USS Roper (DD-147)

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USS Roper (DD-147)
Roper with camouflage according to scheme 12 mod
Roper with camouflage according to scheme 12 mod
Ship data
flag United StatesUnited States (national flag) United States
other ship names

October 20, 1943 APD-20

Ship type destroyer
class Wickes class
Shipyard William Cramp & Sons , Philadelphia
Build number 462
Keel laying March 19, 1918
Launch August 17, 1918
Commissioning February 15, 1919, until December 14, 1922, from March 18, 1930
Whereabouts September 15, 1945 Decommissioned,
sold for demolition
Ship dimensions and crew
length
95.8 m ( Lüa )
94.5 m ( Lpp )
width 9.68 m
Draft Max. 2.64 m
displacement 1090  ts Standard
1943: 1315 ts as APD
 
crew 102-113 men
Machine system
machine 4 White-Forster - boilers
2 Parsons geared turbines
Machine
performance 		27,000 PS (19,858 kW)
Top
speed 		35 kn (65 km / h)
propeller 2
Machine system
machine from 1943: 2 steam boilers
2 Parsons geared turbines
Machine
performance 		13,500 hp (9,929 kW)
Top
speed 		24 kn (44 km / h)
propeller 2
Armament

1940:

from 1943:

Sensors

1940: Sonar , 1942: Radar

The USS Roper (DD-147) was a destroyer of Wickes class in the United States Navy and later under the name APD 20 , a troop transport.

It is named after Lieutenant Commander Jesse M. Roper , the commanding officer of the USS Petrel , who died trying to save his crew in the Spanish-American War . His widow named the new destroyer.

history

Interwar period

The USS Roper was laid down on March 19, 1918 by William Cramp and Sons in Philadelphia with hull number 462. With Stockton and Conner, the shipyard had already built two destroyers of the Caldwell forerunners and from Rathburne (construction number 450) destroyers of the Wilkes class. A total of 21 destroyers of the class were built at the shipyard with construction numbers 450 to 455 and 457 to 471. On August 17, 1918, the Roper was launched and was put into service on February 15, 1919 under the command of Abram Claude.

After testing off the coast of New England , the Roper moved to Europe in mid-June 1919 and anchored in the Bosphorus on July 5th after stops in Ponta Delgada , Gibraltar and Malta . There she supported the work of the Peace Commission and Relief Committee in the Black Sea for a month with the transport of mail and people between Constantinople , Novorossiysk , Batumi , Samsun and Trabzon . On August 20, the destroyer returned to the United States in New York City , from where it set sail again six days later. Towards the end of the month he crossed the Panama Canal and headed north to the San Diego naval base .

The Roper stayed on the west coast until July 1921. On July 23, she left San Francisco with the aim of Cavite to the Philippines , which it reached on 24 August. She was transferred to Chinese waters in December and operated from Hong Kong and Chefoo until the summer . She returned to California on August 25, 1922 . It reached San Francisco on October 13th via Nagasaki , Midway and Pearl Harbor . Two days later she moved to San Pedro and from there to San Diego, where she was decommissioned on December 14, 1922 and assigned to the Pacific Reserve Fleet.

After more than seven years in the reserve, the Roper was put back into service on March 18, 1930 and operated as part of active or changing reserve squadrons for the next seven years, mainly in the southern area of ​​the California coast. In 1931, 1933, 1935 and 1936 she took part in naval maneuvers in Panama , Hawaii and the Caribbean . In 1933 Lieutenant (junior grade) Robert A. Heinlein came on board the Roper . In 1934 he was promoted to lieutenant in the sea before the future science fiction writer was retired due to tuberculosis . In January and February 1936, the Roper moved north into the waters off Alaska .

In February 1937 the Roper left California and was placed under the US Atlantic Fleet . Until 1939 she carried out exercises in the mid-Atlantic and the Caribbean. In November 1939, after the outbreak of World War II in Europe , she was relocated from Norfolk to Key West , from where she patrolled the Yucatán and Florida Straits . In December she returned to Norfolk. In January 1940 she went south again to Charleston and in March north for the New England patrol.

