The ship
USS Porcupine (IX-126) was a station tanker, the second ship of the name. The first was a schooner on Lake Erie in 1813. This one was laid down on 11 October 1943 as the Liberty tanker Leif Ericson, Maritime Commission hull 1930, type Z-ET1-S-C3, by the Delta Shipbuilding Corporation at New Orleans. The Navy named her Porcupine on 23 October. She was launched on 24 November, accepted on 29 December, and commissioned the next day. Lieutenant Daniel M. Paul had her.
DANFS gives her as 3,665 tons, 441 feet 6 inches, beam 57 feet, draft 27 feet 9 inches, 11 knots, and a complement of 79. The guns were one 5-inch, one 3-inch, and eight 20 mm. After a shakedown in the Gulf of Mexico she went to the Service Force of the Pacific Fleet as a mobile oil-storage ship. She passed the Panama Canal and reached Noumea on 28 March 1944. From there she stored and moved fuel at Noumea, Langemak Bay, Milne Bay, and Seeadler Harbor at Manus. By the end of November she was at Hollandia.
30 December 1944
In the last days of 1944 she was in the resupply convoy called Uncle plus 15. It formed off Dulag on 27 December and went up Leyte Gulf for Mindoro. DANFS counts about a hundred vessels, under Captain J. B. McLean, screened by nine destroyers. Two days before she arrived, on 28 December, the ammunition Liberty John Burke blew up in the Mindanao Sea. Lewis L. Dyche was a later ship, lost on 4 January off the west coast of Mindoro. The ships of this convoy arrived in Mangarin Bay at 0710 on 30 December. McLean wanted the cargo off and the convoy headed back to Leyte before dark. Unloading went on until 1540.
Five Vals then broke through and made a suicide attack. Within about two minutes the destroyers Gansevoort (DD-608) and Pringle (DD-477), the motor-torpedo-boat tender Orestes (AGP-10), and Porcupine were hit. Porcupine was off White Beach. A low flyer came in off her port bow. She fired every gun she had and did not turn him. The plane dropped a bomb over the main deck and crashed in after it. Seven of her sailors were killed and eight wounded. Fuel tanks ruptured, the engine room flooded, and the plane's engine went through the hull and tore a hole below the waterline.
Gansevoort, still afloat after her own hit, was towed toward the PT base at Caminavit Point and anchored in 15 fathoms. She was ordered to blow off Porcupine's stern so the fire would not reach the aviation gasoline. One torpedo hit. The flames were not stopped. The gasoline ignited, and Porcupine burned to the waterline. Samuel J. Cox, in H-Gram 040, gives the same afternoon: the convoy in that morning, the same four ships hit, Porcupine abandoned, and Gansevoort's torpedo failing to keep the gasoline from going up. She was struck from the Navy list on 19 January 1945.
DANFS names Paul at the commissioning and does not name the officer who had her off Mindoro. A Navy Memorial lost-at-sea log for the ship lists nine names. DANFS counts seven killed and eight wounded. The two counts are left as the two sources give them.
The photograph on the card is Porcupine at anchor on 17 October 1944, Navy number 80-G-295412. The picture below is the print of the fire off White Beach. It shows the smoke, and a plane. It does not show the hull.
