USS Putnam (DD-757) was the second ship named for Charles Putnam. She was built by Bethlehem Steel at San Francisco, launched on 26 March 1944 and commissioned on 12 October 1944, Commander Frederick V. H. Hilles in command. She passed under the Golden Gate Bridge on 30 December 1944 and reached Pearl Harbor on 2 January 1945.
She sailed on 29 January for the Marianas, screening transports carrying the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, and arrived off Iwo Jima on D-Day, 19 February 1945. She moved in close to attack shore installations and illuminated Japanese troop concentrations at night with star shells. On 23 February Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and a Navy and Marine party embarked in her for the trip to Guam and a conference with Admiral Nimitz.
She arrived at Okinawa on Easter Sunday and took up antiaircraft screening duties, and from 16 April had a gunfire support station southwest of the island. Later she was assigned to a radar picket station. On 16 June 1945 an unidentified American pilot crashed into a kamikaze seconds before it would have hit her. Soon after sundown a torpedo from a low-flying plane struck the destroyer Twiggs and exploded her number 2 magazine. Captain Glenn R. Hartwig, the squadron commander in Putnam, closed the burning ship. Of 188 Twiggs survivors pulled from the sea, Putnam took on 114. She left Okinawa on 1 July 1945.
Sources: Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS) as reproduced on Wikipedia, NavSource Online (commanding officer list), and Wikimedia Commons (photograph record).