lex-for-lexington:Before you ask, pictures are related. Please believe me.USS O’Bannon (DD-450) and
lex-for-lexington:Before you ask, pictures are related. Please believe me.USS O’Bannon (DD-450) and the Potato Incident of 1943“The history of the Pacific War can never be written without telling the story of the USS O’Bannon,” Admiral William F. Halsey wrote. I must say that in turn the history of USS O’Bannon can never be written without telling the story of the Potato Incident. Now get ready for an exciting bedtime story that is going to involve a destroyer, a submarine, a smart crew and a lot of potatoes.Early morning of 5 April, 1943. Off the Russell Islands, in the Solomons.Destroyer Squadron 21 was returning after a night of shelling Japanese positions in the New Georgia area, in the Solomons. Destroyer USS O’Bannon (DD-450), our protagonist of this short little story, picked up a radar contact that turned out to be the Japanese submarine Ro-34. The submarine was on the surface, not expecting a squadron of destroyers to be nearby.The commanding officer of O’Bannon, Commander George Philip Jr., ordered his ship to approach and ram the small submarine. At the last minute, however, the officers on the bridge could not identify the submarine with certainty and decided that it might be a mine layer. Not wise ramming a mine layer and sinking your own ship in the process, right? To avoid the now unwanted collision, O’Bannon made a hard turn, and that put her right alongside the Japanese submarine, “in a rather embarrassing situation”, as crewman Ernest A. Herr put it.“No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.” But what if your ship is so close to the enemy that your guns can’t even depress low enough to fire on them?Nobody on deck carried firearms. The Americans did not, nor did the Japanese. As the Japanese sailors rushed towards their submarine’s 3-inch deck gun, sailors on the deck of O’Bannon had to do something - but what?In confusion and panic, the crew of the O’Bannon picked up potatoes from storage bins on deck and threw them at the Japanese submarine. Yes, potatoes. As Ernest A. Herr remarked, “a potato battle ensued.”Ernest A. Herr thought the Japanese sailors probably had mistaken the potatoes as hand grenades - the truth we will never know. But what we do know is that the submarine crewmen were too busy picking up potatoes and tossing them into the ocean that they did not man their deck gun.This gave O’Bannon enough time to pull away from Ro-34. Once O’Bannon gained some distance firing commenced, and one shell hit the submarine’s conning tower. The submarine managed to submerge; O’Bannon passed over the submarine and performed a depth charge attack. Japanese records showed that the submarine sank afterwards.When the Association of Potato Growers of Maine heard of this strange “Potato Incident”, they sent a plaque to the crew of USS O’Bannon to commemorate the event. And, of course, it was mounted on a wall next to the crews mess hall.Source: Destroyer History Foundation“The Maine Potato Episode” by Ernest A. Herr -- source link