A U.S. Navy destroyer commander received the Silver Star for his heroism fighting the Japanese 70 years ago during World War II.
In action off Nauru Island in December 1943, Navy Lieutenant Commander Ulysses S. Grant Sharp Jr. demonstrated the classic traits of a good destroyer captain in combat—leadership, nonstop vigilance, seamanship, timing, and calculated risk. A 1927 Naval Academy graduate, Sharp had a distinguished career, rising to the rank of four-star admiral, serving as Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, from 1963–64, and Commander, Pacific Command, from 1964–68. He also became a strong opponent of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s policies in Vietnam in the 1960s. Now, in World War II, he was at the helm of a single ship in a historic U.S. armada.
Japanese forces’ march westward, south, and north—which had begun with the attack on Pearl Harbor and strikes through Southeast Asia and the Aleutian Islands—was slowing. The U.S. Navy, with its embarked Marines, was launching “the mighty sweep of the Pacific Fleet across Micronesia which began with the assault on the Gilbert Islands in November 1943.”1
Key targets in the Gilberts were three Japanese airfields built the year before, flying long-range Japanese Betty bomber patrols from runways on the islands of Ocean and Nauru, and from Betio, a heavily fortified island with more than 4,000 Japanese defenders on Tarawa’s triangular coral atoll. The capture of Tarawa was the essential first step in the island hopping that would follow westward across the Marshalls and the Marianas toward the Japanese homeland.
The Navy had upward of 200 ships, with 900 fighters and bombers on board the aircraft carriers, for the Gilberts assault. The shore bombardments would be heavy with fierce at-sea actions. Marines of the 2d Division had trained in New Zealand, and Tarawa would be their first bitterly opposed amphibious landing. Transiting the offshore coral against an opposing rain of gunfire was brutal. The fighting from 20–23 November was bloody, with high casualties. The United States won the battle, and in so doing “knocked down the front door of the Japanese defenses in the Central Pacific.”2
Lieutenant Commander Sharp was skipper of the new Fletcher-class destroyer USS Boyd (DD-544), operating as a screening ship in the forces under Commander, Central Pacific Force, Admiral Raymond A. Spruance. With the Gilberts secured by early December, Admiral Spruance directed the carriers USS Bunker Hill (CV-17) and Monterey (CVL-26), in company with five battleships and 12 destroyers, to launch attacks against the bombers on Nauru before they could go elsewhere and do more damage.3
On 8 December, carrier planes bombed and strafed Nauru, and the battleships and destroyers pounded the island with gunfire. The Boyd “fired on a cantilever crane pier and adjacent buildings. Several hits were observed; shortly after the entire island was covered with smoke, and several large fires started. Light anti-aircraft fire was noted during the attacks of our planes but no return fire on the surface forces.”4 Heading back to form up with her carrier task group, the Boyd received a message advising that returning pilots had spotted a life raft off Nauru. The destroyer was ordered to pick up any survivors.
Following his retirement, Admiral Sharp captured the action that followed in the pages of his U.S. Naval Institute oral history.5 Excerpts from pages 65–69 follow:
After the Gilbert Island landings . . . the force we were with went to Nauru Island on the 8th of December and bombarded the island without any reply. . . . There were a lot of battleships and cruisers and destroyers, and they knew there were Japanese on the island. They tried to spot shore batteries and did a lot of shooting at the island; . . . there was no reply, so they did not know whether they hit anything or not.
We had left the island probably two hours when word came back that a plane was down off the island, one of the planes from one of the carriers, and the carrier planes were overhead, and they thought they had a man in the water, a pilot. We were ordered to go back and try to rescue the man. The first word was that the plane was down about five miles off the island, as I recall, and there didn’t seem to be any problem. But as we were on our way in we were in contact with the aviator [who had reported the downed pilot], and he said that the slick was about two miles off the island.
So that brought up the possibility that we were getting pretty close in case there were any shore batteries there. The division commander who was aboard sent a message to the task force commander calling attention to that, and the task force commander said to continue on your mission. . . .
We went charging in at about 27 to 30 knots, and the plane was circling overhead and said there was an object in the water. They thought it was a man. And we pulled up to a spot we could see that looked like a man’s arm waving in the water. So we pulled up alongside. I backed down full, and we had almost come to a stop when we could see that this was a float light bobbing around in the water. And we had just started up when the shore battery opened on us and the first shots hit the forward engine room. The others were quite close. Well, when it hit I rang up flank speed, all we could make, and at the time the shore batteries really opened on us. We started firing back, but it was very hard to locate the shore battery.
All we could see were the flashes of the gun, and I started zigzagging and chasing the splashes. That is, when the splashes were over on the starboard bow I would turn the ship toward the splashes and hope that the gunner would try to correct his shot and I would be over where the shot fall was the last time.
This worked fairly well. We didn’t get hit again, although we did have some close ones. We finally chased along this way and got out of the range of the guns [more than seven miles from shore]. By this time we had found out that the forward engine was out of commission. The steam lines had been pierced by the shells and the engine room was full of steam. We had been going full blast and the boilers were pouring steam into those engines, because we didn’t realize at first that they were out of commission.
So right away we had a big job to do. The chief engineer who was down in the forward engine room was able to get up the hatch, but apparently when he opened the hatch the steam from the engine room went up the hatch and he inhaled so much steam that he just got up and fell on deck and died right away.
There were about 12 to 15 men down in the engine room, and it was extremely hot down there. They apparently tried to get down in the bilges to get out of the heat, but they were all killed. The engine room was filling up with water fairly fast. The forward engine room was the only place where we had any penetration of the hull. It finally filled up about three-quarters of the way with water. We got the lines isolated and all that and continued on at a slower speed to rejoin our task group. Meanwhile trying to pump out the engine room and plug the holes, we soon found out we couldn’t plug the holes until we had a chance to stop and put somebody over the side.
This must have been about at noon that this had happened. I finally rejoined the task group about two or three o’clock in the afternoon. We went alongside the flagship and got some medical assistance. In the meantime, our doctor had been doing operations down on the wardroom table and had pretty well bandaged up all the people that had flesh wounds from the shrapnel.
The chaplain came over from the battleship and gave the last rites to the people we hadn’t been able to get out of the engine room. We decided to go off and have a burial at sea. The chaplain couldn’t stay with the ship, so we went off and I performed the burial. I guess it was the next morning that we did that, either that evening or the next morning. I can’t remember.
While were alongside [the flagship], the first lieutenant, who was Lieutenant Anderson, went over the side and patched up, put a plug in the hole. We had a burial at sea in which I acted as the Catholic chaplain. After that we were told to join the Denver.
The light cruiser USS Denver (CL-58) had been damaged by aerial attack and towed to Espiritu Santo. She and the Boyd would sail in company to Mare Island, California, for permanent repairs in January 1944. Both ships then returned to the Pacific campaign. Commander Sharp received the Silver Star for his actions off Nauru.
1. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Opertations in World War II, vol. 7, “Aleutians, Gilberts, and Marshalls,” (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011), vii.
2. ADM Chester W. Nimitz, USN, as quoted in COL Joseph H. Alexander, USMC (Ret.), “Across the Reef: The Marine Assault of Tarawa,” www.nps.gov/history/online_books/npswapa/extcontent/usmc/pcn-190-003.
3. Morison, 197–98.
4. USS Boyd (DD-544), May 1943 to January 1958, www.destroyers.org/uss-boyd/history/start/43_58_boyd_history.htm.
5. Reminiscences of ADM U. S. Grant Sharp Jr., USN (Ret.) vol. 1, (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1985).