USS Astoria (CA-34) - World War II

World War II

After rising tensions in the Pacific intensified his concern over the defenses of his outlying bases at the beginning of December 1941, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet/United States Fleet, ordered reinforcements, in the form of Marine Corps planes, to be ferried to Wake Island and Midway. Astoria put to sea on 5 December in the screen of Rear Admiral John H. Newton's Task Force 12 (TF 12) built around Lexington. Once the task force reached open sea, Lexington's air group and the 18 SB2U-3 Vindicators from Marine Scout Bombing Squadron 231 (VMSB-231) bound for Midway landed on the carrier's flight deck.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December, Astoria was some 700 mi (1,100 km) west of Hawaii steaming toward Midway with TF 12. At 0900 the following day, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis, flagship of Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, Commander, Scouting Force, joined up with TF 12, and Brown assumed command. Its ferry mission canceled, TF 12 spent the next few days searching an area to the southwest of Oahu, "with instructions to intercept and destroy any enemy ship in the vicinity of Pearl Harbor...."

The cruiser reentered Pearl Harbor with the Lexington force on 13 December, but she returned to sea on the 16th to rendezvous with and screen a convoy, the oiler Neches and the seaplane tender Tangier — the abortive Wake Island relief expedition. When that island fell to the Japanese on 23 December, however, the force was recalled. Astoria remained at sea until the afternoon of 29 December, when she arrived back at Oahu. When Astoria was moored in Pearl Harbor, she had about 40 sailors from the battleship California transferred to her ranks. They were survivors of 7 December, when California was sunk at Berth F4 on Battleship Row. One of these sailors was Machinist's Mate 1st Class Martin W. Bender.

Astoria departed Pearl Harbor again on the morning of 31 December with TF 11, formed around Saratoga, and remained at sea into the second week of January 1942. On 11 January, the Japanese submarine I-6 torpedoed the carrier, forcing her retirement to Pearl Harbor. Astoria and her colleagues in the task force saw the crippled carrier safely into port on the morning of 13 January 1942.

After a brief respite at Pearl Harbor, Astoria returned to sea on 19 January with TF 11 – the carrier Lexington, escorted by heavy cruisers Chicago and Minneapolis, and nine destroyers – to "conduct an offensive patrol northeast of the Kingman Reef-Christmas Island line." On the afternoon of the 21st, however, TF 11 received orders to rendezvous with Neches, and then to conduct an air raid on Wake Island, followed by a surface bombardment "if practicable." Dispatches intercepted on the 23rd, however, revealed that Neches had fallen victim to a Japanese submarine, identified later as I-17. Without the oiler's precious cargo of fuel, TF 11 could not execute the planned strike. Ordered back to Oahu, the task force reentered Pearl Harbor on the morning of 24 January.