- 26 minutes ago
USS Laffey became the destroyer that refused to die when Japanese kamikazes struck her off Okinawa and still failed to send her to the bottom. On April 16, 1945, she was alone on Radar Picket Station Number One, thirty miles north of Okinawa, under a raid that came in as a blotch on the screen rather than a neat formation.
For eighty minutes, the ship absorbed hit after hit while another destroyer on the picket line was lost in minutes. Laffey’s rudder jammed hard over, her after guns were torn off the deck, and fire pushed below toward a full magazine, yet she remained afloat in open water. When an officer asked the question every man aboard was thinking, the captain’s eleven-word answer became Navy history.
This World War II history story captures one of the most famous kamikaze attacks in the Pacific War and the fight to keep a destroyer alive against impossible odds. It is ideal for listeners who enjoy military history, naval warfare, WW2 stories, battlefield survival, and documentary-style historical narration.
Search for World War II destroyer stories, USS Laffey, kamikaze attack Okinawa, Pacific War history, Navy combat stories, and military history narration. If you enjoy war stories, naval history, and dramatic true events from World War II, this story delivers a powerful account of endurance under fire.
For eighty minutes, the ship absorbed hit after hit while another destroyer on the picket line was lost in minutes. Laffey’s rudder jammed hard over, her after guns were torn off the deck, and fire pushed below toward a full magazine, yet she remained afloat in open water. When an officer asked the question every man aboard was thinking, the captain’s eleven-word answer became Navy history.
This World War II history story captures one of the most famous kamikaze attacks in the Pacific War and the fight to keep a destroyer alive against impossible odds. It is ideal for listeners who enjoy military history, naval warfare, WW2 stories, battlefield survival, and documentary-style historical narration.
Search for World War II destroyer stories, USS Laffey, kamikaze attack Okinawa, Pacific War history, Navy combat stories, and military history narration. If you enjoy war stories, naval history, and dramatic true events from World War II, this story delivers a powerful account of endurance under fire.
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LearningTranscript
00:00April 16th, 1945. Radar Picket Station No. 1, 30 miles north of the northern tip of Okinawa, at 27 minutes
00:09past 8 in the morning.
00:12On the open bridge of an American destroyer, a quartermaster named Ari Futridis stands at the ship's log with a
00:18pencil.
00:19That is his job this morning. Not to shoot, not to steer. To write down what happens, and the minute
00:26it happens, in a ruled column, in a legible hand.
00:31In the next 80 minutes he will write faster than he ever has. Then he will stop, because nothing left
00:37aboard will fit into a column.
00:40One deck below, the air search radar operator has given up counting contacts.
00:45The screen to the north is not showing aircraft anymore. It is showing a solid blotch, moving south, and the
00:52blotch is about 50 planes.
00:55They have come off the airfields of southern Kyushu. This is the third of the mass attacks the Japanese called
01:01Kikusui, floating chrysanthemum.
01:04More than 500 aircraft will be in the air against the Okinawa fleet today, and better than 200 of those
01:11pilots do not intend to come back.
01:13The destroyer's name is Laffey. Her captain is Commander Frederick Julian Beckton.
01:21She has two friends in the water, the support gunboats LCS 51 and LCS 116, neither a fifth her size.
01:31That is the entire American force at Station No. 1. Every carrier, every battleship, every transport full of wounded Marines
01:41is 30 miles behind her to the south.
01:45At half-past eight, four aircraft peel off and drop toward the water.
01:51Aichi dive bombers, the type American sailors call the Val.
01:56They split into pairs. Two come at the bow, two come at the stern. Not a rush. A coordinated attack
02:04from both ends, so the destroyer can never point all her guns one way.
02:10Becton calls for hard left rudder and swings her broadside on.
02:15The forward five-inch mounts kill the first Val at about 3,000 yards, and the second right behind it.
02:20The after mount takes the third.
02:22The 40mm and 20mm guns tear the fourth apart so close in that pieces of it come aboard.
02:29Four planes, four minutes.
02:32Futreids writes them into the log.
02:34One, two, three, four.
02:39Eighteen more are on the way.
02:41Before we go back to that bridge, if the story of the U.S. Navy at Okinawa matters to you,
02:46a like and a subscribe help it reach the people still looking for it. Thank you.
02:51Back to Futreids and his log.
02:52To understand what Futreids was about to write down, you have to know why his ship was out there alone.
02:59Laffey was not lost, and she was not on patrol.
03:02She had been put on that spot deliberately, and every man aboard knew the job.
03:07The American fleet at Okinawa had one problem firepower could not solve.
03:12Aircraft from Kyushu came in low, and a ship's radar cannot see through the curve of the earth.
03:17By the time the fleet saw a raid, the raid was on top of it.
03:21So the Navy pushed sixteen small stations out into open water in a ring around the island, parked a destroyer
03:28on each, and gave every captain the same instruction.
03:32See them first, and tell us.
03:37Station number one was the northernmost of the sixteen, sitting directly under the corridor from Kyushu, the shortest line to
03:44the American anchorage.
