RECOLLECTION
Chester Hill 1988
That bombardment on the Hyane Harbor beaches in the afternoon of 5 March let those foot-slogging cavalrymen loose to take over the place! The next morning a hospital ship arrived off shore, and we transferred , via landing barge, the wounded we had taken on board the afternoon of our arrival on the 4th over to them, after another half hour bombardment at our troops request. This was on the Papitalai Mission area which they had targeted for the next morning, whilst part of their force was already sweeping northward toward salami Plantation. The next day it was a lot more of the same, with three separate bombardments towards the west – this time in direct support of our advancing troops. Late that evening we and the Wilkes departed from the eastern part of the area enroute for a new sort of duty around to the north, escorting old friends of the First Cavalry. A little after dawn the next morning we sighted the destroyer minesweeps (old WWI “four pipers”) USS’s Hamilton and Long coming up behind us from the east. Within about an hour we had formed column with the sweepers leading and Wilkes and Swanson escorting the LCVP’s behind.
As we headed south into Seeadler Harbor I could not but wonder if that magnificent anchorage had not been used as a refuge by Count Felix von Luckner in his Imperial German raider of the same name in World War I. I never did find out! We gave the island to the east of the entrance a good going over with our guns as we entered, because it was there that the Nicholson had drawn damaging fire the day before. We detached the landing craft who proceeded to support the seizure of Papitalai Mission, which was already in progress. Wilkes and we followed in close covering support of the minesweeping operation. These were about a dozen magnetic mines which our planes had laid several weeks earlier, so locating them was not too difficult. They were exploded by long electrically charged cables towed astern on the surface, and the resulting explosions were indeed spectacular. I nearly wore out my thumb pressing the control buttons of our degaussing (demagnetizing ) equipment, as the settings had to be changed with every appreciable change of course. Just as we were leaving the harbor – mission accomplished - I spotted an apparently nearly spherical object awash in our port bow wave , and nearly froze in terror of the imminent blast. Daring to look again I saw it was waterlogged kapok life preserver, not of our design at all, with something still laced in it. We randomly firehosed Hauwe Island on the western side of the harbor entrance with our 40mm as the formation departed.
The next day we went back into Seeadler Harbor two times – once to escort six LST’s in for a landing in support of the Salami Plantation capture three days before, and then back in about a half hour later to cover the minesweeper Long while she finished mopping up the sweeping of the previous day. Nothing much happened except putting a few rounds into an enemy barge alongside a jetty over near Lorengau, just to keep her inactive. That afternoon we sent our Assistant Gunnery Officer Ensign John Lindsay ashore for temporary duty as a naval gunfire spotter for the troopers.
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The next day we headed back down to Buna with other DDs and some LSTs. We were back off the entrance to Seeadler Harbor about five mornings later with more fully loaded LSTs. That evening we lay a mile north of the entrance , patrolling almost casually, when we got a request from the troopers through the very fine spotter they were using to “keep ‘em awake” in an area which they wanted to clean out early the next morning, over in the general vicinity of Lorengau. And so we did. Without going to General Quarters we just used the two five-inchers regularly manned during Condition III and lobbed a few sleep disturbers in at randomly selected intervals. According to our log those intervals were 13, 33, 76 – thought we’s let ‘em get to sleep around midnight and then wake ‘em up again – 35, 50, 25, 30, and 13 minutes. Devilish.
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The only other unusual activity that I can remember our getting involved in in the Admiralties was spotting a PT boat ashore on a reef off Norilo Island. We backed into the shallows close enough to get a line to her and towed them into Seeadler in the hardest rain squall I can ever remember. As we let them go inside where their friends could take care of them I heard Captain Robertson remark about a bunch of Sea Scouts. We made another logistics trip to Buna and return, and finally departed the Admiralties on 3 April, not to return until we came in for a few hours with Task Force 38 in late September. It had been an interesting 30 days.