Re: Bio: Keppel, William (26 Oct. 1944)

Contact: Lani Bartelt
Email:  lanigrg@yahoo.com

From Wikipedia this is the last paragraph of the story of the ship,the Warrington -

Last days Two days out of Norfolk, along the Florida coast, the two ships encountered heavy weather. In the afternoon, Warrington received word that she was steaming directly into a hurricane. Later that evening, the storm forced the destroyer to heave to while Hyades continued on her way alone. Keeping wind and sea on her port bow, Warrington rode relatively well through most of the night. Wind and seas, however, continued to build during the early morning hours of the 13th. Warrington began to lose headway and, as a result, started to ship water through the vents to her engineering spaces.

The water rushing into her vents caused a loss of electrical power which set off a chain reaction. Her main engines lost power, and her steering engine and mechanism went out. She wallowed there in the trough of the swells—continuing to ship water. She regained headway briefly and turned upwind, while her radiomen desperately, but fruitlessly, tried to raise Hyades. Finally, she resorted to a plain-language distress call to any ship or shore station. By noon on the 13th, it was apparent that Warrington's crewmen could not win the struggle to save their ship, and the order went out to prepare to abandon ship. By 1250, her crew had left Warrington; and she went down almost immediately. A prolonged search by Hyades, Frost (DE-144), Huse (DE-145), Inch (DE-146), Snowden (DE-246), Swasey (DE-248), Woodson (DE-359), Johnnie Hutchins (DE-360), ATR-9, and ATR-62 rescued only 5 officers and 68 men of the destroyer's 20 officers and 301 men. Warrington's name was struck from the Navy list on 23 September 1944.