Walker Danforth

Washington’s First WWII Casualty

James Walker Danforth was born in Washington in 1915.  He graduated from Washington High School in 1933 and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1938.

After graduation, Danforth married Mary Reynolds on June 29, 1941, and they made their home in Boston.

Danforth’s duties were on the Naval vessel the USS Truxtun.  On Christmas Day, 1941, the Truxtun left Boston and headed to Iceland. Six days later, they left Iceland and headed toward Newfoundland on convoy duty with two other ships, the USS Pollux and the USS Wilkes.  Their destination was a large military base in Argentia, Newfoundland.  This area of North America was closer to Europe than any other, making it a valuable base area for the Allies.

The ships were traveling to the base in a terrible winter storm. The Truxtun and the Pollux were traveling in almost zero visibility and were not communicating due to radio silence. Their chief navigational device, the star Antares, was last spotted at 6:23 PM on the evening of February 17. Unbeknownst to the ships, the spotter made a slight error, sending the ships closer to the shore than they realized.

Between 4:00 and 5:00 AM the next morning, February 18, the ships suddenly came upon shallow water and ran aground on the rocks below the surface, sending men tumbling out of bed and ripping holes in the Pollux and the Truxtun hulls.

With the storm continuing and the wind whipping the current, the ships were battered and soon broke apart.  Some soldiers froze, others drowned, and very few made it to the nearby island.  Less than half of the crews of the Truxtun and Pollux survived the disaster.  Walker Danforth’s body was never found.

In 1953, the Washington VFW was organized and named itself Walker Danforth Post No. 9016 Veterans of Foreign Wars in tribute to Washington’s first casualty of World War II.