USS Smalley DD-565 Fletcher Class Destroyer Patch

On 21 November 1944, USS Smalley DD-565 put 466 rounds into Matsuwa Island in the Kurils, at the cold northern end of Japan's island chain. She was a Fletcher-class destroyer built in Seattle and commissioned on 31 March 1944 with Commander P. H. Horn in command. Three more bombardment missions followed that first one. The ship carried the name of Acting Ensign Anthony A. Smalley, who led an 18-man detachment digging trenches under fire at the Second Battle of Fort Fisher in January 1865 and then went in with the charge. Her sailors took her from the Aleutians to Okinawa to the coast of Korea, and this patch puts her name and hull number on one round piece of cloth.

In late July 1944 her crew manned the rails at Pearl Harbor as President Roosevelt arrived aboard the heavy cruiser Baltimore CA-68. In May 1945 she sailed with Rowe and Stoddard screening the carrier USS Ticonderoga CV-14 to Ulithi, and during a strike on Taroa she pulled a downed torpedo plane crewman out of the water. She reached Okinawa on 4 June 1945 and took her turn on radar picket, then joined the final strikes on the home islands and fired her last bombardment at Chichi Jima on 23 July. Recommissioned on 3 July 1951 and homeported at Newport, Rhode Island, she crossed to the Far East in 1953. From 2 July she operated with Task Force 77 as plane guard for the carrier Princeton CVA-37 during the Cherokee strikes, right up to the armistice on 27 July 1953.

The patch is a 5 inch circle with a gold rope border and a gold chain running just inside it, line and chain being the two things a deck seaman handles every day. USS SMALLEY DD 565 arches across the top in gold block letters on royal blue, with UNITED STATES NAVY across the bottom. In the center a crowned gray brawler in red boxing gloves, a red anchor on his arm, rides a pair of gold lightning bolts out of a white cloud, with a black gun barrel pointing up behind him. The ship's records do not say when the mascot was first drawn, but a fighter in gloves suits a ship that carried five 5-inch guns and ten torpedo tubes on a 376-foot hull. The edge is cut to the circle and the patch has a sew-on backing.

Smalley came home with three battle stars for World War II and one for Korea. Duty on a Fletcher meant cramped berthing, long watches and a narrow hull that rolled hard in heavy seas. The Kurils runs were made in North Pacific weather, and radar picket duty off Okinawa meant guarding the transport area against submarines and air attack. After the armistice she ferried 110 Marines from Sasebo to Pusan and took all 29 men off a South Korean fishing boat in distress. Her last cruise, in 1957, took her to East Africa and the Persian Gulf with the Mideast Force, calling at Karachi and Bahrain, before she was decommissioned at Philadelphia.

It belongs in a shadow box with a cruise book and a Korean Service Medal, or on the jacket a Smalley sailor wears to a destroyer reunion. It also makes a good gift for a grandson whose grandfather stood watches aboard a Fletcher. At 5 inches across it reads clean from the other side of a room. Her name and hull number, stitched where they can be seen.