Report of Robert A. Low

After a stint at gunnery school in Washington, which came in handy in an unexpected way, I reported for duty aboard U.S.S. Boyd (544), a Fletcher Class destroyer, with five 5-inch guns, torpedoes, and surface and air radars.  The ship was then commanded by U.S.G. Sharp, Jr., (he later became Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet) and had been in the war zone over a year when I reported aboard September 28, 1944.  He left for another assignment shortly after I reported aboard.

 

I certainly wanted to make some points with the new skipper.  My opportunity came the next time our ship anchored in the safe waters of a Pacific island atoll when I learned that the supply officer on a nearby ship engaged in provisioning the fighting fleet was an old and dear friend from Stanford named Bill Rapp.

 

I persuaded the Captain to let me take the Captain's gig (our

 

 

only small boat) over to the supply ship to see what goodies I could wheedle out of my friend.

 

After a wonderful little reunion ("where you been," "how's life on board a destroyer?", etc.), Bill promised to send some 21 cases of beer.

 

The Captain was mighty happy to get my report, because this ship had been at sea continuously for more than a year, and his men had had no liberty in all that time.  But here there were a few palm trees and a sandy beach.  A little beer would make all the difference.

 

In due time, the promised beer arrived and the deck hands stowed case after case into the forward hold.  " ... 18 cases, 19 cases, 20 cases, they're all stowed away Captain," the Bosun's mate called to the Captain on the bridge.

 

The Captain was shocked and angry.  Where was the 21st case?  The Captain took the mike to the loudspeaker system, and stated in no uncertain terms that if the 21st case of beer was not produced in short order, there'd be no beer for anyone.

 

The next day, the Captain shipped 20 cases of beer back to the supply ship!  (I may have taken a little literary license about the precise number of beer cases involved, but the story is otherwise accurate.)

 

 

The Boyd was engaged in some of the meanest duty in the Pacific during the last year of the war.  I remember vividly our five-inch shells going over the heads of the Marines on the beach at Iwo Jima.  I wonder to this day how any of them survived on that beach while Japanese mortar shells blasted little puffs of sand and smoke over every foot of it.

 

The afternoon - the ship only a mile offshore - we heard a roar from the island and the fire controlman on duty in the director yelled out that he had seen through the range-finder the raising of our flag atop the highest peak on the island.  We now knew that some Marines had made it to the top, and it was only a matter of time for them to subdue the island.  I never learned what the fire controlman was doing looking through his scope at the top of the island's highest point; no enemy gun fire came from there!

 

I took charge of the Gunnery Department during those hectic days.  Quite a challenge.  I had no experience in directing the fire of the 5-inch battery.  What I knew was the theory learned at the Naval Gunnery School in Washington a few months earlier.

 

In those days, the director controlled the guns from above the bridge.  The director, something like the turret of a tank, was an enclosed steel structure, housing a giant optical scope known as a range finder, radar equipment, and mechanism for

 

 

training or turning the whole structure to track a target, as well as the detail of five highly-skilled enlisted men and the Gunnery Officer.  Once the Gunnery Officer ordered the guns (the battery) into full automatic, the guns followed the "instructions" of the director totally.  Then all the gun crews had to do was to load, fire, and remove the spent casing.

 

Well below the water line, there was an Information Center, with a giant computer and a gyroscope, called a stable element.  The information generated from either visual or radar tracking of a target was fed into the computer, which then computed the train or horizontal direction, distance and elevation required to lead and hit the target.  The target had a distance, course and speed, and in the case of aircraft, an altitude.  The firing destroyer has a course and speed and a wildly moving deck.  The computer was designed to work out the problem so that the shells from the five-inch battery would lead an aircraft target enough to explode in front of it.  Quite an accomplishment for this primitive computer, largely mechanical in operation.  Of course the problem of the constantly moving destroyer deck had to be taken into account, otherwise shells could be pumped into the sea as the ship rolled in the direction of the target, or they could scatter anywhere as the ship lurched, rolled and pitched.  The gyroscope, or stable element, fed a constant "level horizon" into the computer.  Hooked into this system, the guns swivelled and rose and fell constantly to compensate for the movement of the ship.

 

The Naval computer, then largely mechanical, was a marvel of its time -- a forerunner of the intricate and responsive electronic mechanisms that we know today.

