A Tin Can Sailors Destroyer History
USS SHANNON DD-737
The Tin Can Sailor, April 1999
The second ship named SHANNON, the ex-DD-736, was launched on 24 June 1944. Her namesake was U.S. Marine Colonel Harold D. Shannon, who served with heroism during World War I and in the defense of Midway during the Second World War. The new minelayer was commissioned 8 September 1944 and headed for the Panama Canal and the Pacific on 21 November. On the way, she rescued two the pilot and crewman from a downed TUSCALOOSA (CA-37) scout plane, and then steamed west for Pearl Harbor.
As the flagship of the “Lucky Seventh” Division of Mine Squadron 3, she left Pearl on 27 January 1945. After a stop at Eniwetok and a brief stint of radar picket and anti-submarine duty in the Marianas, she arrived off Iwo Jima on 19 February. From ten miles offshore, her crew watched the marine-laden transports moving toward the beach and then at 1430, began fire support close to the beaches. Nightfall brought their first air attack. On 24 February, her gunners destroyed several enemy emplacements ashore. At 0900 on the 25th, Fire Support Control reported that the “Sassy” SHANNON’s guns had “knocked out several blockhouses, pillboxes, small gun emplacements, artillery emplacements, a bivouac area, a truck, entrenchments, and many small buildings…”
The SHANNON continued on duty off Iwo into March, supporting the 4th Marine Division with night illumination, harassing fire, and call fire. Then, it was on to Ulithi where, on 25 March, the SHANNON joined sister DMs SMITH (DM-23), FRASER (DM-24), BAUER (DM-26), and DITTER (DM-31) as part of Mine Group Two to cover Sweep Unit 13 clearing the waters around the islands of Kerama Retto. In addition to firing on targets ashore, the DMs began fighting off kamikaze attacks at 0400 the following morning. On the night of 27 March, an enemy plane missed the SHANNON’s bridge by a few feet. It then dropped a bomb that turned out to be a dud. At dawn, two Vals attacked the group and tore into the O’BRIEN (DD-725). The SHANNON moved in to help fight the fires and then escorted the destroyer to the safety of the transport area where the wounded were transferred to a waiting troop transport.
Beginning on L-Day, 1 April, the SHANNON was patrolling the waters off the coast of Okinawa when she found and sank a suicide boat. Over the following days and weeks, the crew began to feel the effects of the nerve-racking routine of patrolling and screening under almost constant attack, with little sleep, destruction all around them, and they still had not splashed an enemy plane that they could call a “sure” hit.
Finally, at 0245 on 30 April a kamikaze raider came out of the night sky, closing to 2,000 yards before the gunners were sure of their target. Then, “suddenly, huge, black, and roaring almost straight down, the plane loomed out of the darkness.” Armed with the plane’s range and bearing, the skipper was ready and ordered an abrupt turn to port. “Instead of crashing just abaft the bridge,” wrote an unknown ship historian, “the plane passed between our stacks, so low that he ripped away an aerial before crashing twenty-five yards off the starboard beam.” The crash was accompanied by a tremendous explosion that covered ship and crew with a deluge of water, gasoline, and debris, but no one was hurt and nothing could dampen their spirits now that they had scored their first hit. Twenty-five minutes later, they splashed their second plane.
On 3 May the SHANNON sped to the scene of the disastrous kamikaze attack on the AARON WARD (DM-34) and the LITTLE (DD-803). By the time she arrived, the LITTLE had sunk and the WARD was in danger of following her. The SHANNON’s crew directed the search for survivors and then, eased the ship in to take the WARD in tow for the forty-five-mile trip to Kerama Retto. They turned the crippled DM over to a fleet tug at 0740 on 4 May and returned to radar picket duty in the Hagushi area where she patrolled for the next three weeks. Her crew was constantly at battle stations because of enemy planes in the vicinity. On 27 May, the ships on the picket line fought off fifty-four raids. Maneuvering to avoid bombs, torpedoes, and suicide dives, the SHANNON splashed two attackers, with two assists, and three probables.
In June, she covered minesweepers and laid buoys in the Tori Shima and Iheya Shima areas. From mid-June to the end of July, the SHANNON’s crew turned their attention full-time to screening minesweeping units around Okinawa and in the East China Sea. She was operating with the minesweepers when the war ended on 15 August 1945. By then, her gunners had shot down ten planes with two assists.
With the end of hostilities, the SHANNON moved into the Yellow Sea to screen the minesweepers clearing the fields off Korea. On 7 September, she transferred her operations to the waters off Japan where minesweeping detachments were clearing the sea lanes to the defeated nation’s major ports. When she entered the harbor of Sasebo, Japan’s main western naval base, she was the first U.S. warship to enter those waters after the surrender. She participated in minesweeping operations around Sasebo and Nagasaki and then, relinquishing her duties as flagship of Mine Division 7, she headed for home at the close of 1945.
The SHANNON joined the Atlantic Fleet in April 1946. By June, she was a part of Mine Division 2 in Charleston, South Carolina, where she remained over the next eight nine years cruising the waters off the East Coast and in the Caribbean. During the summer of 1947, she escorted the carrier PALAU (CVE-122) on a goodwill visit to Liberia. Back with the Mine Force, Atlantic Fleet, she participated in fleet, type, and international exercises, conducted midshipmen cruises, and, from September 1950 to January 1951, deployed to the Mediterranean.
Her active career ended in 1955. On 7 July, she joined the Charleston Group, Atlantic Reserve Fleet, and was decommissioned on 24 October. The navy reclassified the SHANNON as MMD-25 on 14 August 1968, and struck her from its lists on 1 November 1970. Sold for scrap to the Boston Metals Company, she was delivered to the firm in Baltimore, Maryland, in May 1973.