03:45Every raid that came south crossed Station One first, which meant Laffey was doing two jobs at once.
03:53She was the fleet's eyes, and she was the first solid object a Japanese pilot saw after 400 miles of
04:01empty ocean.
04:03One number before we go on. Carry it with you, because everything that follows is measured against it.
04:10That same morning, at a picket station south of Laffey, the destroyer Pringle was attacked by three aircraft.
04:17Her gunners shot down two. The third hit her.
04:21One plane. One bomb. One hit.
04:26Her keel snapped, she folded amidships, and six minutes later, 258 survivors were watching her stern go under.
04:34Six minutes. That was the normal outcome.
04:38That is what a suicide aircraft did to a 2,000 ton destroyer, over and over, through the spring of
04:451945.
04:47There is no armor on a ship like that. The plating is thin enough to dent with a hammer.
04:52One aircraft, with one bomb, was, statistically, enough.
04:58Laffey was about to be struck by six of them, plus four bombs, plus strafing so prolonged the crew stopped
05:05flinching at it.
05:06And she would still be afloat at noon.
05:09So the question here is not how many planes the gunners shot down.
05:13Eight or nine, depending on whose count you take, and we will get to every one.
05:17The question is the one the salvage officers asked out loud when they finally saw what was left of her.
05:23By every rule the United States Navy could write down, this ship should have been on the bottom before nine
05:29o'clock.
05:31The first piece of the answer is not what you would expect.
05:35Becton had already made a decision that morning, before a single Japanese aircraft came into range.
05:40And it had nothing to do with his guns.
05:42It had to do with which end of his own ship he was willing to lose.
05:46Which end of his own ship he was willing to lose.
05:50Becton had settled that question long before the radar screen filled, and he had not settled it in a classroom.
05:57He had learned it standing on a destroyer that was going down underneath him.
06:02Three sentences of background, and then we go back to the guns, because they matter to everything that follows.
06:08On the night of November 13th, 1942, off Guadalcanal, Becton was serving aboard the destroyer Aaron Ward when a ship
06:17named Laffey, the first Laffey, a different hull, a different crew, was torn apart in the dark a short distance
06:24away.
06:26Five months later, on the 7th of April, 1943, he was in command of Aaron Ward himself when six Val
06:34dive bombers came down on her off Guadalcanal and put her on the bottom.
06:38The same aircraft type that had just made its run on him at half past eight this morning.
06:43So when the Navy gave him a brand new destroyer in February of 1944 and handed him the name Laffey
06:50for the second time, Becton had one fixed idea about air attack, and it was this.
06:56The guns are not what keeps a ship alive.
07:00The guns kill planes.
07:02What keeps a ship alive is where the plane that gets through finally lands.
07:08Look at the shape of a destroyer.
07:10Forward and aft is superstructure, gun mounts, crew spaces, handling rooms, things that burn and things that kill men.
07:19In the middle, low, under the stacks, are the boilers and the engine rooms.
07:25That is the ship.
07:27Lose that and you lose steam.
07:29Lose steam and you lose the fire mains, the pumps, the power to the mounts, the ability to move.
07:36A destroyer without steam is a raft that is waiting.
07:40So Becton fought his ship all morning to a single principle.
07:44Whatever comes in, do not let it have the middle.
07:48He kept swinging her, presenting bow or stern to the attack axis, taking the blows on the ends and keeping
07:54the midsection turned away.
07:56He was, in the coldest possible sense, feeding the Japanese the parts of his ship he could afford.
08:03The second thing he had done was quieter, and it had happened months earlier.
08:08Becton drilled his crew until they hated him for it.
08:11Gun crews trained to keep firing when the director was gone, when the powertrain was gone, when the telephone circuits
08:18were dead.
08:19Pointing over open sights, loading by hand, taking orders shouted from a man standing in the open.
08:25They had fired off Utah Beach on D-Day and off Iwo Jima in February, and they had been fired
08:31at.
08:32But neither of those days tested what he had actually built.
08:36This morning would.
08:38839.
08:39Mount 53, the after 5 inch, on the main deck.
08:44Its captain is Gunner's Mate 2nd Class Lawrence Dulewski.
08:47Ski to everyone aboard.
08:49And he is 20 years old.
08:51One level above him, Lieutenant Joel Youngquist has the 40mm and 20mm cruise.
08:58Dulewski is standing in the topside hatch of his mount, head and shoulders out, doing what a mount captain does,
09:05which is watch.
09:07A val is coming at him from the starboard side in a shallow dive, holding steady, not a high attack,
09:14a flat run straight at the after end of the ship.
09:17And Dulewski's gun misfires.
09:20He does not wait.
09:21He drops down through the hatch into the armored gun house, picks up a maul, a heavy hammer with a
09:28rawhide face, and hits the breech with it.
09:32Hard.
09:33It is the crudest possible fix on the most sophisticated weapon on that part of the ship.
09:39And it works.
09:41The gun barks.
