Commander Frederick Julian Becton, captain of the destroyer USS Laffey (DD 724), took the radio message his communications officer handed him on April 12, 1945, but the concerned look on the young officer’s face made Becton suspect that it was not good news. Laffey, an Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer, had been screening the heavy fleet units that were bombarding Okinawa in close support of the ground forces ashore. It was the second U.S. destroyer to bear the name Laffey; the first ship had been lost off Guadalcanal in 1942.
The message told Commander Becton to detach his ship from the screening force and proceed at once to the huge naval anchorage at Kerama Retto, where he was to go alongside the destroyer Cassin Young and take aboard its fighter-director team. That could mean only one thing: Laffey had drawn duty on the radar picket line—the most dangerous, deadly and unwanted assignment in the Okinawa campaign as far as Navy personnel were concerned.
