Tales from a Tin Can: The USS Dale from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay
by Michael Keith Olson
Zenith Press, 2007, 336 pages
The destroyer Dale (DD-353) fought from the beginning to the end of
WWII and earned 12 battle stars, but the lucky ship suffered no battle
casualties. The first battle action came at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,
when the ship could not move as it was moored between other destroyers during
the initial Japanese attack. Dale soon broke loose and was the first ship
out of the Pearl Harbor Channel entrance, when her gunners shot down a Japanese
dive bomber. This ship history provides numerous personal accounts from former
crewmen of the Pearl Harbor attack and the many other battles that Dale
fought in such as the Battle of the Komandorski Islands in the Bering Sea in March
1943 and the Battle of Okinawa from April to June 1945. Several crew stories
mention kamikaze attacks on Dale or other ships, but each story lacks a
date and cannot be corroborated with other stories in the book or with excerpts
from Dale's War Diary.
Over 40 former Dale crewmen tell their war stories in this history,
which also includes excerpts from two diaries that chronicle events in 1942 and
1943. Michael Keith Olson, son of Robert Olson who served aboard Dale
from early 1942 until her decommissioning in October 1945, recorded more than
100 hours of stories at Dale's annual reunions and used these
reminiscences to put together a history of the destroyer from Pearl Harbor to
the end of the war. Dale was commissioned in June 1935, but the book does
not mention at all the ship's history from this time to Pearl Harbor.
In the Preface the author admits the book's greatest weakness. The many
stories from about 60 years before presented a major problem in regards to the
difficulties in determining the dates of the events and confirming the facts by
examining Dale's War Diary. This turns about to be especially true for
the several references to kamikaze attacks carried out against Dale or
other ships. The book includes about a dozen personal accounts of kamikaze
attacks, but the book's excerpts of Dale's War Diary have only one
mention of a kamikaze attack not even witnessed by Dale's crew, "Later
the seaplane tender St. George reported that she had been hit by a
suicide plane of the 'Val' type" (p. 262, excerpt dated May 6, 1945).
No story about a kamikaze attack even has a date, which makes it nearly
impossible to confirm the information. For example, Lowell Barker tells the
following rousing story, which the author places in a section about incidents
that occurred during the first half of January 1945 (pp. 238-9):
I was OOD (Officer of the Deck) one day while we were in Leyte Gulf,
waiting for the convoy to form up. Everybody was on edge because of reported
kamikaze activity. Suddenly, several ships were struck by kamikazes and blew
up. The air filled with AA (antiaircraft) bursts and everyone on the bridge
was looking for kamikazes trying to sneak up on us. One was spotted at some
distance and we opened up with our 5-inchers, but he kept boring right in on
us. Then the 40mms opened up, and then the 20s. Closer and closer he came.
Suddenly, his plane erupted in flame, exploded, and crashed into the water
less than a hundred yards away. Boy, we had to get him, and we got him!
Despite the excitement of Dale's gunners shooting down a kamikaze
aircraft that hit the water less than a hundred yards from the ship, not one
other crewman mentions this attack, and Dale's War Diary remains silent
regarding such an attack.
USS Dale during May 1944 Task Force 58 carrier raids,
taken from USS Yorktown (U.S. Navy photograph)
Robert Olson, the author's father, gives an account of what happened one
early morning during the Battle of Okinawa when he was assigned to the bridge
(p. 264):
I'm here to tell you, it was plenty easy to stay awake, because what
greeted me up there on the bridge was the greatest show on earth! Right at
dawn, the anchorage was attacked by a massive flight of kamikazes, and every
ship there opened up with every gun they had. The sky literally exploded
with tracers stitching back and forth among the black puffs of the
antiaircraft rounds. There were dogfights between our planes and the
kamikazes, and the air was filled with flying metal. You could see some of
the kamikazes explode into pieces and watch as the pieces fell crazily down
to earth. But some of them got through and hit our ships, and the resulting
explosions blasted wreckage way up into the sky. It was spectacular, like
watching every fireworks display you've ever seen in your life rolled up
into one big blast.
This impressive dawn attack by multiple kamikaze aircraft does not get any
mention by other former crewmen or Dale's War Diary.
The following account by Electrician Mate Elliott Wintch makes for a good
story but lacks a date, captain's name, and destroyer's name to confirm its
accuracy (pp. 262-3):
We ran a lot of errands for the fleet. One of them was running personnel
and mail back and forth from ship to ship. One evening we took a captain
over to his new ship, which was a tin can (destroyer) tied up in a nest with
two others down the harbor a ways from where we were anchored. The guy was
really friendly. While we motored over to his ship in the whaleboat, he
asked questions about the living conditions aboard old tin cans like the
Dale. He seemed to be genuinely interested in how we were all holding
up. At dawn the next morning, a lone kamikaze came flying down the chute.
Everyone in the anchorage was shooting at him, but he made it through and
crashed into that captain's new ship, hitting it right below the bridge. The
ship went down with one-third of its crew. The only thing left was the bow
sticking straight up out of the water. I never did hear what happened to the
captain.
Paperback version published
by Zenith Press in 2010
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