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:
“Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal. The jungle is my home. But I will show the world that I can be its master. I will perfect my own race of people, a race of atomic supermen, which will conquer the world.”
—Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1922–1978)
“The war was a mirror; it reflected man’s every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)