recently launched Okinawa invasion. On 5 May, she cleared the Hawaiian Islands and steamed west by way of Eniwetok and Ulithi. On 21 May, when she arrived at Okinawa, the campaign had been in progress for almost two months, but the Japanese still hung on tenaciously. The members of the Kamikaze Corps continued to hurl themselves at the ships supporting the troops ashore. Watts proved to be a lucky ship while on radar picket station. Not only did her guns help to shoot down six aerial attackers, but she suffered only one really close call. A suicide plane almost managed to crash into her port side forward, but accurate 20-millimeter fire splashed him at the last possible instant, only 10 yards off the destroyer's port bow. Mercifully, her stay at Okinawa proved brief. In mid-June, she received orders to join the screen of TF 38 at Leyte Gulf, where she arrived on 17 June. For the remainder of the war, Watts screened the fast carriers of TF 38 while their planes flew their last series of sorties against the Japanese home islands. Ranging from Hokkaidō in the north to Kyūshū in the south, those planes helped to decimate enemy shipping, land communications, and military and manufacturing installations. On 23 July, Watts made her own personal contribution to the destruction visited upon the enemy when her guns joined in a bombardment of the outpost island, Chichi Jima, in the Bonins. The Japanese capitulation on 15 August 1945 found the ship steaming in Japanese waters screening TF 38. A bit under a month later, on 10 September, she entered Tokyo Bay to begin participation in the occupation of Japan. She remained on that duty until mid-November; then headed back to the United States. After brief stops at Pearl Harbor and San Diego, the destroyer transited the Panama Canal on 7 December and headed for Philadelphia, Pa. on the 18th. Watts arrived at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on 23 December and began a three-month inactivation overhaul. In mid-March, she shifted to the Charleston Naval Shipyard, where she was placed out of commission on 12 April 1946. 1951–1957 Watts remained in reserve until—to bolster the Navy during the Korean War—she was recommissioned on 6 July 1951. During the first 42 months of the second phase of her career, Watts operated with the Destroyer Force, Atlantic Fleet. In the late summer and fall of 1951,