The Forgotten Odyssey of the U.S.S. Quincy

By William Lydon

Nov 21, 2018

QUINCY - The darkness was broken in the early hours of August 9th, 1942. Searing searchlights from Japanese warships cut through the night as the whine of shells and torpedo wakes followed the beams in the warm waters off Savo Island. Caught like deer in the headlights, a trio of American warships took blow after blow. The three ships, the American cruisers Astoria, Quincy and Vincennes were sisters of the New Orleans-class, and tonight the three siblings would die together…

For 28 years, a memorial stood in Quincy center, a piece of American history connected to a forgotten battle halfway across the world in the South Pacific. Held aloft by Quincy quarry granite over a plaque of her deeds, the ship’s bell of the USS Quincy (CA-71) was dedicated in 1989 to the men of both of the ships that carried the name over the waves. CA-71 served with distinction during the Normandy and Okinawa campaigns. However she took that name from her fore bearer, the cruiser Quincy (CA-39).

CA-39 was laid down at the Fore River shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1933. Quincy was the sixth of seven New Orleans-class heavy cruisers built in the 1930s, with a displacement of 12,463 tons (The amount of water she pushed asided well underway), armed with nine "8"/55 caliber guns and a top speed of 32 knots. At her commissioning, she was considered one of the U.S. Navy's finest vessels and would be launched with much fanfare in 1935 with almost five thousand spectators in attendance. After her initial shake down cruise, she began her service in the Atlantic acting as part of international rescue efforts in Spanish waters, holding vigil off Civil War ravaged Spain in 1936.

When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Quincy’s crew was tense as ever. America remained on the sidelines officially neutral, and the U.S Navy began a patrolling the areas around US waters to monitor the traffic of warring powers with weary eyes. Quincy was tasked with watching the Atlantic coast alongside other vessels, including her sister ship USS Vincennes.

However, even as Americans at home and Quincy's crew watched newsreels of the German war machine on the march, crushing Poland and Norway, and stomping through France and the Low Countries in only six weeks, another enemy was making preparations for a new phase of the war to begin. Imperial Japan had been bogged down in a war in China following its invasion of the country in 1937. In 1941, President Roosevelt cut off oil sales to the Japanese. Fearing for their ambitions in Asia, Japan launched an attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor the following December; a strike force launching waves of fighter-bombers that killed over 2000 and crippled the America’s battleship forces. As black clouds rose over Hawaii, America entered the war. A war that now engulfed the entire world.

For almost six months, Japan ran wild as if carried by the winds of fate. American holdings across the Pacific fell like dominoes, the old colonial garrison of the Philippines, Guam in the Marianas chain. Little Wake island's brave band of U.S. Marines defenders fought on for two weeks before the island, too, fell to the hungry jaws Nipponese lion. By early March, with the occupation of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies (modern day Indonesia), Japan had reclaimed the needed fuel to continue her conquest across the entire Pacific. The outcome of a Japanese victory seemed imminent. It would not be until June that the winds changed. In the course of a single day during the Battle of Midway, Japan would lose four of her aircraft carriers and hundreds of planes and pilots, dealt her first defeat at sea in over 300 years. With the enemy's momentum shattered, America would finally go on the offensive.

On August the 7th, 1942, 10,000 men of the virgin 1st Marine Division thundered ashore on the tropical island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons chain to capture a key airfield under construction that threaten the supply line between Australia and the West Coast. Providing escort to the landing force was a flotilla of 75 warships, among them the USS Quincy, freshly transferred from the Atlantic. Quincy took part in the bombardment of the island in the early morning, and by the afternoon the 1st Division held the airfield which was completed the following week and renamed Henderson field, in honor of a flyer lost at Midway. CA-39 then fought off attacks by Japanese torpedo bombers on the transports ships unloading the Marine’s supplies on the 7th and 8th.

Quincy was later dispatched to patrol the area around Guadalcanal north of Savo island, a small landmass between Guadalcanal and nearby Florida island, with fellow cruisers Astoria and Vincennes. To the south, USS Chicago, HMAS Canberra and the destroyers Patterson and Bagley kept watch.

That night, under the cover of darkness, a strike force of eight Japanese warships under Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa managed to sneak through allied air patrols into the waters off Guadalcanal soon to be name “The Slot” by U.S Marines, Mikawa, hoping to catch the Americans off guard and sink the transports on shore that the bombers had failed to eliminate. Mikawa would first attack the southern force, heavily damaging Chicago and pounding the Canberra with 24 hits, by morning she was scuttled by her own crew.

