Ships
- USS Hoel (DD-533) Captain, 25 October 1944
Leon S. Kintberger was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on 24 April 1910, and Baltimore was his home. He spent 1926 and 1927 at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and 1928 and 1929 at Johns Hopkins University, then entered the United States Naval Academy. He graduated in 1932. His first sea duty was in the battleship New York, and after that he served in the heavy cruiser Minneapolis.
On 1 October 1944 he relieved William Dow Thomas in command of the Fletcher-class destroyer Hoel. Thomas had placed her in commission and remained on board as commander of the screen. Hoel joined Rear Admiral Clifton A. F. Sprague’s escort-carrier group, Taffy 3, and from 18 October operated off Samar in support of the Leyte landings, in company with the destroyers Heermann and Johnston.
By the morning of 25 October 1944 a Japanese force of battleships and heavy cruisers had come upon that group. Commander Kintberger took Hoel in toward the battleships and opened fire as she closed. A salvo struck the bridge and the gun director and wounded him. The destroyer held on.
At about 9,000 yards Hoel fired five torpedoes at the leading battleship. Those torpedoes missed. At about 6,000 yards she fired the other five at the leading cruiser. Kintberger watched that spread run, and at the moment the torpedoes should have arrived he saw columns of water. Japanese ships do not confirm a hit, and Hoel is given no credit for one.
For the next hour she stayed in the path of the heavy ships. Kintberger counted more than forty hits. Around 0830 an 8-inch shell put the last engine out of action. He ordered the crew to make ready to leave the ship. At 0855 Hoel capsized and went down.
Kintberger lived through the sinking. He wrote afterward that aircraft saw the rafts that same day, and that two days still passed before ships arrived to take the men aboard. He received the Navy Cross for his command of Hoel off Samar. The loss of the ship killed 253 men; 86 were saved.
In 1945 he commanded the destroyer Zellars. Off Okinawa on 12 April that ship fought a kamikaze attack, brought down seven aircraft, and was then badly damaged by one that struck her. He received the Silver Star for that day. He remained in the Navy, served with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1958 and 1959, and retired in 1959 as a rear admiral. He died in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, on 4 September 1983.