Read Online Down to the Sea by Bruce Henderson - Free Book Online Page A

Christopher’s medal affixed to her fore-mast,” and Armstrong surmised later that “the good saint must have been working overtime” to prevent the ships from slicing the bow offeach other. Neither vessel was put out of action by the mishap, although the list of damage to Spence would fill two typed pages. At-sea collisions had long been considered career-ending occurrences for commanding officers, but Burke would subsequently attach no blame to either skipper due to the incident taking place “in night actions while operating at high speeds under enemy gunfire.”
    Slugging it out at close range with Sendai , Spence was hit by an 8-inch round on the starboard side. The projectile bounced off and fell into the water without exploding. However, an 18-by-6-inch hole was punched into the ship at the waterline, causing a crew compartment below to flood and salt water to leak into two fuel oil tanks. A mattress and blankets were stuffed into the hole as a makeshift measure, but the fuel contamination was a larger problem. The fires in two of the four boilers went out, reducing the destroyer’s speed accordingly—potentially a death sentence in a sea battle. Hustling boiler room personnel shifted fuel oil suction for the two boilers to a standby tank. Then, with their ship’s fate and their own hanging in the balance, they rapidly restored the fires to the boilers.
    In the aft engine room, Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class Robert Strand, twenty-two, of Ridgway, Pennsylvania, was experiencing his first major battle and learning how loud the sounds of combat could be even so far below and while working next to one of the ship’s two powerful General Electric steam turbines that generated Spence ’s combined 60,000 horsepower. Strand, fine-boned but well-coordinated and athletic—back home he played on a traveling all-star baseball team and was competitive in tennis, basketball, and especially bowling (and hoped one day to own his hometown bowling alley)—knew his way around motors of varying sizes. After graduating from high school in 1938 and working as a butcher’s apprentice, he had been hired by one of the town’s biggest employers, the Elliott Company, an electric motor manufacturer that had a contract to provide motor drives for submarines. When the war began, Strand was given a draft deferment because of his job in the defense industry. One day he found that someone had slapped a fresh coat of yellow paint on his lunch box, no doubt implying cowardice on his part for not going into the military. Strand immediately went to the Navy recruiting office and enlisted, and left a few weeks later, in August 1942. With the skills he had learned working with motors, he was sent to a Navy school following boot camp and graduated with high enough marks to earn his machinist’s mate 2nd class rating. His assignment to Spence had followed in March 1943, and he boarded the new destroyer at Boston’s Charlestown Naval Base shortly after Spence returned from her shakedown cruise.
    Worse than the noise of gunfire in battle, Strand was learning, was no sound at all in the cavernous engine room—as when the huge turbine whined to a halt when the boiler fires went out. But now, with superheated steam again coursing through its feeder tubes, he and the other machinist’s mates had gotten the turbine back on line—and Spence was back in the fight at full speed.
    The “feisty Spence and her fighting crew” again went after Sendai, which was still turning in circles with guns blazing. Spence released four torpedoes and was rewarded with four waterline hits resulting in “columns of fire, water and debris fountaining skyward.” The battered and blazing Sendai soon went down before their eyes. Spotting the two damaged Japanese destroyers that had collided earlier now attempting to flee, Armstrong set off after them but had to give up the chase, as Spence was