By Sea

The hull number on the bow is 445: USS Fletcher, name ship of the largest class of destroyers the U.S. Navy ever built. Commissioned in June 1942, she was in the Solomons by autumn and fought in the night action off Guadalcanal on November 13, 1942, coming through it undamaged when many of the ships around her did not.

She was the first of 175. At 376 feet and 2,100 tons, with five 5-inch guns and ten torpedo tubes, the Fletchers screened the carriers, shelled beaches, ran convoys, picked up downed pilots and took the brunt of the kamikaze attacks off Okinawa.

Fletcher herself earned fifteen battle stars for the Second World War and five more in Korea. She is painted here as her crews knew her: at speed, at sunset, with the rest of the screen on the horizon.

The destroyer cuts across the picture from left to right, bow up, a white curl of wake at the stem. Sunlight from the low left silvers the superstructure and turns the sea beyond her to hammered gold; the water in the foreground is a dark, choppy green-gray. Two more ships ride the horizon, one at each edge. The sky is more than half the picture. Read the bow: 445, and a small flag at the mast.