more nimble opponents were both repeatedly raked and forced to surrender.
Between wars, Stewart refused non-naval openings. He declined the cabinet post offered by President Monroe and an offer of the democratic presidential nomination in 1844. By preference he remained a Captain U.S.N., and invested his prize money in a successful New Jersey farm. His neighbors ignored the name he chose for the place. They called both it and its master, “Old Ironsides.”
This rugged character was the senior officer in the Navy, Commandant of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and credited with over 57 years service, in 1855 when the Navy’s first plucking board put him on the newly created reserved (retired) list. Charles Stewart called it being “cashiered from the eminent position I then occupied,” when he composed twenty printed pages of Appeal to Congress. Among other things he argued that rank only had meaning and value when it meant a place in a going concern. A retired man “may be soothed with the same apparent rank, he may still be called Commodore, Captain, or Master,” he wrote. “But the spot is upon him which severs him from his fellows, he has ceased to be of them, he stands aside, dejected and degraded ...”
Although on the retired list, he held his Philadelphia post while the appeal was considered. Then in March, 1859, Congress restored him to the top of the active list with the new rank of “Senior Flag Officer.” Old Charles was not mollified by this new title. “I’ve been that for years anyway,” he scoffed. Probably it was not so much a promotion as a device to give him active status without demoting the man who had become senior captain during the argument.
In 1861, at the age of 83, the Senior Flag Officer was still in command of the Philadelphia Yard. He requested sea duty when a gun aimed at Fort Sumter started the Civil War. “I am as young as ever to fight for my country,” he wrote, but he was turned down, retired, and ordered, “home to await orders.” He called this an “anathema of national degradation visited upon me by an ungrateful government.”
The first American Rear Admiral’s commission was his when that rank was added to the Navy in December, 1861, but it did not console him for his unemployed status. He repeatedly protested this separation from his active companions in arms, all of the years “he lived with undiminished intellect until November 6, 1869.” The January, 1869, Navy Register credited him with seventy years ten months naval service.
At the end of World War .1, in the city where Charles Stewart had been born 158 years before, one of his granddaughters gave his name to a new four-stack destroyer. She smashed the traditional bottle on its bow as it slid into the Delaware River from Cramp’s shipyard. From this beginning the USS Stewart (DD-224) had a career very like her indestructible namesake’s. When the Navy was pruned after World War I, over 200 destroyers were moth-balled or scrapped. Many new Cramp-boats were included, but the Stewart remained active, as Lieutenant Stewart had done in the cut-back of 1801.
In 1922 the Stewart went to the Far East. Young Charles Stewart had known her ports of call when he sailed in merchantmen. In the 1930’s many aging four-stackers were converted to seaplane tenders, minecraft, or for other auxiliary purposes. However, like the man she was named for, the Stewart escaped conversion and remained a combatant type.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed the little vessel had already served beyond her designed life, but she was still a fighting unit of the Asiatic fleet. In the following months this outnumbered fleet fought desperately against the overwhelming power of the entire Japanese Navy. With them, the Stewart battled long odds to do the enemy the most possible harm in the manner so ably championed by the red-headed Stewart back in the spring of 1812.
The 127th anniversary of Charles Stewart’s last sea-battle was the night of February 20, 1942. On that night the USS Stewart fought her last and toughest battle. At a little after one in the morning she led four other small Allied ships in a gallant, though inconclusive, attack on a Japanese invasion fleet off the island of Bali.
The enemy had been surprised two hours earlier by a similar raid. When the Stewart charged into Badoeng Straight at 25 knots, a transport was burning near the beach. Jittery Jap gunners fired sporadically at shadows, while their searchlights probed nervously here and there.
