As US Army and Marine forces reduced the island of Okinawa in the spring of 1945, the Japanese unleashed a desperate storm of suicide attacks, the infamous kamikaze, on the massed armada of supporting allied warships offshore. It did not take the Japanese long to understand the significance of the line of destroyers that ringed the island, their air search radars detecting and warning of the approach of Japanese aircraft from Formosa, Kyushu, and other locations to attack the US 5th (later 3rd) Fleet.
Soon, duty on the Radar Pickets became among the most deadly and dangerous of the entire war. “Roger Peter” stations were subject to withering attacks, as the Japanese sought to blind the Americans and strike the carriers and transports that supported operations ashore. A grimly high number of US ships were sunk, with heavy loss of life, in order to maintain the ring of warning radars that shielded the invasion fleet. Drexler, Bush, Emmons, Little, Morrison, Luce, Pringle, all were sacrificed to alert the fleet of the impending kamikaze strikes. And Mannert L. Abele, smashed by two massive precision-guided missiles that portended a coming age. Many other ships were savagely mauled, Aaron Ward, Hazelwood, the famous Laffey, Cassin Young. Damaged so severely that their survival astonished those who witnessed their suffering.
HT/ Bring the heat