If you don’t want to trust the statement just say so. As tothe rest of your post I don’t know. It has been a while. He died in the eighties.
“If you don’t want to trust the statement just say so.”
I was trying to see if there was some way of reconciling your statement to the historical fact there were no destroyers located in the 13th Naval District of Alaska, the Alaskan Sea Frontier, or the North Pacific on 7 December 1941. A search of the whereabouts of every destroyer in the U.S. Navy finds none of them were anywhere near to Alaska on 7 December 1941. The destroyers (DD) located closest to Alaska were on patrol off Puget Sound; undergoing overhaul at Mare Island (San Francisco Bay, California); San Diego, California; Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaiian Terr.; or accompanying various task forces ferrying aircraft to Midway Island and Wake Island.
You wrote: “Three days before Pearl my father received flash traffic to immediately sortie and intercept the Jap fleet headed for Pearl. He was on a four stacker tin can in Alaska. He told me they went to sea with ammo on deck.”
PG-51 Charleston was conducting operations somewhere between Seattle and the Alaskan Sea Frontier, but it is a small patrol gunboat that can in no way be compared to a WWI era “four stacker tin can [destroyer].”
In the absence of any confirmable information to the contrary, any claims about the presence of “a four stacker tin can in Alaska” on 7 December 1941 is refuted by the official logs of each and every destroyer in the U.S. Navy. So, the evidence makes it only natural to find the statement cannot be trusted and must be rejected as contrary to the historical facts.