“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.
My dad was on one so your logs are wrong. Previously he had been chief signalman on the heavy crusier Houston. Before her last cruise two chief signalmen wer assigns to her. They flipped a coin and my dad lost and got his orders changed. That is how he wound up in Alaska. He was haunted by that all his life as he believed he should have been with the ship when she was sunk. While I know the historical record is, in the vast majority of cases correct,I was recanting what I was told and I have no reason to doubt it. My dad was commissioned in WWII and had his ship shot out from under him at Guadalcanal. He was also involved in the invasion of Africa but spent most of his time in the Pacific.