Book Review: My Life to the Destroyers

My Life to the Destroyers
Captain L.A. Abercrombie and Fletcher Pratt
Henry Holt, 1944

Taking a break from the usual scientific topics, I review here a fascinating story of sailors at war.   The destroyer Drayton, on which most of this true story is set, missed the Pearl Harbor strike, but shortly thereafter got the first confirmed kill of a Japanese fleet submarine. For the next year and half as described here, the ship went on to battles large and small, against ships, planes, and subs. The authors give the small-scale incidents the same prominence as the famous ones, reminding us just how many different things the "tin can" sailors did.  The book also reminds us of the scale of this war.  The Drayton sails all over the vast Pacific, often needing many days to transit from one island or task force to another, and the book includes the strained boredom of keeping watch day after empty day. The construction, weaponry, and operation of the ship is described very well, and we meet many of her crew, some of whom have been in the Navy for all of six weeks. 



To Abercrombie, the enemy is usually personified as "the Jap." He doesn't think much of "the Jap" as a tactician: he believes the Japanese stick with a tactic longer than they should, which helps the oft-outnumbered Americans plan their counter-moves. He does admire the cleverness of some Japanese efforts like a beautifully camouflaged airfield the Drayton helps destroy and skilled hit-and-run night operations.  
He makes an odd error about the Battle of Midway, perhaps due to the the Navy's restrictions on sharing information (we didn't want the enemy to know we'd broken their codes).  His ship was part of a task force sent to offer some resistance if the Japanese bypassed Midway for Hawaii. He writes. "Actually (the Japanese plan) never had a chance. Even if he'd gone around Midway he would have run into our battle force, and we would have handed him a beating." Either Admiral Nagumo's First Carrier Striking Force with its airpower (Abercrombie's task force had no carriers) or Admiral Yamomoto's Main Body with its battleships would have crushed any surface opposition the U.S Navy could assemble at the time. 
The book was written during the war, which gives it immediacy but also means some details of operations are obscured: the ship is sent on a secret mission soon after Pearl Harbor, and there's no word on what it was. 

[If you're wondering, the Drayton was a Mahan-class ship built in 1936: she came through the war unscathed, but with hundreds of newer destroyers in the fleet, she was decommissioned almost immediately after the war and scrapped in 1946. By the way, my father was a destroyer sailor  several years after WWII, and this is one of his favorite books.]
To summarize, this is a great book if you want to know what the early years of the war were like from the perspective of one captain and one ship.  It's readily available from used-book sites including Amazon.