09:43Outside, the val comes in low and clips the top of the mount, front to back, passing directly over the
09:50spot where Dulewski's head and shoulders had been standing four seconds earlier, and goes into the water off the starboard
09:57quarter.
09:58That is number five.
10:01Fautritus writes it down.
10:02Six, seven, and eight follow inside the next few minutes.
10:06Val's and Judy's coming from the beam, from the quarter, singly and in pairs, and every one of them is
10:12met.
10:13Two more go down to the forward mounts.
10:15One is broken up by 40mm fire at less than a thousand yards.
10:20Another takes a five-inch shell in the engine and simply comes apart in the air.
10:25Eight attacking aircraft.
10:27Eight in the water.
10:28Not one hit on the ship.
10:31Roughly fifteen minutes into it, the Laffy was winning, and every man topside knew it.
10:36Now watch what the Japanese do, because this is the moment the morning turns.
10:41The attacks stop coming from the beam.
10:44They start coming from dead astern, low, along the wake, one after another.
10:49And that is not stupidity.
10:51A destroyer's heaviest guns are forward.
10:54Her fire control can see best forward.
10:56From directly behind, the number of barrels that will bear on you drops sharply.
11:01And the ship has to turn to bring them back.
11:03Which takes time she does not have when the next aircraft is already in the groove.
11:08Somebody in that formation had worked out where Laffy was thin.
11:12Directly under the stern, five feet below the waterline, sat the after magazine.
11:18And in the next two minutes, four aircraft would arrive there, one behind the other.
11:22Eight forty-five in the morning.
11:24Sixteen minutes since the first val came at the bow.
11:28And the log on the bridge reads, eight aircraft down and no damage.
11:33Then the ship's whole world moves aft.
11:37The first of the four comes up the wake, low, engines screaming.
11:41And Laffy cannot turn fast enough to bring her forward guns onto him.
11:45The twenty-millimeter gunners on the after deck house hold their triggers down and hit him.
11:51And it changes nothing.
11:54Momentum is not an opinion.
11:56The aircraft comes in across the fantail, takes the twenty-millimeter mounts off the deck
12:02the way a plow takes off topsoil,
12:04kills six men in the time it takes to read that sentence,
12:08and slams into the after five-inch mount.
12:12Dulufsky's mount.
12:14The bomb the aircraft is carrying detonates.
12:17The blast picks up Dulufsky, the twenty-year-old who had hammered his own gun back into life
12:23six minutes earlier, throws him roughly fifteen feet,
12:27and drops him on the port side of the main deck next to the depth charge rack.
12:32He gets up.
12:34He is not seriously hurt.
12:35Almost everyone who had been standing where he had been standing is dead.
12:40His mount is finished.
12:41The gun that killed the third val of the morning will not fire again.
12:47The second aircraft is right behind the first.
12:49It comes in over the stern and plants a bomb on the fantail,
12:53and the bomb opens a hole in the deck aft of Mount 53 that men later measured at eight feet
12:59by ten.
13:00Fire goes down through that hole, into the compartments below,
13:04and starts working forward, toward the after-magazine,
13:08where the five-inch ammunition for the mount that no longer exists is still stowed.
13:13Understand what that means.
13:15The aircraft could not sink Laffey directly.
13:18They were hitting her above the waterline.
13:20Her own ammunition could.
13:23If the fire reached that magazine, the story ends there.
13:27And it ends the way Pringles ended, except faster.
13:32The third hit lands seconds later.
13:34So does the fourth.
13:36And one of them, sources differ on which,
13:39and Becton himself could not say for certain afterward,
13:43puts a bomb into the stern almost directly above the propellers.
13:48It does not hull the hull.
13:50It does something worse.
13:53Running through the stern of a destroyer,
13:55in a trunk under the deck,
13:57are the electrical cables and hydraulic lines
14:00that connect the steering wheel on the bridge to the rudder in the water.
14:04The explosion cuts them.
14:07On the bridge, the helmsman feels the wheel go soft in his hands.
14:12It turns, and nothing at the other end answers.
14:16Laffey, at that moment, has her rudder over to port.
14:19And the rudder stays over to port.
14:2326 degrees.
14:24Jammed solid.
14:26A destroyer with a jammed rudder does not stop.
14:30She keeps her speed, and she begins to circle.
14:34Sit with that for a second,
14:36because it is the worst thing that happened to that ship all morning.
14:40And it is not the thing that gets remembered.
14:43Everything Becton had done since half past eight depended on one ability.
14:49To turn the ship.
14:50To swing the midsection away from the attack axis.
14:54To present the end he could afford to lose.
14:59To keep the boilers and the engine rooms, the ship's heart,
15:03the reason she still had power and pressure and light,
15:06out of the path of whatever was coming.
15:10Every decision he had made was made with the rudder.
15:14Now the rudder belongs to nobody.
15:17The ship is going around in a slow, left-hand circle in the open sea,
15:2330 miles from help, under an air attack that is not close to finished.
15:29And a circle is the single most useful thing a target can do for an attacking pilot,
15:35because a circle is predictable.
