When she minced into Pearl Harbor, just in time to see war break over Hawaii, the destroyer Patterson was only four years old and one of the best. A survivor of Dec. 7’s disaster, she became one of the thin line of U.S. warships left to stop the Jap fleet in the Pacific. Lean as an alley cat, “Pat” stalked off to westward.
It was a bad time. On the blackest night in U.S. naval history, off Savo Island, the Japs destroyed the Allied cruisers Astoria, Quincy, Vincennes and Canberra. Pat, hit and hurt, stood by and picked up 400 survivors. It was the kind of work expected of destroyers. They were the tin cans and expendable.
With little rest Pat labored on, convoying ships off Australia, operating in the “Slot,” seeing the tide of war turn at last as reinforcements began to arrive from a nation which had tardily remembered its Navy. She fought at Saipan and Tinian. She was a picket ship. She was fire support. She was mobile 5-in. artillery steaming inshore against Jap pillboxes. She operated at Guam and later at Palau and later with Halsey in the second Battle of the Philippines.
Like her sister cans, she seldom figured in communiques, but she was beloved by the big ships whenever there was trouble. (“Screen us, Pat!”) She rescued 124 men from the blazing Ommaney Bay. She rescued 106 survivors of the Bismarck Sea off Iwo Jima. She fought off Okinawa. When there was nothing else to do she carried the mail.
When the war ended, rusty old Pat lay in Saipan Harbor, worn out and obsolescent. Soon after, she was ordered home.
Last Port. In some ways, Pat had been lucky. Seventy-one of her sister destroyers had been lost in the oceans of the world; their bones lay in Iron Bottom Bay, in Bali Strait, in watery locations marked simply: “12 28 S, 164 08 E.”
She plodded back across the Pacific, rested briefly at San Diego and went on to New York Harbor. She was tucked away in an East River pier, her carcass decently out of-sight. Agents came aboard her to calculate coldly the amount of aluminum in her superstructure, the steel in her hull. Officers and men learned then that old Pat was through. They were not bitter. More than 200 other veterans of World War II (about 600,000 tons of warships) were also marked for the scrap heap. Considering the life she had led, Pat had lasted a long time.
They set to stripping her of her movable gear, littering her decks with outmoded radar, communication equipment, boxes of crockery and silverware. A faded jack at her bow, her commission pennant, and her ragged ensign hanging limply aft indicated that she was still a ship of the U.S. Navy, but soon these flags would be hauled down and she would be towed off to the bone yard.
On Navy Day old Pat rested alongside two sisters who were awaiting the same forlorn ending—the heroic Dewey and Farragut. Across Manhattan, in the North River, the august battleships and carriers and the newer cans of the U.S. Fleet took the applause.
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