World War II
Into the fall of 1942, Waller conducted shakedown out of Casco Bay, Maine, and occasionally performed local escort duties for training submarines based at New London, Conn. Late that fall, Waller departed the New York Navy Yard, Brooklyn, N.Y., bound for the Pacific, via the Panama Canal and Pearl Harbor.
She arrived at Efate on 21 January 1943 and, six days later, sortied as part of the destroyer screen with Task Force 18 (TF 18). Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen, commanding the force, flew his flag in Wichita (CA-45). The mission of TF 18 was to rendezvous off Guadalcanal with a transport force sent to resupply and reinforce the land-based forces there in their struggle to dislodge the Japanese from the key island. Intelligence reports indicated—wrongly, as it turned out—that the Japanese were mounting a big "push" to resupply their forces. As events would show, the enemy was instead massing his forces to evacuate his troops.
Read more about this topic: USS Waller (DD-466)
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“I danced in the morning when the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun,
And I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem I had my birth.”
—Sydney Carter (20th century)
“Then down came the lidthe day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a war to end war. But it merely ended art. It did not end war.”
—Wyndham Lewis (18821957)