15:38You do not have to guess where she will be.
15:41You can calculate it.
15:44Down below, the engine rooms are still turning.
15:48That is not an accident either.
15:50And it is not luck.
15:52A machinist's mate named John Michelle is working the ventilation in the engineering spaces,
15:59while the fires above him pour heat down through the ship.
16:03The temperature in those compartments climbs past 130 degrees.
16:08Men are working in it.
16:10They do not shut down, they do not evacuate, and they do not lose steam pressure.
16:16Which means the fire mains stay charged.
16:18Which means the hoses topside have water in them.
16:21Which means the fires burning toward the magazine can still be fought.
16:26Keep Michelle in your mind.
16:28He never sees an aircraft all morning.
16:31He is one of the reasons the ship is still here.
16:34Topside, Becton now has to fight a ship he cannot steer.
16:38He has two shafts and two throttles.
16:41And a destroyer can be pushed around after a fashion by running one engine ahead and one astern.
16:47Clumsily, slowly, nothing like fast enough to dodge an aircraft.
16:52He orders it anyway.
16:54It is the only control he has left.
16:56Here is where the morning stood at roughly ten minutes to nine.
17:01Eight enemy aircraft splashed.
17:03Four hits in 90 seconds.
17:06The afterguns gone.
17:07Six men dead on the fantail.
17:09Fire heading for the magazine.
17:11The rudder locked hard over.
17:14And the radar, still turning on the mast above the bridge, was showing eleven more aircraft coming down from the
17:20north.
17:20Nine minutes to nine.
17:22The ship is going in a circle she cannot break.
17:25And the next pair is already inbound.
17:29Two Judys.
17:30Yokosuka dive bombers.
17:32Faster than the valves.
17:33Harder to hit.
17:34Split and come at her from opposite beams.
17:37One to port.
17:38One to starboard.
17:40This is the same trick the first four tried at half past eight.
17:43And at half past eight, Becton answered it by turning.
17:48He cannot turn now.
17:50The guns that will bear are the guns that happen to be pointed the right way.
17:55The forward mounts take the one to starboard.
17:58The one to port gets through.
18:00And hits.
18:01More fire aft.
18:03More men down.
18:05And now the ship is noticeably heavier at the stern.
18:09Water is coming into the after compartments.
18:11Through the split seams and the hole in the fan tail.
18:14And she is settling by the tail.
18:16Like a shoe filling in the surf.
18:19It is at about this point that Lieutenant Frank Manson comes up to the bridge.
18:24Manson is the assistant communications officer.
18:27He has been aft.
18:29He has seen what is left of the aft part of the ship.
18:32Which is more than Becton can see from where he is standing.
18:34And what he has seen has convinced him that somebody needs to ask the question out loud.
18:39So he asks it.
18:42Do you think we will have to abandon ship?
18:45Before I give you the answer.
18:47I want you to understand what that question actually meant.
18:50Because it has been repeated so often that it has gone soft.
18:55Abandoning was not surrender.
18:57It was a normal, correct, frequently given order in the spring of 1945.
19:04Pringle's men had gone into the water that morning.
19:07And 258 of them were alive because of it.
19:10A destroyer that is burning aft with fire.
19:13Heading for a magazine.
19:15Is a ship where the standard professional judgment is.
19:18Get the crew off before the magazine goes.
19:21And Manson was not asking an academic question.
19:24He was asking whether the roughly 300 men still alive aboard should be in the water in the next few
19:30minutes.
19:3130 miles from the fleet.
19:32With no ship able to come to them.
19:36Becton's answer went into the log of the United States Navy.
19:39And it has not moved since.
19:42Hell no, Frank.
19:43I'll never abandon ship as long as a gun will fire.
19:48Now, that sounds like defiance.
19:50And it was.
19:51But it was also a calculation.
19:53And the calculation is the part that saved the ship.
19:57A burning destroyer does not float by itself.
20:01Every minute Laffey stayed up.
20:03She stayed up because men were standing on her with hoses.
20:06Shoring bulkheads.
20:08Dragging wounded clear.
20:10Flooding what needed flooding.
20:12And pumping out what needed pumping.
20:14Abandon.
20:15And all of that stops instantly.
20:18The fire reaches the magazine on its own schedule.
20:21The flooding aft goes where it wants.
20:24The ship that might have been saved.
20:26Becomes a certainty in about 20 minutes.
20:30Becton was not choosing between danger and safety.
20:33He was choosing between a ship with a crew fighting for her.
20:36And a ship with nobody aboard at all.
20:39Everything that happened in the next 40 minutes.
20:41Happened because roughly 300 Americans stayed on a deck.
20:44They had every professional reason to leave.
20:47One of them was an ensign named Robert Thompson.
20:50Thompson took hose crews aft.
20:52Into the part of the ship that was on fire and still being strafed.
20:56And worked the fires back from the magazine bulkhead.
20:59He was killed doing it.
21:01He is one of the 32 names.
21:03And if you want the single sentence that explains why this destroyer is still afloat in Charleston Harbor today.
