Operation Flintlock Support
On 8 January 1944, the destroyer escort returned to Pearl Harbor to prepare for her role in "Operation Flintlock", the Marshalls invasion. Twenty days later, she departed Oahu in the screen of a convoy bound for the Central Pacific. As in the case of the Gilberts operation, Wileman took no part in the actual assault phase of Operation Flintlock. Instead, she again escorted the ships carrying part of the garrison troops — the 16th Marine Defense Battalion and a Construction Battalion unit — for Kwajalein Atoll. The assault itself went forward just three days after Wileman left Pearl Harbor, and Kwajalein had been secured for three days when she reached the atoll on 10 February. The convoy entered the lagoon upon arrival, and Wileman began an uneventful 18 days on anti-submarine patrol in and around the atoll and later at Majuro. The warship departed the Marshalls on 28 February and reentered Pearl Harbor on 8 March.
After three weeks of gunnery drills and sonar exercises, Wileman left the Hawaiian Islands on 30 March in an antisubmarine hunter-killer task group built around Altamaha (CVE-18). The unit arrived in the eastern Marshalls at the end of the first week in April and began its search for Japanese submarines. The hunting proved less than good. During the voyage from Oahu, a plane from Altamaha claimed to have attacked an enemy submarine and took credit for a probable kill. While actually on patrol in the Marshalls, the group's only contact with the enemy almost proved to be a disaster.
Read more about this topic: USS Wileman (DE-22)
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