Hadley was an Allen M. Sumner, a later and slightly heavier destroyer, named for Hugh William Hadley of Oregon, Naval Academy 1922, killed in action. She was the fighter-direction ship on the same station. That mattered. Evans shot. Hadley shot and also ran the air battle overhead.
For nearly two hours on 11 May the two destroyers maneuvered at high speed while the raid came in. After Evans went dead in the water around 0900, Hadley was alone with the support craft. At 0920 ten planes attacked her at once, from ahead and from astern. She destroyed all ten. She was hit anyway: one bomb and three suicide planes. A 250-pound bomb blew the port quad 40 mm and its nine men over the side. Engineering spaces flooded. Both propeller shafts were bent when the keel took the shock. Fires ran through the 20 mm mounts and the torpedo tubes.
The Presidential Unit Citation credits her with twenty planes destroyed, help against all ten of the final attackers, and direction of the combat air patrol in at least forty more kills. The ship’s own memorial and DANFS put her gun tally at twenty-three in that engagement, which the crew still calls the single-action record for a U.S. warship. A scoreboard later painted aboard counted twenty-five for the whole Okinawa tour. The Corsairs and Hellcats overhead are a separate number, more than sixty that morning, and should not be folded into the ship’s guns.
Thirty of her men were killed. Wounded figures vary by source; the memorial site says 121, other accounts are lower. Damage control kept her afloat. She was towed to Ie Shima, then, like Evans, across the Pacific. She was not returned to service. She received the Presidential Unit Citation and one battle star, for the Okinawa campaign.
Between them, on one morning, the two ships’ guns were credited with something on the order of thirty-eight to forty-two aircraft, depending on which tally is used and how the shared kills are counted. The air patrol did the rest. Neither ship was repaired. Both were saved by men who had already lost the engines.