Wreck of USS Ingraham (DD-444)

 Second World War 1939-1945, military, shipwreck, destroyer (ship), United States Navy

USS Ingraham was the 18th member of the Gleaves Class of Destroyers built for the US Navy, laid down at the Charleston Navy Yard in November 1939 and commissioning into service with the US Atlantic Fleet in July 1941. After conducting shakedown and training cruises along the length of the US East coast during the late summer and fall of 1941, the Ingraham and her crew entered the Second World War while docked at Norfolk when news came of the Surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor.

Dispatched immediately to secure the waters off Norfolk from the threat of German Submarines, the Ingraham was eventually reassigned to the vital and highly dangerous duty of escorting merchant convoys from North America to Iceland, where her British counterparts would take over and bring the convoy to the United Kingdom or Russia. With Nazi Germany declaring unrestricted Submarine warfare against the United States and the vital convoys which were keeping England supplied and in the fight, the Ingraham and her crews found themselves constantly under threat of attack as they transited the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea during the next year screening convoys.

Assigned to another Iceland-bound convoy departing New York on August 20th, 1942, the Ingraham took her position on the edge of her convoy as it headed slowly Northeast towards Halifax, constrained first by slow-moving merchant ships and then by a thick fog bank South of Sable Island. Though the fog provided the convoy with some protection from the marauding U-Boats prowling these highly trafficked seas, the presence of so many ships in tight formation and limited visibility made safe navigating extremely hazardous. As night fell on the fog-shrouded seas, word came across the convoy that several ships on the opposite side from Ingraham had fallen out of formation, prompting the Destroyer USS Buck (DD-420) to locate and return the ships back to their assigned positions in the formation. As Ingraham’s crew monitored their portion of the convoy for similar stragglers, an urgent message flashed from the Buck stating that she had been involved in a collision with the troopship Awatea, had several casualties and was severely damaged.

Dispatched by the convoy Commander to render assistance to her fellow Destroyer, the Ingraham began to thread her way through the convoy and thick fog as her damage control and corpsman teams mustered topside and prepared to lend assistance. While still several thousand yards from the Buck’s stated position and maneuvering across an area thought to be clear of ships, lookouts aboard the Ingraham not searching for the disabled Destroyer would have had the horror of sighting the towering bow of the US Navy Oiler USS Chemung (AO-30) materializing out of the fog only a few hundred feet off the ship’s exposed broadside and on a direct collision course. Such was the lack of time between the sighting and the subsequent collision that no alarms sounded aboard the Ingraham before the Chemung’s bow slammed into the Destroyer between her stacks and sliced completely through her hull, coating the ship and the surrounding sea in a wreath of burning fuel oil.

Rolled to beam ends by the force of the collision and the fully-laden Tanker’s momentum, Ingraham’s Stern section flooded and sank before the Chemung had even passed through the two halves of the hull, taking nearly every man stationed there to the bottom of the Atlantic with it. Those on Ingraham’s bow had a few more seconds to get clear of the rapidly floundering section which was left bobbing vertically in the water and spun 180 degrees from its previous heading. Rapidly capsizing onto its deck as it flooded, Ingraham’s bow section threw dozens of men into the water before crashing down on top of them, followed moments later by several heavy explosions below the surface as the Stern’s still-armed depth charges began detonating. The resulting blast shockwaves caused heavy loss of life among the already few survivors floating on the surface in addition to heavily damaging the hull of the USS Chemung, which had come to an emergency stop and was lowering her lifeboats to assist the remaining crew of the Ingraham.

By the time the Chemung’s crew had pulled the last of Ingraham’s surviving crew from the oily waters, only 11 of her 208-man crew had survived her sinking at this location on August 22nd, 1942.

www.navsource.org/archives/05/444.htm