USS Edsall (DD-219), was a , the first of two United States Navy ships named after Seaman Norman Eckley Edsall (1873–1899). She was sunk by a combined Japanese air and sea attack, approximately SSE of Christmas Island on 1 March 1942.
Construction and commissioning Edsall was laid down by the William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company on 15 September 1919, launched on 29 July 1920 by Mrs Bessie Edsall Bracey, sister of Seaman Edsall, and commissioned on 26 November 1920.
Service history Edsall sailed from Philadelphia on 6 December 1920 for San Diego, California for shakedown. She arrived at San Diego 11 January 1921, and remained on the United States West Coast until December, engaging in battle practice and gunnery drills with fleet units. Returning to Charleston, South Carolina, 28 December, Edsall departed 26 May 1922 for the Mediterranean.
Arriving at Constantinople on 28 June, Edsall joined the U.S. Naval Detachment in Turkish Waters to protect American interests as the Near East was in turmoil with civil strife in Russia, and Greece at war with Turkey.
She was part of the international effort to alleviate the postwar famine in eastern Europe. She helped evacuate refugees, furnishing a center of communications for the Near East and standing by for emergencies. When the Turks expelled the Anatolian Greeks from Smyrna (Izmir), Edsall was one of the American destroyers which evacuated refugees. On 14 September 1922, she took 607 refugees off in Smyrna and transported them to Salonika, returning to Smyrna on 16 September to act as flagship for the naval forces there. In October she carried refugees from Smyrna to Mytilene on Lesbos Island. She made repeated visits to ports in Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia, Greece, Egypt, Mandate Palestine, the Syrian Federation, Tunisia, Dalmatia, and Italy, and kept up gunnery and torpedo practice with her sisters until her return to Boston, Massachusetts, for an overhaul on 26 July 1924.
Edsall sailed to join the U.S. Asiatic Fleet on 3 January 1925, joining in battle practice and maneuvers at Guantanamo Bay, San Diego, and Pearl Harbor before arriving at Shanghai on 22 June. She was to become a fixture of the Asiatic Fleet on the China coast, in the Philippines and Japan. Her primary duty was protection of American interests in the Far East. She served during the civil war in China, and the early part of the Sino-Japanese War. Battle practice, maneuvers and diplomacy took her most frequently to Shanghai, Yantai, Hankou, Hong Kong, Nanjing, Kobe, Bangkok, and Manila. In late October 1927, Edsall visited the Siamese capital Bangkok, and had three of the Royal Princesses aboard for tea. In return Edsalls skipper, Commander Jules James, was given an engraved silver cigarette case by the Thai Royal Family.Kehn, A Blue Sea of Blood, p. 39.
World War II On 25 November 1941, two days in advance of the "war warning" which predicted that hostile Japanese action in the Pacific was imminent, Admiral Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet, dispatched Destroyer Division (DesDiv) 57 (, , and Edsall) with the destroyer tender , to Balikpapan, Borneo, to disperse the surface ships of his fleet from their vulnerable position in Manila Bay.
At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 8 December 1941, Edsall was en route to Batavia (now Jakarta) with her sister ships and Black Hawk. When word was received DesDiv 57 was then ordered to Singapore to rendezvous with Royal Navy Force Z. She delivered a badly-needed secret ECM coding machine and embarked a British liaison officer and four men at Singapore from Kehn, BSOB, p. 91. and was sent to search for survivors of and , sunk by Japanese aircraft off the east coast of Malaya on 10 December. Although she did not rescue survivors, DD-219 and the other fourpipers of DesDiv 57 did come across wreckage and oil in the waters near the sinking location. As she returned Edsall intercepted a Japanese fishing trawler, Kofuku Maru (later renamed and used extensively by Australian special forces) with four small boats in tow and escorted them into Singapore before turning them over to .Kehn, BSOB, p. 92.
Edsall and her division joined the heavy cruiser and other US units at Surabaya on 16 December 1941 and escorted shipping retiring to the relative safety of Darwin, Australia. During the first week of 1942 Edsall escorted elements of the Pensacola Convoy from Torres Strait back to Darwin.
After fueling operations in the Lesser Sunda Islands, Edsall and Alden were escorting the Darwin-bound oiler in the Beagle Gulf west of Darwin. On the morning of 20 January 1942 the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine sighted Trinity, and misidentifed her as a transport. I-123 fired four Type 89 torpedoes at shortly after 0630. The sound man aboard I-123 reported hearing one torpedo hit, but all four torpedoes had missed; Trinity had sighted three of them and reported the attack. Alden then searched for I-123, made a sound contact and conducted a brief depth charge attack at 06:41 before losing contact and abandoning the search.
