I am Paul Haden and served on the Nields from late 1943 till the completion of the decommissioning in early spring of1946. On the ship I was a Lt.jg and an Asst. Eng. Officer. The history was very interesting and brought back many old memories.

Although I never kept a personal log or diary there are some things that I could add to that history, but perhaps just two that might be of interest to others.

In early 1945,when Roosevelt went to Malta for his conference with Churchill(then later to Yalta with Stalin) we were in Oran when we received an urgent message to proceed to Gibralter then through the straits and pick up a Naval convoy about 100 miles to the West.We took up a position as one of the screen and headed East back through the straits. The next day we were told to come along side the Cruiser to receive a long message in semiphore. The message was coded and we were ordered to turn back West and head in the opposite direction from the convoy and steam for 4 hours in that direction at full speed then radio the message back to Radio Fox in the U.S.without decoding it.On completing that, turn around and catch the convoy before it reached Malta.Because of all the secrecy involved we had all guessed who was on the Cruiser and of course when we arrived in Malta we had that confirmed.

The other incident happened just after the the end of the war in the Pacific I believe it was in Sept. that the huge typhoon swept through the Ryukus and did considerable damage to a number of ships in the area ,and I believe a few were lost.We had escorted an LST carrying a Co. of Marines to a small island named -I believe-Amami Oshima as part of dearming those Islands.The Typhoon hit after midnight and we were caught in a small bay between two islands. The LST was blown aground and we went alongside to try and help them off before they were broken up.A big wave knocked them off the grounding and they collided with us.The collision made a large hole in our bow which turned out to be about 12 ft. in diameter and knocked off one of their bow doors. Both ships got through the rest of the night and storm without further incident.

We had been told we were going to China to be part of a Shanghai squadron but because of the damage we got a temporary patch job and then were sent back home immediately to be decommissioned.Thus we were probably the only crew in the fleet to be happy about being caught in that awful storm.

Paul Haden
USS Nields 1943-1946