World War II
After shakedown training out of San Diego, California, Heermann joined the 5th Fleet 21 October 1943 for Operation Galvanic, the assault on the Gilbert Islands, the second major offensive thrust in the Navy's conquest of Japan's far-flung Pacific empire. She arrived off Tarawa in Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill's Southern Attack Force 20 November. Her guns sank a small enemy craft inside the lagoon and the next 2 days assisted troops ashore with close-in fire support. With the island secured, she returned to Pearl Harbor for voyage repairs and training which ended 23 January when she sailed in the screen of an attack transport reserve force.
Read more about this topic: USS Heermann (DD-532)
Famous quotes containing the words war ii, world and/or war:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
“War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular.... War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it.... War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)