USS Drexler (DD-741) was named for Ensign Henry Clay Drexler, a 1924 graduate of the Naval Academy who was killed in a turret explosion on the cruiser Trenton in October 1924, earning the Medal of Honor for placing a flaming bag of powder into an immersion tank to limit the damage. The destroyer was launched at Bath on 3 September 1944 and commissioned on 14 November 1944.
She sailed from Norfolk on 23 January 1945, escorted a carrier to Trinidad, reached San Diego on 10 February, and trained at Pearl Harbor before escort duty to Guadalcanal and Ulithi. She left Ulithi on 27 March 1945 for Okinawa and a radar picket station.
At 0700 on 28 May 1945 two kamikazes attacked Drexler and Lowry. The first was shot down. The second tried to crash onto Lowry, missed, and hit Drexler, cutting off her power and starting large gasoline fires. She kept firing and helped shoot down two more planes. At 0703 she was hit by a twin-engined P1Y 'Frances' bomber, which rolled her onto her beam ends. She sank in less than 50 seconds. Because of the speed of the sinking casualties were heavy: 168 dead and 52 wounded, her captain among the wounded. Commander Louis Drexler Jr., the older brother of her namesake, had been killed off Okinawa two weeks before. In March 2026 the Lost 52 Project announced that her wreck had been found in 2025.
Sources: Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS) as reproduced on Wikipedia, NavSource Online (commanding officer list), and Wikimedia Commons (photograph record).