21:09And not 80 fathoms down off Okinawa.
21:12It is that men like Thompson kept walking toward the stern all morning.
21:16While aircraft kept arriving at it.
21:19Up forward the ship was also losing the ability to shoot in any organized way.
21:24The fire control gear was going.
21:26Circuits were cut.
21:28The talker's phone lines were dead in places.
21:30The gun director could not see aft through the smoke coming off her own stern.
21:35This is where the drills came back.
21:37An ensign named James Townsley climbed up on top of the pilot house.
21:41The most exposed place on the ship with nothing over him and nothing around him.
21:46And started calling targets to the gun crews by voice and by hand.
21:51Improvising a fire control system out of a man standing in the open air.
21:55Down at the mounts, crews shifted to local control and pointed their guns over open sights.
22:01Which is exactly what Becton had made them practice until they were sick of it.
22:05It worked.
22:07Not well.
22:08It worked.
22:10Here is the count as the clock came up on 9 o'clock.
22:13And I want you to hold both halves of it at once.
22:16Because this is the arithmetic the whole morning turned on.
22:19Enemy aircraft splashed by Laffey.
22:238.
22:24With the 9th in dispute.
22:26Enemy aircraft still airborne and working.
22:28About 11.
22:29Guns aboard Laffey still able to reach an aircraft.
22:33Falling every few minutes.
22:35The after 5 inch.
22:36Gone.
22:37The after 20mm.
22:39Scraped off the deck.
22:41One 40mm mount.
22:44Gone.
22:45Two lines on a graph running toward each other.
22:49And somebody on that bridge was going to find out where they crossed.
22:53Something else was happening on that patch of ocean at the same time.
22:56And almost nobody tells this part.
22:59Laffey was not the only American ship at station number 1.
23:02Two support landing craft, LCS 51 and LCS 116, had come up on the 14th with her and stayed.
23:11These are small ships.
23:13About 150 feet.
23:14A fraction of a destroyer's displacement.
23:17Built to shoot rockets at a beach.
23:19Not to duel aircraft in open water.
23:22Their job on picket station was to plug the gaps in the destroyer's gunfire.
23:26And to pick men out of the sea when the destroyer could not stay up.
23:30They had one sane option that morning.
23:33And it was to open the range.
23:35A landing craft has nothing an attacking pilot wants.
23:39Move off 5 miles.
23:41Wait.
23:41Come back and pull survivors out of the water.
23:45Neither of them left.
23:46LCS 51 stayed close enough that her gunners were shooting into the same aircraft the destroyer
23:51was shooting at.
23:52The fourth val of the morning.
23:55The one torn apart at close range went down partly to her guns.
24:00LCS 116 stayed 2 and paid for it.
24:04A suicide aircraft came down on her and killed 17 of her crew and wounded 12.
24:10On a ship that small, 17 dead is not a casualty list.
24:15It is most of the men who were topside.
24:18Remember those two little ships.
24:20They come back at the end of this story.
24:23And what they do then is the reason certain Americans went home at all.
24:29Now, the toll on that duty.
24:31And this is the number that explains why the Navy has never forgotten the picket line.
24:38206 American ships served on the radar picket stations at Okinawa.
24:4329% of them were sunk or damaged.
24:47Nothing else a surface sailor could be assigned to in the Second World War came close to that rate.
24:53The men on those stations knew it.
24:55They'd watched Bush and Colquhoun go down two weeks earlier on Station 1 and Station 2.
25:01The same two stations, the same corridor, the same reason.
25:06Which is to say that when Laffey sailed north on the 14th, every man aboard understood what the odds were.
25:13Nobody was surprised on the 16th.
25:16They were just busy.
25:18Back aboard, past nine o'clock.
25:21The wounded are being carried forward, because forward is the only part of the ship that is not on fire.
25:28336 men had come to this station.
25:3132 of them are already dead or dying, and better than 70 are hurt,
25:35which means roughly one man in three on that ship is out of the fight before the fight is over.
25:41The ones still standing are doing the work of the ones who are not.
25:46And the guns are still going.
25:49Attack number 17 comes in fast and low off the starboard quarter.
25:53A Judy, using the same blind approach that had worked at 845.
25:57This time the ship is ready for it in a way she was not half an hour earlier.
26:02A 40mm mount and a group of 20mm pick it up together and break it apart at 800 yards.
26:09800 yards is close.
26:11At the speed that aircraft was making, 800 yards is about 6 seconds from the deck.
26:16That kill is the drills.
26:19Nobody in a director aimed that gun.
26:22Men aimed it, over open sights, with a lieutenant standing on the roof of the pilothouse calling where to look.
26:29Attack 18.
26:31An Oscar, an army fighter, coming straight in on the starboard beam.
26:36Mount 52, one of the two forward 5-inch mounts, still alive, still in the fight, puts a shell directly
26:43into its engine.
26:44There is nothing left of it to hit the ship.
26:47I want to stop on that for one second because it is the heart of this whole story and it
26:52is easy to slide past.
