War Stories III by Oliver L. North

carrier HMS Glorious had been sunk by German cruisers and later on, in November ’41, just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, a U-boat sank the carrier HMS Ark Royal in the Mediterranean. Then in December, a week after the Japanese sneak attack, a U-boat sank HMS Audacity, an escort carrier on convoy duty in the North Atlantic.
    German U-boat commanders were incredibly audacious throughout the war. In October 1939, the U-47 slipped into Scapa Flow—the Royal Navy’s principal anchorage—and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak and then got away! When we pulled into the anchorage, we could see the superstructure of the Royal Oak sticking out of the water—just like with our sunken battleships at Pearl Harbor.

    At Scapa Flow we came under the command of a British admiral and served with their “Home Fleet” for three months. Toward the end of our deployment, we were part of a big British convoy to Malta. We raced through Gibraltar into the Mediterranean with the Wasp to resupply the British garrison on the island and deliver Spitfire aircraft. That trip turned out to be easier than we expected. The Germans apparently never knew we came in. We ran within 300 miles of Malta and launched the Spitfires without incident.
    By May we were back in New York, where they slapped radar aboard—we had no idea what it was, or how to use it. I’m not even sure they gave us instruction books. But we figured it out by the time we got through the Panama Canal and up to San Diego, which was where the 1st Marine Division was embarking for combat in the South Pacific. Our job was to get them there.
    Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, was the first American offensive of the war—and the battle to take and hold Guadalcanal lasted from 7 August 1941 until February 1943. We had several big engagements during that time frame—the toughest of which occurred between 12 and 16 November against the “Tokyo Express”—the Japanese air and surface action groups that came down “the slot” between the islands to pound the Marines trying to hold Henderson Field on the northeast coast of Guadalcanal island.
    We were in action every night and every day. At night it was against Japanese transports, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships and in the daylight it was against Japanese air attacks. The area between Savo Island and Guadalcanal had the wrecks of so many ships in it that we called it “Ironbottom Sound.”
    On 13 November 1942, the Sterett was credited with shooting down two Japanese torpedo bombers—and an “assist” on two others. One of the damaged Japanese planes hit the San Francisco that afternoon, in the after-fire control tower, and killed thirty of their crew.
    By the time that battle was over, the crew of the Sterret had done it all—“neutrality” duty before Pearl Harbor, anti-submarine patrols off the
U.S. east coast, convoy duty in the North Atlantic, service with the British Home Fleet, escorting a carrier in the Mediterranean, and fighting Japanese surface ships and aircraft in the Pacific. It shows the kind of stuff Americans are made of.
    The USS Sterett’s dramatic entry into World War II—and subsequent service in two theaters of the conflict—may not have been altogether typical, but Charles Calhoun’s experience demonstrates the remarkable transformation the U.S. Navy made, once war was thrust upon us. The same thing happened in the U.S. Army. One who was there when it happened was another son of Philadelphia, Charles Hangsterfer. Like Calhoun, he too had “signed up” before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
    FIRST LIEUTENANT CHARLES HANGSTERFER, US ARMY
    1st Infantry Division, England
16 November 1942

    I went to Gettysburg College after high school because my eyes weren’t good enough to get into West Point. I’d always wanted to be a soldier—and going to college near where a great battle had been fought less