Qualla: USS Warrington (DD-383)

USS Warrington (DD-383): Introduction

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy (photographed by a blimp of ZP-12), Public domain. On the morning of June 9, 1939, the destroyer USS Warrington moored at Fort Hancock, New Jersey, and took aboard King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for passage to Manhattan. It was a peacetime assignment, ceremonial and brief, the kind of duty that makes a good line in a ship's log. Five years later, Warrington lay on the ocean floor east of the Bahamas, broken apart by a hurricane that killed 248 of her 321 crew. Between the king's visit and the ship's death, Warrington fought across the Pacific, dodged torpedoes, shot down Japanese planes, and bombarded enemy positions in New Guinea. She survived all of it. What she could not survive was a September storm and a set of ventilation ducts that let the sea pour into her engineering spaces.

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Image: U.S. Navy (photographed by a blimp of ZP-12) | Public domain

USS Warrington (DD-383): Prewar Ceremony and Patrol

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, Public domain. Warrington was laid down on October 10, 1935, at Kearny, New Jersey, by the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company and commissioned on February 9, 1938, at the New York Navy Yard. Named for Lewis Warrington, a naval officer during the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812 who also s...

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Image: U.S. Navy | Public domain

USS Warrington (DD-383): War in the Pacific

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RealJunkanoo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Warrington was moored at Charleston, South Carolina, on December 7, 1941, when word arrived of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. She put to sea the next morning and spent the first weeks of the war patrolling the Atlantic coast. By January 1942, she had transited the Panama Ca...

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Image: RealJunkanoo | CC BY-SA 3.0

USS Warrington (DD-383): Bougainville and the Guns of New Guinea

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark A. Wilson(Department of Geology, The College of Wooster), Public domain. By late 1943, Warrington had joined the southwestern Pacific theater. On November 8, she escorted troop ships into Empress Augusta Bay, Bougainville, as part of the island's invasion force. While the transports unloaded reinforcements near Cape Torokina, the air raid warning soun...

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Image: Mark A. Wilson(Department of Geology, The College of Wooster) | Public domain

USS Warrington (DD-383): The Hurricane That Won

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard from USA, CC BY 2.0. In the summer of 1944, Warrington returned to the United States for repairs at the New York Navy Yard. After completing her yard period and additional alterations at Norfolk, she departed on September 10 in company with the stores ship Hyades, bound for Trinidad. Two days out, al...

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Image: Richard from USA | CC BY 2.0

USS Warrington (DD-383): Seventy-Three from Three Hundred Twenty-One

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit albert kok, CC BY-SA 4.0. The search for survivors lasted days. Hyades, along with several other vessels including ATR-9 and ATR-62, combed the waters east of the Bahamas. They found seventy-three men alive: five officers and sixty-eight enlisted sailors. Two hundred forty-eight crew members were lost. Wa...

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Image: albert kok | CC BY-SA 4.0