Four bombs, six kamikaze crashes, and continuous strafing in 80 minutes, and the USS Laffey (DD-724) stayed afloat. This episode is a biography of an Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer, from her construction at Bath Iron Works in Maine and commissioning under Commander Frederick Becton, through D-Day at Utah Beach, the E-boat fight after the torpedoing of USS Nelson, and the dud shell that ricocheted into her hull off Cherbourg.

In the Pacific she screened fleets at Leyte, supported Marines at Iwo Jima, and carried intelligence to Admiral Nimitz before being posted to Radar Picket Station One off Okinawa on April 16, 1945. We break down how Japanese pilots exploited the SC radar’s overhead blind spot, the avgas fires fought with fog nozzles under machine-gun fire, the flooded magazines, the rudder jammed at 26 degrees that trapped her in a circle, Carl Rieman’s dry runs in an unarmed Wildcat, and Becton’s refusal to abandon ship. Then comes the strange afterlife: the Bikini atomic tests and sandblasting radiation off her hull, Korean War duels at Wonsan, Cold War patrols, and a 9.2 million dollar rescue from rust at Patriots Point.

• Why Sumner-class twin 5-inch mounts and the Mark 37 system made her a top anti-aircraft platform
• How radar pickets served as the fleet’s early warning system and its bait
• The engineering and damage-control decisions that kept a 2,200-ton ship afloat
• Decontaminating a warship after Operation Crossroads
• The 2008 discovery of more than 100 hull leaks and the dry-dock effort that saved her