 

The Gunnery Officer occupied a seat at the front of the director where he could stand in a hatch and see what was going on.  The Gunnery Officer communicated by telephone with the crews in each of the guns, and through a "talker" (enlisted man with mike and earphones) with the Captain on the bridge below.

 

We who served in the director developed a camaraderie -- sort of a team spirit.  The safety of the ship depended upon us.  At times, I made life or death decisions: which target to track, which target to fire upon.  Those were heady days and nights.  We in the director spent hours together.  We developed an uncanny teamwork.

 

The Army and Marine Corps were engaged in a ferocious amphibious operation to take the Island of Okinawa, 330 miles south of Japan.  Our objective was to use Okinawa as a base for the final assault on the Japanese mainland.  The Japanese were intent on raising as much havoc on Okinawa as possible.  More than 100,000 died before it was over -- 11,000 U.S. Marines and Army troops, and 90,000 Japanese.  Only 4,000 Japanese allowed themselves to be taken prisoner.

 

 

The Japanese launched a vicious Kamikaze attack on U.S. ground forces on Okinawa.  These attacks were conducted by pilots, flying huge bombs, whose mission was to destroy our troops on Okinawa.  More often than not, however, they chose to crash themselves into the first targets sighted -- the destroyers on patrol duty between Japan and Okinawa.

 

Of course, when the pilot took off, he had no hope of surviving, whether he was able to crash into a target or simply crashed into the sea.  This was a trip into the hereafter -- incomprehensible to those of us in the West who hold no allegiance to a divine Emperor.

 

The "scuttlebutt" at the time was that the Allied forces would lose a million men invading the Japanese mainland.  On the other hand, with the war in Europe over, military commanders in the Pacific had vast arrays of ships, planes, and troops to do the job, and each of the services (Army, Navy and Marine Corps) tried to outshine the other in demonstrating its courage and effectiveness.

 

 

The Navy offered to assign destroyers to "radar picket" stations around Okinawa to make possible early warnings of incoming Kamikazes to the ground forces engaged in taking Okinawa -- or it would seem to provide diversionary targets.

 

Our first assignment was to Radar Picket Station #6, the point of Okinawa on a direct line from Japan, i.e. the most direct route for Kamikazes en route to Okinawa.

 

My recollection of that first night on radar picket duty is a bit hazy after all these years, but I remember that I fired the five-inch guns almost continuously from sundown to dawn at enemy "bogeys" and by daybreak we were out of ammunition.

 

We were ordered back to Karama Rhetto, a group of small islands to the west, where our ships were able to refuel, reprovision, and replenish stocks of ammunition.

 

The little harbor among these islands was filled with an impressive array of supply ships of various types, but the sight of mangled destroyers was the thing not to be forgotten.  The superstructures of some of these ships were a mass of tangled steel: it was impossible to discern any of the characteristics (the bridge, smokestacks, etc.) that we knew once had been there.  These were Kamikaze victims.

 

Destroyer duty was known to be glamorous duty and usually some sailor aboard a supply ship would arrange a transfer with a destroyerman, if the chance presented itself.  No one offered

 

 

to come aboard the Boyd on this visit to Karama Rhetto.

 

When a Kamikaze was picked up by radar headed for our ship, we in the director performed with a coolness and professionalism that thrills me to this day.  Those days and nights brought out the best, and I am proud to this day of my own coolness in those times of danger.

 

No Kamikaze ever hit us, and our five-inch guns sent a number of them into the sea.  At night they abruptly disappeared from the radar screen as we fired at them, and we knew we had a kill.

 

We survived radar picket duty without a scratch although 52 destroyers were damaged and 14 sunk in the Kamikazi action around Okinawa.

 

Without any explanation that we then understood, the war was over.  We now know that after the devastation of two atom bombs, the Japanese had sued for surrender.

 

One of the first to sign up, I was one of the first released from active duty, at 26, one of the youngest lieutenant commanders in the Navy.  My life as a civilian was ahead of me.

 

USS Boyd.  Robert A. Low was Gunnery Officer during the Battle of Okinawa.

 

 

SOURCE: Robert A. Low, Informal Autobiography 

Written for his family in 1989, Bob Low has graciously granted his permission to add a portion of his Informal Autobiography to the USS Boyd website 08 SEP 2001.