Second World War

During the time of the American Neutrality Patrol , the Roper continued to cruise in the waters off the American and Caribbean east coast. From a location off Cape Cod she returned briefly to Norfolk on December 7, 1941 as part of increased alert and then moved to the new Naval Station Argentia near Placentia on Newfoundland . In early February 1942, she accompanied a convoy to Londonderry , before traveling home in March for patrol and escort service in the Norfolk sea area.

One month later, on the night of April 13-14, she was surprised by the German submarine U 85 that had appeared off the coast of North Carolina . U 85 fired a torpedo at the approaching Roper before it was so badly damaged by artillery fire from the Roper that the German commander had to give the order to leave the boat. Almost all of the submarine crew succeeded in disembarking , but the Roper crew continued to pursue the submarine, throwing a volley of eleven depth charges while about 40 crew members of the submarine floated in the water. The next day, the bodies of 29 crew members were recovered and later buried with military honors at Hampton National Cemetery in Hampton, Virginia . Helmut Schmoeckel takes the view that this is a war crime and draws a comparison with the trial against the submarine commander Eck , who was executed by the Allies for shooting at shipwrecked people.

From May 1942 to the beginning of 1943 the Roper was used in convoy protection between Key West and New York. From February 1943, the destroyer secured convoys between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. From October 1943, the old destroyer was converted into a fast transporter at the Charleston Navy Yard .

Express transporter

Reclassified as APD-20 , the Roper left Charleston in late November for maneuvers in Chesapeake Bay and off the coast of Florida . On April 13, 1944 she moved east, where she joined the 8th US fleet in Oran / Algeria at the end of the month . As part of Transport Division 13 , which was tasked with supporting the offensive in Italy , it landed units of the FFL at Pianosa on June 17 and operated between Oran and Naples and cruised off the west coast of the embattled Italian peninsula until July . On August 15th, she landed troops on the Ile du Levant off the southern French coast as part of the "Sitka Force" together with Tattnall , Barry , Greene and Osmond Ingram . On September 5, it crossed again in front of Italy, where it resumed traffic between Oran and Naples, before leaving Oran at the beginning of December for Hampton Roads .

After arriving in Norfolk on December 21, the Roper moved back to the Pacific Fleet on January 29, 1945 . After stops in California and Hawaii, she reached the Mariana Islands . On May 11th she went from Guam to the Ryūkyū Islands . Shortly after her arrival in Nakagusuku Wan on May 22nd, she moved to the Hagushi roadstead on the same day . Three days later she was hit by a kamikaze flyer , charged with security tasks in the area .

Ordered back to the US for repair, the Roper left the Ryukyu Islands on June 6th and reached San Pedro a month later. In August she relocated to Mare Island , but with the end of the fighting, repairs were halted. On September 15, 1945, the Roper was decommissioned and her name was deleted from the Naval Vessel Register on October 11, 1945 . The hull was then sold to the Lerner Company in Oakland and then scrapped in December 1946.

To this day, no other ship in the United States Navy bears the name Roper .

Awards

The Roper was awarded four Battle Stars during the Second World War :

  • Countersinking of U 85
  • Operations off the west coast of Italy
  • Landing in the south of France
  • Attack and occupation of Okinawa Gunto

literature

  • Clay Blair : The Submarine War. Volume 1: The Hunters. 1939-1942. Heyne, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-453-12345-X .
  • Edwin P. Hoyt: U-Boats Offshore. When Hitler struck America. Stein & Day, New York NY 1978.
  • Samuel Morison: History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Volume 1: The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939 - May 1943. Atlantic Monthly Press et al., Boston 1947.

Web links

Commons : USS Roper (DD-147)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Schmoeckel: 79th German shipwrecked people are killed by the US destroyer ROPER after the sinking of »U 85« on April 18, 1942. In: Franz W. Seidler , Alfred de Zayas : War crimes in Europe and the Middle East in the 20th century. Mittler, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-8132-0702-1 , p. 181.
  2. ^ Rohwer: Sea War , War Crimes, April 8, 1942 West Atlantic
  3. ↑ Rohwer: naval warfare , 3.- 5.29.1945, Central Pacific