Ships
- USS Leutze (DD-481) Captain from 4 March 1944
Berton Aldrich Robbins, Jr., was born on 27 August 1908 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1931. In wartime orders he is Commander B. A. Robbins, Jr. He stayed in the Navy after the war, retired as a rear admiral, and died on 4 December 1983. His grave is in Arlington National Cemetery.
He became captain of Leutze on 4 March 1944, the day the Fletcher-class destroyer was commissioned at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington. Her keel had been laid there on 3 June 1941, and she had been launched on 29 October 1942. Robbins took her through trials and the first training of the crew. In June and July 1944 she escorted ships out to Pearl Harbor and Eniwetok. On 2 August she left Seattle for the western Pacific.
Peleliu was the ship’s first bombardment. Leutze arrived on 12 September 1944, three days before the landing, and shelled Japanese positions ashore. Fragments from an enemy shell swept her decks and gave the crew its first casualty. She withdrew on 24 September and joined Task Group 77.2 at Manus, in the Admiralties, for the Philippines campaign.
Air attacks opened the Leyte fighting. Leutze fired on a Japanese plane on 22 October. On the morning of 24 October a bombing and strafing run hit the ship and left eleven men as casualties. That night Robbins took her into Surigao Strait against a Japanese column of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers trying to force the gulf. He kept her on course through a long burst of heavy gunfire, closed to a firing position, and launched a torpedo attack that ran true. Leutze came out of the strait undamaged, and the attack helped break the Japanese force. For his conduct on the night of 24–25 October 1944 he received the Navy Cross.
The ship remained in Philippine waters under repeated air attack. On 1 November 1944 a massed kamikaze raid sank the destroyer Abner Read and badly damaged the ships nearest Leutze. Leutze was not hit, and the crew began calling her Lucky Leutze. From 6 to 9 January 1945, in Lingayen Gulf, she covered the Luzon landings. Her gunners destroyed two Japanese motorboats packed with explosives. Immediately after the second boat blew up, fire from nearby landing ships wounded six of her sailors.
On 17 February 1945, two days before the main landing on Iwo Jima, Robbins brought Leutze close to the eastern beaches to cover underwater demolition teams working on the obstacles. Batteries on Mount Suribachi answered. A shell hit just abaft the bridge. A fragment lodged in his spine and left him critically wounded and unable to stand, and three other men were seriously hurt. He refused to give up the ship while the fire mission was unfinished and stayed on the bridge until it was done. The Silver Star followed for that day, which was also his last day in command. Lieutenant Leon Grabowski succeeded him.
Robbins survived the wound. Leutze went on to Okinawa under her new captain. On 6 April 1945, while she lay alongside the burning destroyer Newcomb to fight fires and take off the wounded, a kamikaze glanced off Newcomb and exploded against Leutze’s port quarter, nearly tearing away the stern. Many of the crew were killed or wounded. The men still aboard kept her afloat. She lay for months at Kerama Retto before she could steam home, and she was decommissioned on 6 December 1945.