Men on the Stewart's bridge saw two large ships, black against the dim shoreline. They fired their port torpedoes at them and swept past into the narrow waters. Two minutes later a pair of destroyers loomed as dark shadows ahead and to port. When one of them flashed a challenge, the Stewart answered with a dozen salvos from her 4-inch guns. Heavy shells from several enemy ships crashed around the old four-stacker. She shuddered under their blows, but her veteran black-gang kept her turbines spinning and drove the little ship on into the protecting darkness. When the firing died away, one of her crew was dead, the executive officer and two others lay wounded on the bridge. Amidships the shattered whaleboat spun on one remaining line as it thrashed the side. Torpedomen cut it away. Then as this wreckage washed astern, the guns of three big ships blazed on the starboard bow. Their first salvos landed harmlessly ahead of the Stewart, and she loosed her remaining torpedoes at these new targets. The next enemy shells straddled her. Then others thudded into her. Again the little ship talked back with her guns. Missiles jarred her, but her old engines purred out a steady 28 knots. One of the Stewart's torpedoes found its mark and lit up the sky astern. An enemy patrol boat roared out of the night ahead, swept the destroyer with machine guns as it flashed past close aboard; then it blacked out astern. Presently, barely an hour after the first shot, the Stewart was knifing through a calm open sea again. The battle of Badoeng Strait was over.
At daylight the Stewart’s tired crew found her decks littered with shell fragments and bits of wreckage. Overside the hull looked as full of holes as the top of a salt shaker. The big holes, like open barrel-heads, all seemed to be above the waterline, but the men knew their ship must be patched before she could fight again. No one went into the after living quarters. Those compartments were full of live steam. Near the stern steam whistled from under the bolted hatch atop the steering-engine room. Everyone let it alone, for in some miraculous way the engine below it was still steering the ship in answer to the wheel on her bridge. The galley deckhouse was wrecked, but below, the turbines hummed as sweetly as the day they were built. At midmorning they brought the battered vessel into Soerabaja.
Japanese bombers had made a mess of that Dutch base, but Captain H. P. Smith, the Stewart’s commander, got his ship into the only drydock that had not been wrecked. Worried dockyard workers centered the vessel and started their pumps. At first the dock rose normally; then their carelessly placed shores failed. The destroyer flopped over on her side. Oily water poured through shell holes and new punctures into her engine rooms and magazines. Firemen secured the last boiler and scrambled out of the flooding firerooms. As he clambered to the slanting deck, one of this sweaty gang said, “My dad always told me that names starting with “S” were unlucky for ships.”
A red-eyed machinist’s mate glared at him. “Nuts,” he growled. “She’s brought us through a fight most everyday for three months, hasn’t she?”
Three days later Captain Smith knew the disorganized dockyard would never refloat his ship before the Japanese attacked the city. His experience was very like Charles Stewart’s when his Constellation was cornered in 1812. Smith divided the Stewart’s gear, stores, and crew among the other destroyers which were leaving to fight again. He chose six technicians to stay with him and completely destroy the ship before it could be taken. However, at the last minute, radio orders sent them all into the departing ships and assigned the final destruction of the Stewart to base personnel.
Navy Communique #57 announced the destruction of the USS Stewart (DD-224). The Japanese who occupied Soerabaja disregarded this information. They needed ships to consolidate their new empire, and repaired both the damaged dock and the battered destroyer they found in it. They gave her three stacks instead of four, and called her P-102 in Hirohito’s Navy. The Japanese used her for the rest of the war, but always kept her well away from Allied surface forces. Sometimes aviators or submariners back from a long patrol reported an American four-stacker deep in Japanese waters. Invariably they were told they had been seeing ghosts, for no such ship could exist in the Inland Sea or off the coast of Kyushu.
In some ways the old destroyer’s forty-odd months as the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific” were similar to the forty-one months that old Charles Stewart spent “severed from his fellows” on the reserved list before Congress made him the Senior Flag Officer.
A General Order dated March 25, 1942, struck the USS Stewart (DD-224) from the Navy list. Her alien operators never read it, nor the old Commodore’s words about “the spot which severs him from his fellows.” However, above the P-102 they placed their white flag with the red spot in its center. Bearing that “spot” the old ship kept the sea, as the old man had kept the Philadelphia Yard, for some three and a half years while the issues were being decided.
In October, 1945, occupation forces found the ship moored between the shattered Kure naval base and atomized Hiroshima. She was rusty and empty, but intact. At American demand, the Japanese cleaned and painted her, steamed her out through the minefields, and delivered her alongside one of Admiral Olendorf’s World War II destroyers.
