USS Anderson (DD-411)
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The USS Anderson (ID: DD-411) was an American destroyer the Sims class at the time of World War II .
history
Her keel-laying was in November 1937 with the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Kearny , New Jersey , she was the first ship of her class in May 1939.
After commissioning, it was first used in the Atlantic , then in the Pacific . In 1941 the destroyer was again in service in the Atlantic Ocean as part of the armed forces that were supposed to ensure American neutrality .
The first enemy contact of the Anderson came in the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 8, 1942, in which the ship participated in the combat group for the aircraft carrier USS Lexington , which in turn was sunk by Japanese dive bombers . The Anderson rescued 377 crew members.
A month later, the destroyer was used in the Battle of Midway as an escort of the USS Yorktown , which, after having been damaged by bombs , was sunk by torpedo hits during a rescue attempt by the Japanese submarine I-168 .
In the fighting for the island of Guadalcanal , the Anderson were mainly assigned escort duties. She then covered the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands . The strategic success of keeping the Japanese away from Guadalcanal was bought at a high price with the loss of the Hornet and the damage to other ships.
In the following years the ship was used in the Aleutian Islands and during the amphibious landing on Tarawa . During the landings on Kwajalein , it was damaged by fire from a coastal battery on January 30, 1944, before it ran onto a reef that was not shown on the nautical charts that same day. The necessary repairs had to be carried out in Pearl Harbor .
The next major mission followed in the context of the landings on the Philippine island of Leyte in October 1944. There, the Anderson supported the troops with its guns when it was damaged on November 1st by a Japanese Nakajima Ki-43 fighter plane that crashed . The repair work, this time carried out in San Francisco , dragged on until April 1945. Until the end of the war, the destroyer was then used for coastal bombardments and other tasks around the main Japanese islands.
After the end of the war, the Anderson was sunk as a test object during Operation Crossroads , the nuclear weapons tests on Bikini Atoll , on July 1, 1946.