Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "USS William D Porter, the Unluckiest Ship in the Navy" video.

  1. The balloons were target balloons, not weather balloons. Target balloons were used for antiaircraft practice throughout the fleet during the war.
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  2. To her credit, the Willie D had one of the highest aircraft kill totals of any destroyer arriving in the South Pacific after the actual invasion of Leyte. She shot down somewhere between ten and fourteen aircraft, depending on which count is to be believed. She had one other unlucky incident while serving in the Aleutians before being deployed to the South Pacific. On June 13, 1944, while assigned to shore bombardment duty against Matsuwa Island in the Kuriles, her radar picked up what the operators identified as an enemy PT boat closing at 55 knots. No visual identification was possible in the early morning gloom and fog, but Willie D opened up radar directed fire with every gun on the ship that could be brought to bear. After about five minutes of firing, the target disappeared from radar, and the crew believed they had sunk the enemy ship. Postwar records show no PT type craft were ever in the Kuriles, and there were no Japanese ships of any kind within 300 miles of the Willie D on June 13. It appears she was a victim of the "Battle of the Pips", something that plagued a whole task force a year earlier in the Aleutians. Radar was still rather primitive, and about all it could do was show reflections from anything on or over the ocean. There's a bird in the Aleutians called the dusky shearwater, a type of albatross, and a large bird at that. They would appear in large flocks when huge schools of anchovy would appear near the surface. Their hunting pattern as they flew a foot or two above the water in unison would show up on radar with the same kind of return as a warship zigzagging to evade incoming fire. When the anchovy school went deeper to escape the birds, the flock would break up and start searching for fish on their own, and the supposed ship would seem to have disappeared from radar, just as if it had been sunk. It looks like the Willie D was shooting at birds, just another unlucky incident in the history of an unlucky ship.
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