Beside the newer ship the old veteran looked tired and small when the “spot” was removed with appropriate ceremony. Her own flag was run up and she was recommissioned in the U. S. Navy. However, like the Senior Flag Officer, she could never exactly regain her former status. Even as there had been a new senior captain, a new USS Stewart had been commissioned late in 1942. In 1945, the Chief of Naval Operations directed that the recovered ship be referred to as “DD-224 without name.”
This practical measure saddened officers who sentimentally remembered their own four-stacker service and who knew the little vessel’s history. But a homesick youngster cracked, “After 25 years out here she can go home now that she’s lost her unlucky name.”
DD-224-without-name breezed through an engineering trial in the Inland Sea. A few days later, under orders “to the U. S. for decommissioning,” she sailed out of Hiro Wan with her high-point crew happily planning a quick trip home in their trim old craft.
On their first leg, to Buckner Bay, they only got a hint of their future troubles. For half an hour of the last night the ship drifted while they repaired an oil pump. Then she behaved like a perfect lady until they were three days out on the second leg. There the old engines commenced guerrilla war. Three days of stop, fix, start, and stop-again, used the last of her fuel and water. A day later she was towed into Guam. Base repairmen worked over the engineering plant for some three weeks while the point-happy crew fretted. One of them complained that the old ship didn’t seem to want to go home. The notion seemed monstrous to men who wanted-out too much ever to understand how old Commodore Stewart had felt about leaving active service.
Their steaming was smooth and easy for a couple of days out of Guam. Then the engines balked again. For three days it was stop and go before they quit permanently. Later one of the black-gang said, “She just seemed to start falling apart shortly after she was commissioned without a name.” Or, was it after she was ordered home for inactivation?
It took a tug two days to find them and four more to drag them to Eniwetok. That dawn at the harbor entrance DD-224-with- out-name dug her heels in. The towline fouled a coral head. At sunset, frustrated men cut her chain to get .the ship into the lagoon.
Since her engines seemed beyond local help, a big tug took DD-224-without-name out through the reef just after New Year’s Day. From then on everything got tougher. Stubborn men battled a cranky old ship across the world. They jettisoned tons of fuel oil before they could force her slowly up against the long swells of the trade-wind belt. They fought her through late-winter storms among the westerlies. Four times they were forced into island refuges before struggling on. Eventually, five tugs, some sixty days, and 5000 miles from Eniwetok the old veteran was dragged past the Farallons. Her crew, now down to twenty men, was living without power or lights. Their quarters were coldly damp in the foggy northern seas. They had seen a dozen heavy wire-and-chain tow- lines part. Each time they had strained for hours at the rusty capstan on the sea-swept forecastle before new gear was manhandled into place.
Now they thought all of that was behind them. That March afternoon they stared ahead at the dim break in the cliffs called the Golden Gate. They figured they might dock by supper time. While they eagerly talked of bright lights and city pleasures, the towline snapped.
The little ship wallowed in the steep trough as all hands manned the hateful capstan once more. For three hours the northwest gale dunked them in icy spray while gear slipped in their numb hands. It was dark when the new line was rigged. Four minutes later it carried away. The lights of the Cliff House dining room shown down and mocked the discouraged men starting their exhausting work all over again. Twice more they bulled a line aboard. Twice more it parted as the shoal chopping seas jerked the ships. Late that night the lights on the cliff were ominously close when bitter men let go her anchor to hold the DD-224-without-name outside the pounding surf.
They cut the chain when fresh tugs came out and put new towing gear aboard. By daylight these worked the tired old ship into a San Francisco pier. The newspapers called her “historic,” “gallant,” “doughty” and “decrepit.” They ignored her official designation and called her Stewart again, but like the Senior Flag Officer she had finally lost the last round in her fight against retirement.
Our ship christening ceremony is a fragment of an ancient religious sacrifice. The wine spilled on the bow paid a god to endow the vessel with the character of the one whose name it carried. Did these ancients have something? The DD-224 was decommissioned on May 23, 1946. The next day, condemned by a board of inspection and survey, the salty veteran was dragged north and west of the Farallons and scuttled in a thousand fathoms. She gave the tug captains a bad time on her last day, and seems to have fought as stoutly as did old Charles himself for a chance to continue in the country’s service.