26:53An hour into an attack that had already destroyed the after third of the ship, jammed her rudder,
26:58knocked out her fire control, killed a tenth of her crew and set fires burning toward her magazine.
27:05Americans on that deck were still shooting down aircraft at 800 yards.
27:09Not surviving.
27:10Not enduring.
27:12Killing.
27:14That is what Becton meant by, as long as a gun will fire.
27:17He was not describing a mood.
27:20He was describing a machine that was still working.
27:22And the machine was the crew.
27:26By now the ship has taken six aircraft into her and four bombs.
27:30She is down by the stern and circling at 26 degrees of left rudder.
27:34Her stern is under fire from the inside.
27:36Her mast is shot through.
27:38Her radio antennas are being replaced by hand while the ship is being strafed.
27:42And at about this moment, the 19th attacker lined up on her.
27:46An Oscar, carrying a bomb.
27:48Coming in across the bow, aiming at the one part of the ship that had not yet been touched all
27:53morning.
27:54The bridge.
27:55Where Becton and Frutridis and the log were standing.
27:59It was not going to get there.
28:02But what stopped it was not Laffey's guns.
28:04And what happened in the next 60 seconds put a piece of an American aircraft on her signal deck.
28:099.39 in the morning, and for the first time since half past eight,
28:13there were American aircraft over station number one.
28:16They were Marine Corsairs, 12 of them, from Fighting Squadron 441,
28:21flown off Yonten Airfield on Okinawa itself.
28:25Understand why they had not been there sooner.
28:27The Japanese had put more than 500 aircraft into the air that morning
28:31against a fleet spread over hundreds of square miles of water.
28:35And every ship in it was screaming for cover on the same circuits.
28:40Laffey had been on her own for over an hour because there was nobody left to send.
28:44Now the Marines came into it.
28:46And in the next few minutes, those 12 Corsairs shot down somewhere between 15 and 17 Japanese aircraft
28:53in the airspace immediately around the crippled destroyer.
28:57The Oscar lining up on Laffey's bridge had one of them behind it.
29:01The Japanese pilot came across the ship low.
29:04He did not hit the bridge.
29:06What he hit, whether because the Corsairs' guns reached him first
29:10or because the destroyer's 20mm did, and both crews claimed it, was the mast.
29:16The aircraft sheared the port yardarm clean off, went on across, and went into the water.
29:23And the ship's national ensign, which was flying from that yardarm, came down with it.
29:29Behind the Oscar, the Corsair was going too fast and too low to follow it out.
29:34The American fighter clipped Laffey's air search radar, the big rectangular mesh antenna the crew called the Bedspring,
29:41the thing that had found the raid in the first place, and tore it off the mast.
29:46The antenna came down onto the signal deck and missed a crewman named Kelly by a matter of feet.
29:52The Corsair staggered up just far enough for its pilot to get out.
29:56He came down in the water near the ship, and LCS-51, the little support craft that had refused to
30:04leave the station all morning, ran over and pulled him out.
30:07Take a second with that picture, because it is the whole morning in one image.
30:12An American destroyer, on fire, circling, unable to steer,
30:17her radar knocked off her mast by one of her own fighters, her flag in the water,
30:21and the smallest ship on the station sitting out in the open under air attack, fishing an American pilot out
30:29of the sea.
30:31Somebody aboard noticed the colors were gone.
30:34A signalman named Tom McCarthy got another ensign and ran it up.
30:39That is not decoration, and it is not sentiment.
30:42A warship that is burning and not flying colors is a warship that other people start writing off.
30:49McCarthy climbed up and put the flag back into the air while the ship was still being strafed,
30:53and it stayed there for the rest of the action.
30:56The attacks kept coming for another eight minutes.
30:59The last of them broke on the combination of the Corsairs above and whatever Laffey still had that could shoot.
31:05And by roughly 9.47, one hour and twenty minutes after the first Val dropped out of the formation,
31:12there was nothing left overhead but American aircraft.
31:16And then it was quiet, and the crew could look aft for the first time.
31:21What they saw?
31:23The after five inch mount smashed down onto its own barbette.
31:28The twenty millimeter mounts gone entirely, torn off the deck plating.
31:33A hole eight feet by ten in the fan tail.
31:36Fires still burning below.
31:39The whole after end of the ship black, twisted, and slumped.
31:43And the stern sitting low enough in the water that the sea was coming up over it.
31:49Twenty-two aircraft had attacked her.
31:51Six had hit her.
31:53Four bombs had gone off aboard.
31:56Thirty-two Americans were dead, and seventy-one were wounded, out of three hundred and thirty-six.
32:03And she was floating.
32:05Now we come to the question I put to you at the start.
32:07Because at 9.47, on the 16th of April, there was no longer any point pretending it had an obvious
32:13answer.
32:14Pringle had taken one hit that morning and lasted six minutes.
32:19Laffey had taken ten and was still underway.
32:22Here is the first half of the answer, and it is physical, and it is not romantic at all.
32:28An aircraft is not a torpedo.
