February 8, 1944
The USS Laffey (DD-724) is commissioned in Boston.
March 2–31, 1944
Shakedown cruise in Bermuda.
June 6, 1944
Laffey participates in the Normandy invasion.
June 25, 1944
Laffey duels with Battery Hamburg at Cherbourg.
August 26, 1944
Laffey begins her voyage to the Pacific.
September 18, 1944
Laffey enters Pearl Harbor.
October 23, 1944
Laffey proceeds to Eniwetok, Marshall Islands.
October 25, 1944
At Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, Japan unleashes her first organized kamikaze assault of the war.
November 11–19, 1944
Laffey participates in four carrier air strikes against the Japanese in the Philippines.
Laffey participates in the Ormoc landings in the Philippines.
December 12–16, 1944
Laffey participates in the Mindoro landings in the Philippines.
January 6–21, 1945
Laffey participates in the Lingayen Gulf landings in the Philippines.
February 16–17, 1945
Laffey participates in air strikes against the Japanese Home Islands.
February 18–23, 1945
Laffey participates in the Iwo Jima landings.
February 24–26, 1945
Laffey participates in a second round of air strikes against the Japanese Home Islands.
March 26–29, 1945
Laffey participates in the seizure of Kerama Retto southwest of Okinawa.
April 1–2, 1945
Laffey participates in the landings on Okinawa.
April 3–12, 1945
Laffey operates off the coast of Okinawa.
April 13, 1945
Laffey receives orders posting her to Picket Station No. 1.
April 14–15, 1945
Laffey operates at Picket Station No. 1.
April 16, 1945
Twenty-two kamikaze aircraft attack Laffey at Picket Station No. 1.
April 17–21, 1945
Repair crews work on Laffey at Hagushi.
April 27, 1945
Laffey anchors in Saipan.
Laffey enters Pearl Harbor.
May 24, 1945
Laffey moors in Seattle.
May 25–30, 1945
The Navy opens Laffey to public inspection in Seattle.
June 26, 1945
Becton steps down as commander of Laffey.
July 1946
Laffey participates in the Bikini Atoll nuclear weapons tests.
1981
Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, accepts Laffey from the Navy as a floating museum.
In his most terrifying nightmare Seaman 1/c Jack H. Ondracek could never have imagined the sight that confronted him that April 16, 1945, morning. As he leapt into the straps of the 20mm antiaircraft gun aboard the destroyer, USS Laffey (DD-724), a Japanese aircraft raced directly toward him.
Ondracek took this attack personally, for the human being piloting the aircraft did so with the lethal intent of killing Ondracek and mortally damaging his ship. It hearkened to those days that pitted single warrior against single warrior, the path hostilities had taken for centuries past. But one-on-one encounters were for Caesar’s swordsmen or medieval knights, not for a sailor on a World War II destroyer, where combat usually pitted five-inch guns and torpedoes against enemy plating.
As the lone aircraft bore down on him, Ondracek’s gun beat a steady rhythm that matched the pounding of his heart. His 20mm gun was effective up to one thousand yards. He brushed aside the sobering thought that although his opponent had closed to within the range of his gun, he now had fewer than fifteen seconds to destroy the hurtling plane before it smashed into the ship. His best defense—his only defense—was to kill the pilot before the pilot killed him. “You either kill them or get killed,” said Gunner’s Mate 2/c Lawrence H. Delewski. “You were playing for keeps and it was a very deadly game.”1
As the aircraft eluded Ondracek’s bullets and narrowed the gap, the seaman knew it would be only moments before either he or the kamikaze pilot, or both, perished in a deafening explosion.
Nothing in his tour of duty had prepared Ondracek for this moment. He experienced his first taste of combat off the Normandy coast in the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion, when the Laffey’s five-inch guns lambasted German gun emplacements as Allied troops rushed ashore. He had participated in four prior assaults of enemy positions in the Pacific—at Ormoc, Mindoro, and Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines, and at Iwo Jima—where their guns again blasted land targets while Marines and infantry battled across the terrain. He had seen kamikazes purposely crash into other destroyers and cruisers and had witnessed firsthand the bloody results of those crazed tactics, but until now he had avoided being the target of such suicidal actions.
His good fortune appeared over. As Ondracek glanced skyward, it seemed that the entire Japanese air force had assembled directly above. At one point the Laffey’s radar plotted fifty enemy aircraft converging on the ship, their dots all but obliterating the radar screen.
On that April 1945 day off the Pacific island of Okinawa, Ondracek and the rest of the crew contended with one of the war’s most terrifying weapons. First appearing in late 1944, kamikazes caused American skippers and sailors untold heartache and misery. “Few missiles or weapons have ever spread such flaming terror, such scorching burns, such searing death, as did the kamikaze in his self-destroying onslaughts on the radar picket ships [at Okinawa],” wrote the eminent naval historian, Samuel Eliot Morison. “And naval history has few parallels to the sustained courage, resourcefulness and fighting spirit that the crews of these vessels displayed day after day after day in the battle for Okinawa.”2
Prominent among those picket ships was the crew of the USS Laffey.
