USS William D. Porter: The U.S. Navy Destroyer’s Service in World War II

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Officers on Willie Dee’s bridge started racing around, barking orders and calling for confirmation that what they feared was happening was in fact happening. At most, the torpedo might take two minutes to reach Iowa, and battleships can’t turn on a dime, so there was no time to waste.

Walter ordered a warning immediately sent to Iowa. But the secret convoy was under strict orders not to use the radio. Instead, a signalman was to signal the battleship by flashing light. Unfortunately, in his haste and inexperience, the young sailor first flashed that a torpedo was in the water but moving away from Iowa. Becoming more flustered as he watched the torpedo swim toward the battleship, he tried again and somehow signaled that Willie Dee was going in reverse at full speed.

Walter realized the flash signals weren’t going to work, and he was running out of time, so he decided to break radio silence. Willie Dee’s radioman quickly called to Iowa using its code name: ‘Lion, Lion, come right!’

The radioman on Iowa, surprised to hear anyone on the air, responded by calmly asking who was calling and why: ‘Identify and say again. Where is submarine?’Willie Dee’s operator responded with ‘Torpedo in the water! Lion, come right! Emergency! Come right, Lion! Come right!’

And then there was no more response from Iowa, because at about the same moment the lookout on the battleship had spotted the fish and was screaming: ‘Torpedo on our starboard quarter! This is not a drill! Torpedo on our starboard quarter!’

Iowa turned sharply right and increased speed as its guns began firing on the incoming torpedo. Walter and his crew on Willie Dee could only watch and hope the big ship made the turn in time.

The battleship sounded its General Quarters alarm, and the crew began racing to emergency stations. Those on deck soon saw the incoming torpedo as the ship leaned heavily to the left in a desperate maneuver. The list was so pronounced that Roosevelt’s bodyguards had to steady his wheelchair. One of the guards even reached for his pistol with the intent of shooting the torpedo as it came closer.

As the crew of Willie Dee held their breath and watched, the battleship made the turn in time, and the torpedo exploded in the big ship’s wake. Roosevelt later made a note in his diary about the trip that said: ‘On Monday last a gun drill. Porter fired a torpedo at us by mistake. We saw it — missed it by 1,000 feet.’

Walter and the Willie Dee crew could breathe again, but for them the incident was far from over. Once Iowa came back into formation, Walter could see that the battleship’s guns were trained on the destroyer that had just fired on the president. Soon Iowa radioed to ask what in the world had happened. ‘We did it,’ was Walter’s reply.

After quickly conferring with his own crew, who had no immediate explanation for how the torpedo ended up in the water, a red-faced Walter tried to assure Iowa that the whole thing was just an accident. Under the circumstances, however, suspicions ran high, and the hard luck Willie Dee was ordered out of the convoy. Iowa continued on to North Africa and delivered the president for his history-making summit, but Willie Dee was sent to a U.S. naval station in Bermuda. Fully armed U.S. Marines greeted the ship as it docked and placed the entire crew under arrest — the first time ever that a U.S. Navy crew was arrested en masse.

Willie Dee’s crew was grilled in a secret inquiry whose first purpose was to determine whether the ship had been infiltrated by a saboteur. Was firing the torpedo a simple boneheaded mistake or part of a larger conspiracy to assassinate Roosevelt and derail the Allies’ summit?

It took several days of testimony for the board of inquiry to determine that the live primer had been left in torpedo tube 3 by accident, rather than by someone using it deliberately during a drill, which meant that there was no conspiracy. Willie Dee’s crew had just screwed up in a big way. Exactly how remained a mystery until crewman Dawson finally confessed that he had lied in his first testimony, in which he claimed to have no idea how the live primer was left in place. Coming clean, he told the board that, in fact, he had accidentally left the primer in place when he removed the other three from the torpedo tubes. When the torpedo fired unexpectedly, he panicked and threw the used primer overboard.

One officer, Lieutenant William Poindexter, explained to the board of inquiry that ‘the inexperience of the personnel of the William D. Porter, men as well as officers,’ must be considered as a partial explanation for the accident. Of 16 officers junior to Poindexter, only four had any experience on a ship before coming to Willie Dee.

Nevertheless, Willie Dee had nearly killed the president, so someone had to be punished. For the initial mistake and his subsequent cover-up, the 22-year-old Dawson was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor. But when Roosevelt heard of the sentence, he ordered the Navy not to punish Dawson since the incident was clearly a mistake and no harm had been done. Maybe not, but in almost sinking Iowa, Willie Dee became known in the Navy as a screw-up ship to watch out for.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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