32:32Every single thing that struck that destroyer struck her above the waterline.
32:37The crashes hit her deck, her gun mounts, her deck house, her mast.
32:42The bombs went off in her stern structure and in her after compartments.
32:47Terrible damage.
32:48And all of it in the part of a ship that is above the sea, where damage kills men and
32:53wrecks equipment,
32:54but does not, by itself, let the ocean in.
32:58What sinks a destroyer is a hole under the water.
33:02Pringle died because a bomb went through her decks and detonated deep and broke her keel.
33:07Bush and Colquhoun died because aircraft opened them at or below the waterline, and the sea did the rest.
33:14Laffey's hole was never opened below the waterline.
33:17Not once.
33:18In eighty minutes.
33:19In twenty-two attacks.
33:21That was not luck.
33:23And the man who made sure of it had spent the entire morning doing one thing with two throttles and
33:29a dead steering wheel.
33:30Two throttles and a dead steering wheel.
33:33From the moment the rudder jammed, Becton fought the ship with her engines.
33:38One shaft ahead, one shaft back.
33:41Working her head around a few degrees at a time.
33:44It is a crude way to move two thousand tons.
33:47It is nothing like fast enough to dodge an aircraft in a dive.
33:51But it was enough to keep doing the one thing he had decided on before the first shot.
33:56Never let them have the middle.
33:59Now look at where the damage actually went.
34:01The after five inch mount.
34:04Destroyed.
34:06The after twenty millimeter mounts.
34:08Gone.
34:09The fan tail.
34:11Hold.
34:12The after compartments.
34:14Flooded and burning.
34:16The steering gear.
34:18Cut.
34:19The mast.
34:21Shot away.
34:21The forward fire room.
34:24The after fire room.
34:26The forward engine room.
34:28The after engine room.
34:30Untouched.
34:32Four machinery spaces in the middle of the ship.
34:35And in eighty minutes and twenty-two attacks, not one aircraft and not one bomb reached any of them.
34:43That is the answer.
34:45And everything else in this story hangs off it.
34:47Because the boilers kept steaming, the ship had pressure.
34:50Because she had pressure, the fire mains had water.
34:54And the pumps had power.
34:55And the hoses that Ensign Thompson dragged aft into the fire had something coming out of the nozzle.
35:01Because the engine room stayed manned by men like John Michel working in over a hundred and thirty degrees
35:07with the fires roasting the deck above their heads.
35:10Nobody ever had to say the words that finish a warship.
35:13We've lost power.
35:15Turn that around and you can see how close it was.
35:18A destroyer that loses her machinery spaces loses pumps and pressure in the same second.
35:24The fires she was already fighting simply win.
35:27The water she is already taking simply rises.
35:30She does not sink because of the hit.
35:33She sinks twenty minutes later because she has no way to argue with what the hit started.
35:39Pringle lost that argument in six minutes.
35:42Laffey was never allowed to have it.
35:44And there is a bitter irony folded into that, which the crew could not have appreciated at the time.
35:51Remember what the Japanese did at 8.45?
35:54When they stopped attacking from the beam and started coming up the wake, one behind the other?
36:00That was a genuinely good decision.
36:03It was the right tactical read of a destroyer.
36:06The guns are forward.
36:07The fire control looks forward.
36:09The blind quarter is astern.
36:12Every pilot who took that approach improved his chances of getting through.
36:16And four of them did.
36:18But the blind quarter of a destroyer is also the part of her that is furthest from her engines.
36:24By finding the way in, the Japanese guaranteed that their hits would land in the one third of the ship
36:30that could be wrecked without killing her.
36:33The smartest thing they did that morning was also the thing that made sure she lived.
36:39There is one more piece, and it is the least mechanical of them.
36:43Twenty-two aircraft attacked.
36:46Eight, by some counts nine, were shot down before they arrived.
36:51Several more were hit hard enough on the way in that they went into the ship at the wrong angle,
36:55in the wrong place, breaking up as they came, instead of driving in clean the way a suicide aircraft is
37:01meant to.
37:01The valve that grazed Dulufsky's mount at 839 was aimed at the middle of it.
37:07A 20mm burst put it a few feet off, and a few feet was the difference.
37:13That is what the drills bought.
37:16Not invulnerability.
37:18Feet.
37:20Degrees.
37:21Fractions of a second on the approach, over and over, for 80 minutes.
37:26And every fraction pushed the damage further from the machinery spaces.
37:32By 11 o'clock, the fires were out.
37:35Laffey could not steer, but she could move.
37:38And she was still a warship with a crew and a flag flying.
37:42The wounded went off to whatever could take them.
37:45The dead were gathered.
37:46Men who had been shooting at aircraft an hour before were now cutting through wreckage on the fantail, looking for
37:51people they had eaten breakfast with.
37:54She was taken south to Karama Reto, the anchorage the Navy used for ships too badly hurt to stay in
38:00the fight.
38:01A harbor full of blackened destroyers.
38:04There the damage was surveyed, and the officers who did the surveying went quiet.
