Profiles in Courage: USS Laffey

Bartlett Laffey was an Irish immigrant who joined the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. Laffey unloaded a 12-pound howitzer from his post aboard the gunboat USS Marmora in the middle of an intense Confederate attack at Yazoo City, Mississippi. As he moved it into position, the gun carriage and rammer were chewed away by enemy rifle fire. 

Despite the heated enemy assault, he and his shipmates used the gun to turn back the Confederates and win the battle. He received the Medal of Honor for turning the tide amid a fight that should have killed him. The Sumner-Class Destroyer USS Laffey was named in his honor during World War II and would more than live up to his name in a relentless kamikaze attack that would have sunk the ship if not for its fighting crew and captain.

Construction of the Laffey took little more than five months in 1943. After its training cruise, it was sent to England, arriving on May 27, 1944. The ship's first combat mission would be the invasion of Europe on D-Day, June 6, 1944. It spent the morning of D-Day raining fire on German positions before replenishing its ammo and hunting enemy torpedo boats. 

D-Day was its only assignment in the European Theater. The crew didn't know it, but they would need all the combat experience they could get. By November 1944, Laffey was in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese in the Philippines. It supported landings in Leyte, Ormoc Bay, and Lindayen Gulf, to name a few. Its hardest day wouldn't come until after the Allied invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. 

As part of Task Force 54 supporting the invasion, Laffey was 30 miles north of the island as a radar picket. On April 15, the Laffey shot down 13 Japanese planes. The enemy would return the next day with a force of 50 planes determined to send the Laffey to the bottom.

The attack started early, with a single Aichi D3A Val dive bomber dropping its ordnance near the ship at 0830. Minutes later, four more dive bombers came at it from both sides, and all four were shot down. A Yokosuka D4Y dive bomber tried to fly in close and strafe the deck during the fighting but was also shot away. One more dive bomber was shot down, making for six down planes in less than ten minutes.

Twelve minutes after the initial bombing runs, another D3A bomber appeared, flying right for the ship's deck. It glanced off the deck and fell into the ocean. The crew realized they were firing at a kamikaze formation. TheJapanese couldn't get through the destroyer's defenses, so they began making suicide attacks. 

At 0815, a plane crashed into one of the Laffey's 40-millimeter gun mounts, killing three crew members and lighting the destroyer's magazine on fire. As crew members struggled to control the damage, another D3A managed to strafe a gun mount and drop its bomb on the ship's magazine. The resulting explosion took out the Japanese plane and started another major fire. 

A burning enemy plane then crashed into the same spot as three more dive bombers hit the Laffey, taking out its rudder. Laffey was disabled, but its gun crews were still fighting. The ship's communications officer asked the captain, Cmdr. Frederick Becton if they should abandon ship, to which he replied, "No! I'll never abandon ship as long as a single gun will fire." 

Laffey, overwhelmed within just 20 minutes of fighting, finally got some air support from a flight of FM-2 Wildcats from the USS Shamrock Bay and 12 Marine Corps Vought F4U Corsairs. The fighters engaged the Kamikaze formation, breaking up the determined assault but not ending it. 

They had to dodge the American fighters, but D3As were still making bombing, and kamikaze ran on the vessel. Dive bombers then destroyed another of the ship's 40-millimeter gun mounts as near-miss bombs detonated next to the ship, spraying its crew with shrapnel. In all, the Laffey took four bombs, six kamikaze crashes, and a strafing fire that killed 32 and wounded 71.

The destroyer was towed to safety, where it was repaired enough to sail for Saipan and, eventually, drydock in Washington State. It was back in action by 1946. Laffey would also engage the enemy in the Korean War and serve until 1975, the last of its class to be decommissioned. 

Today, it's a museum ship at Patriot's Point in Charleston, South Carolina, after being declared a national landmark in 1986.