Later that day, Edsall and three Australian corvettes, , , and , working in concert sank off Darwin, the first sinking of a full-sized submarine with the involvement of a U.S. destroyer in World War II.
Continuing to escort convoys in northern Australian waters, Edsall was damaged when one of her own depth charges exploded during an anti-submarine attack on 23 January 1942 in the shallowHoward Channel. Although her skipper (LT J. J. Nix, USNA 1930) denied that her readiness for war was affected, the destroyer did have a leaking stern and shaft vibration afterwards that limited her top speed to approx. 27-28 knots.Kehn, BSOB, FN, pp. 156-157.
On 3 February, Edsall and other American units of the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command, at that time commanding Allied forces in the area, moved up to Tjilatjap, Java in order to be closer to the combat theater and to replenish. She continued as a patrol vessel off southern Java. On 23 February 1942 she and the old gunboat operated off Tjilatjap on antisubmarine patrols. At this time Asheville was also escorting small convoys in Sunda Strait.
On the afternoon of 26 February, she steamed from Tjilatjap with her sister ship to rendezvous with the converted seaplane tender , which was bringing in P-40E fighters and U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) personnel for the defense of Java. On the following day, 27 February, the three ships were attacked by sixteen Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service's Takao Kōkūtai, led by Lieutenant Jiro Adachi, flying out of Den Pasar airfield on Bali, escorted by fifteen Mitsubishi A6M2 Reisen (Zero) fighters. The attack damaged Langley so severely that she had to be abandoned after scuttling attempts by torpedoes and gunfire from Whipple failed to sink her. Exhibiting fine shiphandling, Edsall had picked up 177 survivors, and Whipple 308. There were a number of wounded men on the destroyerssome requiring hospitalizationand it was hoped the destroyers would be sent to Australia, but these requests were denied by Vice Admiral William A. Glassford, the COMSOWESPAC; that is, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the southwest Pacific. Instead they were ordered to meet the oiler USS Pecos (AO-6) at Christmas Island, about 200 miles south of Java and transfer the Langley survivors to that ship.
On 28 February, the two destroyers rendezvoused with the oiler off Flying Fish Cove, Christmas Island some southwest of Tjilatjap. A flight of Japanese medium attack bombers (Rikko) from Bali came over just as these transfers of men were about to begin; this forced Edsall and other ships to head for a nearby rain squall, and then open sea. They headed south into the Indian Ocean for the rest of 28 February and all night in high winds and heavy seas. This delayed the transfer of men to Pecos. Finally, between 0430 (USN/local time) and 0815 on 1 March all Langley'''s crewexcept for the AAF menwere transferred safely to the oiler thanks to the superb boathandling of Boatswain Robert Baumker of Pecos.Messimer, Pawns of War, pp. 100-101. Whipple then set off for Cocos as protection for the tanker Belita. Pecos, carrying as many as 700 crew and survivors from Langley, , Marblehead and Houston, plus assorted stragglers, was ordered to Australia.Edsall was directed to return to Tjilatjap, carrying 31 uninjured USAAF pilots and 10 or 11 ground crew who had been passengers on Langley. (Two wounded AAF fliers, Dix and Akerman, were evacuated on Pecos.Messimer, Pawns of War, 1983, p. 100.) The USAAF personnel were to assemble and fly 27 disassembled and crated P-40 fighters which had been delivered to Tjilatjap aboard the cargo ship . Following orders from Glassford, at 0830 she headed back to the northeast for Java.
Last engagement of EdsallPecos was detected later that morning by air patrols from the Support Force cruisers of Japanese Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's Kido Butai (or KdB). Soon she came under heavy air attack from Nagumo's carriers. For some time she sent out open distress calls to any Allied ships in the area, as it was assumed the Japanese obviously knew her location already and the ship would probably be lost. Whipple, less than distant, received some of these calls, but was too far away to return quickly and wanted to arrive after dark in any case. , a troopship many hundreds of miles south in the Indian Ocean also copied some of these signals. At approximately 1548 hours Pecos sank after being attacked for several hours by four waves of IJN dive-bombers from Nagumo's KdB. IJN records indicate the distance between the Japanese force and Pecos could then have been as little as twenty miles. Nagumo gave orders to RADM Omori of 1st Torpedo Squadron (DesRon 1) to send two destroyers to rescue survivors of Pecos and then sink the oiler if it was still afloat. Omori sent the destroyers Tanikaze and Urakaze of the 17th Division, but they never found the men in the water and returned to Nagumo KdB as dusk fell.Kehn, In the Highest Degree Tragic, p. 250.