80 years ago today. Leyte Operation, October 1944. The day of the first noted use of kamikaze.
Official Wartime caption: “The Australian heavy cruisers HMAS Shropshire (left) and Australia (right), with an unidentified U.S. heavy cruiser, photographed through a ring gun sight on board USS Phoenix (CL-46), off Leyte on 21 October 1944.”
Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-291377
The gunsight is on a, likely Detroit-built, Bofors-licensed 40mm L60 quad mount, of which the “Phoo-Bird,” as a Brooklyn class light cruiser, carried six by this time in the war. She put them to good use, too.
In the first 11 days of the Japanese kamikaze attacks in the Leyte Gulf, Phoenix called her gunners to action no less than 55 times.
Her Navy Unit Citation reads, in part:
In encounters with the enemy air forces the ship shot down three of the suicide divers coming at her and assisted in shooting down several others that attacked other ships.
The Swedish-designed 40mm (which needed extensive conversion for inch-pattern mass production) was a godsend both to the U.S. Army who used it for ground-based AAA and to the Navy, who used it to fill the gap between 20mm Oerlikon, the fiasco that was the 1.1-inch “Chicago Piano,” and the excellent 5″/38 DP gun.
The Navy credited the 40mm Bofors with splashing an astounding 742.5 enemy aircraft during the war with 1,271,844 shells– an average of 1,713 per “kill.” Of note, they were credited with fully one out of every three aircraft downed by AAA, a record matched by no other platform.
Not put into U.S. domestic production until early 1942, during 1944-45 alone, no less than 7,440 single mountings, 6,670 twin, and 1,550 quad mountings were produced for the Navy by the time the end of the war halted production.
Only in first-line service for six years (it was officially replaced by the new rapid-fire radar-controlled 3″/50 Marks 27, 33, and 34 in 1948) the Navy still had Bofors afloat on WWII-era auxiliaries until at least 1977, with some reportedly being used from time to time on LSTs engaged in brown water ops during Market Garden during Vietnam.
USS Garrett County (LST 786) in the Co Chien River, Republic of Vietnam, June 1968. Note the PBRs alongside and HAL-3 Seawolf Hueys on deck. Commissioned in 1944, she also has manned 40mm Bofors at the ready in her gun tubs. U.S. Navy Photo K-51442
And of course, dozens of these mounts endure on WWII-era museum ships around the globe.
These images are from one of my recent visits to the SoDak battlewagon USS Alabama.
