Fate
The fate of Mahan was set in motion in November 1944, when bad weather and hostile terrain bogged down the ground campaign to seize Leyte from the Japanese. The chief impediment to retaking all of Leyte was the Japanese ability to reinforce and resupply its headquarters at Ormoc City, on the west side of Leyte, and the Americans' inability to counter this advantage. Thus, the unavoidable decision was made to attack Ormoc by amphibious means.
On the morning of 7 December 1944, three years to the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, troops of the 77th Army landed south of Ormoc City. At the same time, Mahan was patrolling the channel between Leyte and Ponson Island. The amphibious strike by the infantry met with little opposition, but nine Japanese bombers and four escort fighters converged on Mahan. “Observers were to record of this, one of the most unusual and devastating of kamikaze assaults of 1944, that the Japanese aircraft used torpedo-launching tactics, but when they had been hit they switched to kamikaze attacks, diving on Mahan ...” During the assault, US Army fighters downed three Japanese aircraft and damaged two more; Mahan blew four out of the sky but took three direct kamikaze hits. ..."the most calamitous a direct hit to the superstructure near the No. 2 gun." Awash in flames and explosions, Commander E. G. Campbell, the skipper, turned Mahan toward the picket line as the last hope of salvaging his ship. With that gone, he gave the order to abandon ship. Destroyers Lamson and Walke rescued the survivors: one officer and five men were missing and thirteen seriously wounded or burned. Mahan had met her Waterloo at the Battle of Ormoc Bay and was sent to the bottom by the friendly fire of USS Walke (DD-723).
Read more about this topic: USS Mahan (DD-364)
Famous quotes containing the word fate:
“We are hedged about, we think, by accident and circumstance; now we creep as in a dream, and now again we run, as if there were a fate in it, and all things thwarted or assisted.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls,—the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot- box once a year, but on what kind of a man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“So the old flute was doomed and its fate was pathetic,
‘Twas fastened and burned at the stake as heretic,
While the flames roared around it they heard a strange
noise—
‘Twas the old flute still whistling ‘The Protestant Boys’.”
—Unknown. The Old Orange Flute (l. 37–40)