On August 9th, at 1:50 am, the Japanese battle line engaged the Quincy and her sisters, Japanese flares turned the night to day as powerful searchlights blinded the ship and their crews as devastating one sided gun duel began. The Japanese sailors, trained in night time gunnery began firing accurate salvos around the American vessels, and the alarms chimed aboard Quincy as men roused from their bunks now tried to man their battle stations groggily after two days on alert. Ahead the ship in van, the Astoria was struck by shells that ignited the aircraft fuel stored in her aft section for her seaplanes, she burned with fury as her damage control parties fought fires alongside a battle, soon she was dead in the water, her engines wrecked as the enemy bore down on her with shell fire.

As she turned to charge the enemy battle line, a crash shock the Quincy as the bridge was struck with a shell. Enemy warships maneuvered, on either side now and began to riddle her. A crewmen sent to the bridge described the sight.

“When I reached the bridge level, I found it a shambles of dead bodies with only three or four people still standing. In the Pilot House itself the only person standing was the signalman at the wheel who was vainly endeavoring to check the ship's swing to starboard to bring her to port. On questioning him I found out that the Captain, who at that time was laying near the wheel, had instructed him to beach the ship and he was trying to head for Savo Island, distant some four miles (6 km) on the port quarter. I stepped to the port side of the Pilot House, and looked out to find the island and noted that the ship was heeling rapidly to port, sinking by the bow. At that instant the Captain straightened up and fell back, apparently dead, without having uttered any sound other than a moan."

She returned fire piecemeal, only a single shell finding its mark on the Japanese cruiser Chōkai’s chart room, killing 34 crewmen and, if only several feet higher, would have struck the cruiser's bridge. Quincy had no time to celebrate as a torpedo struck her, setting fire to the aft of the ship as one of her forward turrets exploded taking it’s gunners with it. She began listing and the crew abandoned her within minutes at 2:38 sinking like a stone having taken 54 hits, her sister Astoria floundered dead in the water as men began to abandon her. Now alone, the Vincennes was cornered, and struck 74 times before her captain ordered men to the lifeboats as his ship died beneath him. The three hulks sank by daylight taking with them 1,077 men into the waters bellow, among them the 370 of the Quincy’s crew.

Ten minutes after the call to abandon ship, as the Vincennes made her stand, Quincy dipped below the waves never to be seen again. Daniel Galvin, a 21 year old sailor aboard her managed to escape the warship right before she sunk, running down the deck and, kicking off his shoes as he jumped overboard and began swimming to safety, he spoke of his last view of his ship as her bow sunk into the sea, lifting her aft.

“... I could still see, even in that light, that the flag was flying, and the propellers were still flipping over. It went down with a lot of my shipmates still on board.”

The Japanese withdrew by 2:20, fearing both U.S aircraft would come at daybreak and now without the charts of the channel lost in hit by Quincy, there was danger they might run aground in the shallow waters of the Slot. leaving in their wake one of the worst defeats in U.S Navy history. What modern historians would come to call the Battle of Savo Island, was what Marines who watched the night battle from the shore coined “The Battle of the Four Sitting ducks”, a massacre.

Hours pasted as men bobbed in the water, the living interwoven with the dead and the dying. Men cried out for friends to be found, or who they knew were lost for good. At sunrise, the shape of an unfamiliar destroyer came into view, and men feared the worst. Galvin was one of them.

“...I assumed it was Japanese looking for survivors to machine gun . A voice sounded out " Come along the Starboard Side !" That was not a Jap, it sounded real American There was a cargo net hanging from near the bow which I climbed to the deck and removed my water soaked kaypox jacket . The crewmen told me to go aft and get some sleep which I did after removing my wet dungarees and shirt-had left my shoes at the lifelines of my sinking ship . I promptly fell into a deep sleep because we had been at Battle Stations for many hours .”

The warship was the USS Ellet, and she picked up almost a hundred survivors of the doomed Quincy. By midmorning, fearing further attack the U.S Navy would withdraw from Guadalcanal, leaving the 1st Marine Division alone to face the Japanese with little in the way of supplies, it would take a six month campaign on and around the island defeat the Japanese, and in years to come, the Slot gained would gain the name Iron Bottom Sound, for the amount of metal that had sunk below her wakes.

Galvin passed away in 2016, joining the 370 men who perished in the warm August air that night, today all that stands in memory of CA-39, is a ship’s bell in Quincy center. In the annals of history she is relegated to the index, simply a causality in a bloody one sided battle. Today she all but forgotten, and in Mr Gavin’s own words : “I worry that when I’m gone, no one will remember these men.’’

Now that monument is too gone, removed to make way for a new city park. And even after months of being complete, she has not been returned. The last piece of a dying moment in history has been buried by the sands of time, and time is as cruel a mistress as they come.

Image credits to NavSource Online: Cruiser Photo Archive