Armed with four four-inch, 50-caliber deck guns and 12 torpedoes, the Wickes were crewed by a total of 122 officers and men. Capable of roughly 35 knots, the ships were known for their large, difficult turning radius caused by their sterns digging in at high speeds and for having a maximum range that was hampered by a less-than-ideal fuel capacity. Only a few were finished prior to the end of World War I, leaving many to be mothballed or converted in the interwar years.

USS Taylor (DD-94) was the 20th Wickes constructed and the first warship named for Spanish–American War Admiral Henry Clay Taylor. Commissioned on June 1, 1918, at the Mare Island Navy Yard in California, the Taylor and her crew quickly passed through the Panama Canal for wartime service. She patrolled the Atlantic Ocean in the days prior to the November 11 Armistice, remaining operational along the East Coast and in the Caribbean for the next few years. Like many of her sister ships, she was decommissioned in 1922, rejoining the service from May 1, 1930, to September 23, 1938, before being decommissioned a second time at the Philadelphia Naval Yard in Pennsylvania.

There she was redesignated Damage Control Hulk 40 on July 11, 1940, serving the valuable purpose of training damage control parties at the yard. She would remain a useful instructional tool leading up to America’s entrance into World War II, preparing crews to face the dangers of naval combat at sea.

Taylor’s younger sister, USS Blakeley (DD-150), was built on the other side of the country by William Cramp and Sons in Philadelphia. Commissioned on May 8, 1919, and named for War of 1812-era Captain Johnston Blakely, the ship was too late to serve in World War I and instead joined the East Coast patrol squadrons for the next three years.

Decommissioned one week after Taylor in 1922, Blakeley joined her sister in Philadelphia before spending five years with the Scouting Fleet from 1932 to 1937. Following another brief period in decommission, the vessel was chosen for reactivation amid growing war tensions, rejoining the fleet as a commissioned warship on October 16, 1939. Initially assigned to Neutrality Patrols, Blakely would find herself placed on convoy duties in the Caribbean following the American entry into the war. And it was here that events would lead to a unique reunion with her sleeping sister back in Pennsylvania.

On May 22, 1942, USS Blakeley was operating in the vicinity of the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Martinique when she came across a lifeboat from the torpedoed merchant ship SS Quaker City. Sunk on May 18, four lifeboats of survivors had been directed toward Barbados by their ship’s executioner, the German submarine U-156, a Type IX-C U-boat.

After being separated from the other lifeboats, the seven men found by the Blakeley were quickly brought to the island of Trinidad on May 24, with the destroyer sallying forth to resume her duties. The next day, while examining a sonar ping near Martinique, one of U-156’s torpedoes found its mark on the submarine’s next victim.

Striking the destroyer roughly four feet under the waterline, the torpedo’s explosion sheared the vessel in two. Sixty feet of hull from the superstructure to the bow was blown clear, resulting in the loss of six crew members.

Now missing a full fifth of their ship, the crew struggled to stabilize their vessel for a few tense minutes while the U-156 contemplated her next move. Luckily for the men of the Blakeley, the threat of approaching rescue ships and aircraft weighed heavily, and the German crew disappeared to hunt another prey. Miraculously still afloat, the men aboard the battered destroyer found that they could still maneuver the rudder and used alternating speeds on the vessel’s two propellers to slowly get themselves to the port of Fort-de-France on Martinique over the course of four hours.

The first in a series of ingenious solutions, a new anchor was quickly made from a truck axle and spring shocks. Braced and fitted with wood over the exposed bulkheads, the crew set sail for San Juan, Puerto Rico, where a temporary stub bow was waiting. Once this was fitted, the Blakeley set off for Philadelphia and her old sister ship, the Taylor.

When news of the damage suffered by the Blakeley reached the Navy, a novel solution was proposed. The Taylor was no longer a commissioned vessel, and she could still serve the as a training hulk even if she sacrificed a large section of her hull to save her sister ship. Despite both vessels being over two decades old, the loss of a destroyer early in the war when such a repair option was deemed possible would have been unacceptable to the war effort. And so Taylor found herself in the limelight, her bow cleaned and cleared in preparation for her sister’s surgery. By mid-July 1942, both ships were ready.

Maneuvered into drydock, Blakeley had her forward areas cleaned up, the cuts following the perimeter of her superstructure and even bisecting a porthole as the yard workers worked vertically down the hull.

Taylor likewise saw her forward compartments cut free, and with the aid of a crane, a full fifth of the older destroyer was swung into place. For the next month, the men of the Navy Yard would meld these colossal sections together and improve the fighting effectiveness of the new hybrid vessel. Taylor’s long lost bow gun was restored, propulsion systems were improved, and new radar arrays were added. Now featuring the truncated three-funnel layout common of upgraded Wickes destroyers, Blakeley was underway by September 5, 1942. Less than five months after the torpedo strike and with less than two months of work, Blakeley was back in the fight.

The modernized USS Blakeley off the Philadelphia Navy Yard on September 5, 1942, now bearing the bow of the Taylor. Courtesy of the National Archives.

For the next three years, Taylor and Blakeley would do their part for the war effort. While the Taylor’s main hull would remain quietly moored in Philadelphia as an odd-looking but relatively innocuous training tool, her sister ship and donated bow would sail out on several convoy patrols throughout the Caribbean, even sailing as far as Bizerte in Tunisia.

As the war began to draw to a close, Blakeley was assigned to New London in Connecticut, spending the time from mid-March to mid-June 1945 ironically hunting American submarine crews as a means of teaching them how to evade enemy destroyers at sea. But despite all the effort of 1942, both the war and time had taken their toll, and the summer of 1945 saw both Taylor and Blakeley entering the twilight moments of their class. Taylor was the first to go, quietly towed away from Philadelphia for scrap on August 8, 1945. Blakely, having rejoined her sister for one last time when decommissioned in Philadelphia on July 21, met the same fate on November 30, 1945. And though the vessels are now long gone, their unique shared story remains.