USS PORCUPINE and the IX Tankers
30 DECEMBER 1944
USS PORCUPINE AND THE IX-TANKERS
The Allied island-hopping drive across the Pacific in WWII created logistical problems for our Navy. Not the least was the need to fuel our massive naval and air fleets. Rather than build fixed tank farms ashore that would become targets for enemy action, the Navy elected to pre-position stores of fuel aboard old tankers, converted for duty as mobile storage facilities. Approximately 40 tankers, some from civilian WWI vintage, were purchased and filled with bunker oil or avgas. These were anchored in strategic Pacific island harbors and moved forward as the fighting progressed. All were given IX hull numbers, signifying the “miscellaneous” category. The seventeen Armadillo-class (IX-110 to 128) tankers were converted from Liberty ship hulls purchased from the Maritime Administration–all named for small American animals.
USS PORCUPINE (IX-126) had served at Noumea, New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands before moving forward with the invasion of the Philippines in late 1944. After the successful recapture of Leyte Allied attention shifted to Mindoro, a large island just south of Luzon. On 15 December US forces landed near the town of San Jose on Mindoro with the hope of establishing an airbase there. The last week in December a major supply convoy of over 100 vessels departed Leyte for the Mindoro landing beaches. Among the ships was PORCUPINE carrying thousands of gallons of 120 octane aviation gasoline. The overcast weather hampered US air cover efforts, and the enemy kamikaze pilots flying from Cebu plagued the convoy all the way into Mangarin Bay.
Here at 1540 this day a low-flying Val bomber approached PORCUPINE off her port beam. Her quills bristled, but PORCUPINE’s gunners could not knock this kamikaze out of the sky. It released a bomb just before crashing into the after main deck. Avgas tanks erupted in a giant mushroom cloud, the engine room flooded, and the entire after section was engulfed in flames. The engine of the attacking plane crashed completely through the ship, blowing a large hole in the hull below the waterline. Seven sailors disappeared in the explosion and fire; the rest abandoned ship. The nearby destroyers GANSEVOORT (DD-608) and PRINGLE (DD-477) were hit by kamikazes as well, but when the forward section of PORCUPINE was in danger from the fires, the wounded GANSEVOORT was ordered to torpedo PORCUPINE’s flaming stern in hopes the explosion would blow-out her fires. But Mangarin Bay proved too shoal for torpedoes and despite one hit, PORCUPINE’s forward tanks exploded. She burned to the water line as spreading flames chased the rest of the convoy from the bay. PORCUPINE was the only IX-tanker to fall to enemy action in WWII.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 4 JAN 23
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Department of the Navy, Naval History Division. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 5 “N-Q”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1979, p. 353.
Grover, David B. “IX Ships: The Navy’s Forgotten Flotilla.” Sea Classics, Vol 40 (8), August 2007, pp. 44-49, 67.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol XIII The Liberation of the Philippines: Luzon, Mindinao, the Visayas. Little Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1959, pp. 42-47.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: The convoy of which PORCUPINE was a member was called “Uncle plus 15.” “Uncle” was code for the Mindoro D-Day, and “plus 15” was the date the convoy was to arrive off the landing zone.
Duty aboard such tankers as PORCUPINE was filled with thankless heavy labor, punctuated by long periods of boredom. Such is illustrated well in the Hollywood movie Mr. Roberts, about an officer aboard a similar pre-positioned supply ship in the Pacific.
PORCUPINE was abandoned where she lay and struck from the Navy list on 19 January 1945.
