Ships
- USS Lardner (DD-487) Captain, 16 June 1943 – 19 May 1944
Otto Carl Schatz, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, was captain of the destroyer Lardner from 16 June 1943 until 19 May 1944. He took her in the South Pacific as the fight for the Solomon Islands moved out of Guadalcanal and into the central and northern islands. Lardner (DD-487) was a Gleaves-class destroyer, a fleet escort built for high speed, gunfire, torpedoes, and the close work of screening larger ships.
By the early summer of 1943 those destroyers were already veterans of the run between Nouméa, Espiritu Santo, and Guadalcanal. Their days were convoys, antisubmarine searches, and night patrols. Their nights were often spent in poorly lit anchorages, ready to get underway again before dawn. Schatz inherited a ship that knew that routine and was about to spend it farther up the island chain.
His first weeks in command coincided with the opening of the New Georgia campaign. At the end of June, Allied forces landed at Rendova and began the push toward the airfield at Munda, which Japanese troops held until early August. Destroyers of Lardner's kind screened the transports, put 5-inch fire on shore positions, and met air attacks launched from fields that were still in enemy hands. Through July and August the ship stayed in that work: escort, bombardment, and the short, hard passages between Guadalcanal and the new beachheads.
In the autumn the same pattern carried the advance northwest. Landings went in at Vella Lavella, then on the Treasury Islands, then at Empress Augusta Bay on Bougainville at the start of November. Lardner operated with the South Pacific destroyer force through those moves, guarding amphibious groups, patrolling against the barges that supplied bypassed garrisons, and answering calls for gunfire. Into the early months of 1944 the front stepped again, to the Green Islands and Emirau, tightening the ring around Rabaul. Schatz remained her captain through that stretch of the campaign, eleven months of almost continuous sea duty.
A destroyer captain in those waters was responsible for the ship's station in formation, for navigation among reefs and sudden squalls, and for how the guns and torpedoes were used when a contact appeared on a dark night. Schatz carried that duty until 19 May 1944, when he left Lardner. Officers who served with the ship in her Pacific years included William M. Sweetser, Jefferson David Parker, and James Boyd. His own command covered the long middle of her Solomon Islands war, from the fight for New Georgia through the advance that carried Allied forces up to the Bismarck Archipelago.