Sweet Pea at War: A History of USS Portland (CA-33). By William Thomas Generous Jr. The University Press of Kentucky, 312 pages, $29.95.
The USS Portland (CA-33) — Sweet Pea to her crew — was a fighting ship, serving in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, the naval battle of Guadalcanal, and almost every other battle fought in the Pacific Ocean during World War II.
“She was the greatest heavy cruiser of all time,” says Thomas Generous, adjunct associate professor in the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense. But, “She was razor blades in 1959.” Turned to scrap.
Cruisers, Generous says, have been forgotten. Battleships turned into museums are common, but not a single cruiser has been preserved that way.
Maybe it’s their medium size — bigger than a destroyer but smaller than a battleship. “Cruisers are tough, hardworking ships,” Generous says. “Admirals rarely ride on them. Battleships got all the glory.”
World War II cruisers were originally designed to chase down enemy commercial ships and to protect carriers, Generous says. “But when so many of the battleships got sunk at Pearl Harbor, in the first hour of the war, we had to use the cruisers.” They didn’t have the firepower of battleships but had plenty of antiaircraft artillery.
Generous studied a year’s worth of the ship’s newspaper, interviewed about twenty men who served on the USS Portland, and corresponded with many more by letter and email. Generous himself served in the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1959 and from 1963 to 1967. He saw a little combat, but “nothing compared to what the Portland did,” he says. But he could identify with the former sailors. “When these guys describe to me how they lived and what they did, I was on their same page.”
The USS Portland was the only American ship at all three of the battles that reversed the Japanese victory march across the Pacific, Generous writes. Though many historians think that the Battle of Midway was the turning point of World War II, according to Generous, the crucial moment was the naval battle of Guadalcanal, when the USS Portland and another cruiser fought against two Japanese battleships and their escorts. “Portland was the winner,” Generous says. “It was like David and Goliath.” That was the moment, he says, when the Japanese lost their supreme confidence and the Americans started to believe they could win.
In that battle, the Portland got hit by a torpedo fired from close range by the Japanese destroyer Yudachi. Seventeen of the Portland’s men died.
In addition to the battles, Generous chronicles the details of life on board — the homemade stills the men ran in the newspaper office and the engine room, the women they romanced while on leave in Australia, and their obsession with the ship’s “gedunks” stand, which sold ice cream, candy, and sodas. Many of the men were no more than boys, having lied about their age. “I found that dozens of these guys enlisted when they were fifteen or sixteen,” Generous says. “They clung to their youth, although they had already become much more adult than they ever dreamed.”