THE BAD LUCK OF THE PORTER

The William D. Porter, an American destroyer commissioned in 1943, had a very ignoble career, starting with its maiden voyage. Pulling out of dock to join a convey escorting the battleship USS Iowa, the Porter collided with and damaged another vessel. Shortly thereafter, one of her crew members was swept overboard by a freak wave and was lost. While maintaining strict silence in U-boat infested waters, the Porter accidentally set off a depth charge. She then blew an engine and endangered the convoy by falling behind.

These incidents by themselves are not all that remarkable considering the number of ships manned by green crews which were churned out in World War II. However, the Porter notched things up a bit by accidentally launching a torpedo which nearly sank the Iowa. While this was considered a bad thing to do on general principles, the gravity of the situation was compounded by the fact that President Roosevelt, the Secretary of State, and numerous high ranking military officials, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were aboard the Iowa on the way to the Tehran conference. They witnessed the near miss of the torpedo and saw a Secret Service agent trying to defend the President by shooting his pistol at the torpedo. Although the Iowa almost returned fire under the belief that the Porter was under the control of saboteurs, she ultimately refrained from doing so. The Porter was sent back to Bermuda and the entire crew was arrested.  The officers were assigned to obscure shore posts, and the crewman who accidentally launched the torpedo was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor--a sentence which was eventually set aside by Roosevelt.

The Porter thereafter was a source of derision throughout the fleet and was regarded as cursed. She received hundreds of signals during her career along the lines of "Don't shoot--we're Republicans." She was banished to the Aleutians, where her most noteworthy action was the shelling of the base commandant's house by an intoxicated crewman. 

Eventually, the Porter was given a chance to redeem herself in the South Pacific, where she shot down at least three American planes and riddled another American ship with gunfire. On June 10, 1945, a Japanese suicide plane attached a nearby vessel, changed course at the last minute, splashed into the ocean near the Porter, and sank. The Porter crew members congratulated themselves at escaping the close call. Unfortunately, a minute or two later they found out the hard way that the wrecked Japanese aircraft had slid beneath the Porter. The plane exploded, and the Porter sank in 2,400 feet of water. Fortunately, however, the bad luck had finally run out, and not a single crew member was lost during the sinking.

The Navy was very embarrassed about the Porter and the whole Iowa incident and covered up the story until a newsman found out about in during a 1958 reunion of the crew.