38:10Samuel Elliot Morrison, who wrote the Navy's own history of the war, and was not a man given to overstatement,
38:16put it this way.
38:18Probably no ship has ever survived an attack of the intensity that she experienced.
38:23Within days, she was moving again under her own power, headed east for repair yards on the American west coast,
38:30with the hole in her fantail patched and her stern still sagging.
38:34And when she got home, the Navy did something with her that it had done with almost no other damaged
38:40ship in the war.
38:42Rather than hide her in a quiet corner of a yard until she looked like a warship again, the Navy
38:48put her on display.
38:50They wanted Americans to walk up and look at what had been done to her.
38:55The question is why, and the answer has less to do with Okinawa than with what the Navy believed was
39:02coming next.
39:02Last, 1945, Seattle, Todd Shipyard.
39:07Laffey came in with her stern still sagging, and the Navy opened her up to look at.
39:13Shipyard workers walked her decks.
39:15So did the public.
39:16They were shown the smashed after mount, the plating peeled back, the hole in the fantail,
39:22a warship that had been chewed apart above the main deck and had come 9,000 miles home anyway.
39:29There were two reasons.
39:31One was recruiting.
39:32Yards needed welders and fitters, and nothing recruits like the sight of what the work is for.
39:38The other was harder.
39:39In the summer of 1945, the United States was preparing to invade the Japanese home islands,
39:45and every planner in the Navy understood that the picket line at Okinawa had been a preview.
39:51Whatever the fleet had faced off that island would be multiplied against Kyushu.
39:55The Navy wanted Americans to see what one destroyer had absorbed,
40:00because it expected to need hundreds more crews willing to do exactly what Laffey's crew had done.
40:05That invasion never came.
40:07The war ended in August.
40:09What happened to the men?
40:11Commander Frederick Julian Becton received the Navy Cross for the 16th of April.
40:16He stayed in the Navy, retired a rear admiral, and lived until 1995.
40:21A long life for a man who had two ships shot out from under him at Guadalcanal,
40:26and very nearly a third off Okinawa.
40:29He wrote a book about that morning, and he called it after the name his crew's ordeal had given the
40:34ship.
40:34The ship that would not die.
40:38Lawrence Dulewski, Ski, the twenty-year-old who beat his own gun back into action with a rawhide maul,
40:44and was blown fifteen feet across the deck by the aircraft that finished it,
40:49walked away from the fantail that morning and went home.
40:52He spent decades afterward telling people, plainly and without embroidery,
40:57what he had seen from the hatch of Mount 53.
40:59Frank Manson, the lieutenant who came to the bridge and asked the hardest question of the day,
41:05stayed in the Navy, and spent much of his later life making sure this story was written down properly,
41:12with the names in it.
41:14Ari Futridis kept the log.
41:16Ensign Robert Thompson did not come home.
41:20Neither did thirty-one other Americans.
41:23Most of them killed in the ninety seconds when four aircraft came up the wake into the after-end of
41:29the ship.
41:30The oldest of them had a few years on the youngest by a decade.
41:34Most were in their late teens and early twenties.
41:38They are the reason the fire never reached the magazine.
41:41The ship herself was repaired, and then, this is the part that still surprises people,
41:47she went back to work.
41:50Laffey served into the Korean War, and stayed in commission, on and off, into the 1970s.
41:57She was finally struck from the list long after almost everything she had sailed with was scrap.
42:02Today she is tied up at Patriots Point in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina,
42:07a National Historic Landmark and a museum ship.
42:11You can walk her main deck.
42:13You can stand at Mount 53, at the hatch where Dulewski was standing at 839 on the 16th of April,
42:20and look aft along the deck where the 20mm mounts used to be.
42:25And there is a flag flying over her, which is where this ends.
42:29Because the thing that kept that destroyer on the surface was never one thing.
42:34It was an aircraft that is not a torpedo.
42:37And a captain who spent 80 minutes making sure every hit landed in the end of his ship he could
42:44afford to lose.
42:45And four machinery spaces that never stopped turning.
42:49And men in 130 degrees of heat holding the fire main pressure up so that other men could stand in
42:57the flames and win.
42:5922 aircraft destroyed everything on that ship that showed above the water.
43:04Not one of them was ever allowed to reach the part of her that was actually alive.
43:10That is the whole answer.
43:12Becton put it in 11 words on the bridge that morning, and it has not needed improving since.
43:18I'll never abandon ship as long as a gun will fire.
43:24Thank you for watching all the way to the end of this one.
43:26If it held you, a like genuinely helps.
43:29It is the main way a story like this reaches the people who go looking for it, and most of
43:34them find it by accident.
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43:39Are you watching from the United States? The United Kingdom? Canada? Australia?
43:45Tell me where you are in the comments. I read them.
43:48And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War, put his name and his
43:55ship or his unit below.
43:58Say it out loud here. That is how a name like Frederick Julian Becton's, and the names of the 32
44:04men who did not leave that deck, stays in the world, instead of disappearing into silence.
44:11Let's see.