USS Mannert L. Abele (DD-733) was named for Lieutenant Commander Mannert L. Abele, who commanded the submarine USS Grunion and was lost with her in July 1942. The destroyer was built by Bath Iron Works, launched on 23 April 1944 and commissioned at Boston on 4 July 1944, Commander Alton E. Parker in command.
After shakedown off Bermuda and a spell as a training ship in Chesapeake Bay she reached Pearl Harbor on 17 November 1944. She was converted at Pearl Harbor into a fighter director ship, with special radio and radar equipment, and sailed on 27 January 1945 for Iwo Jima. She screened the transports on 19 February, joined the fire support group the next day, and over 28 hours shelled gun emplacements, blockhouses and caves for the 5th Marine Division. From dusk on 21 February she returned to screening and radar picket duty.
At Okinawa she was on the radar picket line. On 12 April 1945 a kamikaze hit her at about 1440. About a minute later an Ohka, the rocket-powered suicide aircraft carried by a bomber, struck her and she sank. Eighty-four men were killed. She was the first of three radar pickets hit by an Ohka and the only ship sunk by one during the Okinawa campaign. Her wreck was located in December 2022 by the Lost 52 Project, about 75 miles off the northern coast of Okinawa.
Sources: Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS) as reproduced on Wikipedia, NavSource Online (commanding officer list), and Wikimedia Commons (photograph record).