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

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After 1943 the ship was commonly hailed by other ships with the greeting: ‘Don’t shoot! We’re Republicans!’ Willie Dee became a black sheep, and sailors like Bill Glover, a 17-year-old from Montgomery, Ala., when he joined the destroyer in 1944, were not happy about being assigned to it. ‘In less than a year after launching, it had done several things we heard about, so I didn’t want to go to the Porter,’ he said. ‘They acknowledged it when I got on board, laughed about it some. Nobody had gotten hurt, so you could joke about it some. And plus, there was a war on so we had other things to do.’ Besides, Glover said, Willie Dee didn’t screw up any more than the typical Navy ship run with inexperienced crews who had never been to sea. Willie Dee drew attention with a particularly dramatic error involving the president, but similar mistakes happened all the time as young crews learned on the job, he remembered.

‘Once you’ve fired a torpedo at Roosevelt, then everyone is looking at you and you get noticed for all the little things that everyone else is doing too,’ Glover said. ‘There were a lot of rookies in the service in 1943. Mistakes were made because 17-year-olds don’t know how not to make mistakes.’ Glover pointed out a fact largely forgotten in the victory of World War II: In the scramble to gear up in the early days of the war, the nation was sending brand new ships to sea with crews so young and inexperienced that they were quite literally learning everything as they went.

Still, the shadow of that ill-timed shot continued to haunt Willie Dee. Seeing how the destroyer had performed in a high profile task such as guarding the president’s secret convoy, the Navy thought the ship might be better off in an assignment where it could do little harm. The destroyer was sent to the Aleutian Islands for a year, and while serving in the frigid waters off Alaska the crew worked hard to vindicate their ship’s reputation.

Although they performed well, their ship seemed to be haunted by a Jonah and unable to entirely shake its embarrassing past. During a break in exercises in the Aleutians a sailor came back to the ship drunk after leave and decided he wanted to fire one of Willie Dee’s big guns. He fired the weapon before anyone could stop him, having no idea where the 5-inch shell would land. Unfortunately, it just happened to land in the front yard of the base commandant’s home while he was having a little party for fellow officers and their wives. Fortunately, the only damage was to the destroyer’s already unenviable reputation.

With the naval war in the Pacific reaching its climax, however, the Navy concluded that even Willie Dee was needed for the final campaigns. With a more seasoned crew, Willie Dee left the Aleutian Islands for the western Pacific performing escort duty to the Philippines and taking part in the operations at Mindoro and Lingayen Gulf. In late March 1945, Porter was sent to Okinawa, where it patrolled far out in the ocean to intercept Japanese aircraft before they got in close to the bigger ships. On one patrol, Willie Dee was fighting off kamikazes, each loaded with enough explosives to easily sink a destroyer. As one of the suicide planes came in low and aimed straight for the ship, Willie Dee’s gunners fired furiously, trying to down the plane before it struck them.

This time their training paid off and the crew rejoiced when the plane went down well short of the ship and didn’t explode. Maybe, some thought, Willie Dee’s luck was finally beginning to change. They were wrong.

The Japanese plane had been moving so fast that even after it went into the water it continued to move toward the ship. It kept moving until it was right under William D. Porter and exploded with enough force to lift the destroyer right out of the water.

The ship with the short, troubled history held on for three hours, long enough for every man on board to be rescued. Willie Dee then slipped beneath the waves, hardly to be mentioned again, its niche in history kept secret until the Iowa incident was officially reported in 1958.

This article was written by Gregory A. Freeman and originally appeared in the December 2005 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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

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