CORRY Controversy
6 JUNE 1944
CORRY CONTROVERSY
The morning of 18 December 1941 dawned at the Charleston Navy Yard with palpable anticipation. Our citizenry was united against the Pearl Harbor attack only 11 days earlier, and this morning our Navy was set to commission the next destroyer in that brand new war, the Gleaves-class USS CORRY (DD-463). She joined the Atlantic Fleet and shortly earned three Battle Stars for operations off North Africa, Norway, and against U-801, respectively. Spring of 1944 found her in England, preparing for the cross-channel invasion of Europe. At 1815, June 4th (H-Hour minus 36 hours and 15 minutes), CORRY and FITCH (DD-462) led the five LSTs of Convoy U-2B out of Dartmouth harbor. U-2B comprised the first sortie to cross the English Channel toward Normandy.
As shell splashes enveloped the landing craft headed for Utah Beach at H-Hour, CORRY’s skipper, LCDR George D. Hoffman, recognized how severely German shore fire was smashing the invasion. He maneuvered as closely to the breakers as the destroyer’s draft would allow–a mere 1000 yards off the beach–to lay down supporting fire. But as American 5-inchers fired, German gunners ashore in the Saint-Marcouf battery stared in amazement. CORRY was steaming at point-blank range from their triple mounted 210-mm guns! At 0633, three 300 lb. shells screamed into CORRY, striking her amidship and detonating in her engine room. The blast broke the destroyer’s keel and raised her stem and stern skyward. Sailors on deck were thrown toward a 4-foot crack across her beam ends. Nearby FITCH watched the destroyer blown sideways to seaward with her superstructure recoiling toward shore. Minutes later she went under. CORRY’s mainmast and ensign remained visible as she settled in only 30 feet of water. FITCH, HOBSON (DD-464), BUTLER (DD-636), and PT-199 rescued 252 CORRY survivors, including LCDR Hoffman. Twenty-four were lost.
Hoffman’s ship loss report described the shelling–at least until Hoffman met the skipper of MEREDITH (DD-726) in a survivor’s camp in Scotland. MEREDITH had been sunken by an aerial bomb while close inshore–at least according to her skipper’s initial report. But after their meeting, both skippers redrafted their reports to claim their ships had succumbed to mines. Hoffman’s amendment asserted that CORRY struck a mine at nearly the same moment the shore fire hit, and that the gunfire caused only incidental damage.
There is little support today for Hoffman’s rewritten report. It has been suggested that both skippers feared censorship for hazarding their ships too closely inshore, and both perceived mines to be a hazard of lesser negligence. To the contrary, close-in destroyer support saved countless lives among the D-Day invasion force.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 10 JUN 23
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Department of the Navy, Naval History Division. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 2 “C-F”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1977, pp. 190-91.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol X The Atlantic Battle Won. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1956, pp. 279-80.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol XI The Invasion of France and Germany. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1957, pp. 88, 96, 106-08.
Roscoe, Theodore. United States Destroyer Operations in World War II. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1953, pp. 349-50.
Sweetman, Jack. American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3rd ed. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 2002, p. 171.
USS CORRY website. AT: https://www.uss-CORRY-dd463.com, retrieved 18 December 2022.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Our Navy accepted Hoffman’s revised report and still lists her loss officially as due to striking a mine. However, neither German action reports nor the reports of witnesses aboard CORRY and FITCH support the mine theory. Indeed, a mine explosion under her keel might well have broken CORRY, but such would likely have raised her amidships, contrary to eye-witness reports.
CORRY was the second warship to remember LCDR William M. Corry, Jr., a naval aviator and Navy Cross recipient from WWI and a Medal of Honoree from the interwar period.
