Ships
- USS Raymond (DE-341) Captain from 15 April 1944 · Relieved on 27 December 1944
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the 2019 history of Raymond (DE-341), says she was commissioned on 15 April 1944, Lieutenant Commander Aaron F. Beyer, Jr., in command, and its table of commanding officers runs his tour to 27 December 1944. The same history puts him on her bridge at Samar. The initials are not the whole name. The Navy had already refused him once. The letters USN do not describe the officer who commissioned his first escort.
Tyrone, and the accident the class remembered
The Lucky Bag places him in western Pennsylvania, "from the vicinity of the famous Horseshoe Curve." That is Altoona's railroad landmark, a few miles from Tyrone, in Blair County. The Academy register, in the table of the class's last year, gives his age at admission as seventeen years and seven months. The Navy Register of 1 January 1956, under the column it heads as date of birth, prints 12, 01, 11 for him, in the same place where the officers around him carry ordinary birth dates. Read against that column, the digits are 1 December 1911. An admission in the early summer of 1929 would make a boy born on that day seventeen years and seven months old. The register does not, in the pages read here, print his own day of entrance, so the fit is a check, not a second document. No source in hand names his parents beyond the "Jr.," or says what his father did, or who kept the house in Tyrone.
The yearbook is a roommate's sketch, not a service record, and it should be read as one. It says a tough accident in plebe summer nearly sent him home. "For a while we were afraid that he was going to be a civilian again, but Fate spared him for the Navy." The sketch does not say what broke, or how long he was in the hospital, or whether the injury left a mark. It goes on in the usual way. He was a good sport and a staunch friend, good for a loan until payday and willing to "drag blind" on short notice. He worked as a property man for theatricals and musical programs. He was not on a varsity squad. He played golf, tennis, and solitaire. The activity line under the sketch lists the Property Gang, the Masqueraders, the Musical Club, class swimming, and "2 P.O." The index puts the sketch at page 136. There is a joke about pumpernickel and Wienerschnitzel and a dreamy look in the mess hall. That is the class guessing at a Pennsylvania boy. It is not evidence that German was spoken at home.
The sketch's last word is that he could fit into any situation and make most girls look twice. No wife is named. No engagement is named. The yearbook is the only picture of him before the war that turned up, and it is a picture drawn by boys who expected him to be commissioned with them.
The number, and the day the Navy let him go
He finished. The Annual Register for the academic year that closed in 1933 lists Aaron Frederick Beyer, Jr., in the graduating class of June 1933: 435 members at the end of the course, of whom 432 received diplomas and the degree of bachelor of science. His relative standing for the completed course is 321. The same line gives his standing year by year as 364, 407, 291, and 313, and his aggregate multiple as 738.57 out of a maximum of 1,000. The register's own rule is printed a page ahead of that table. A multiple of at least 85 percent of the maximum earned a diploma that read "Passed with distinction." At least 75 percent, and less than 85, read "Passed with credit." Below 75 percent the diploma read "Passed." His 738.57 sits just under 750. The diploma, if it followed the rule, said only that he had passed. He was not a star man. In the last year his department standings, which the register prints as places in the class and not as grades, run from the 220s into the 300s, and his aptitude for the service is 310 in a class of 435. None of this is a judgment added later. It is the Academy's arithmetic.
The symbol in the left-hand column of that line is b. The register's key, on the page it tells the reader to consult, says b means "Resignation accepted upon graduation due to physical disqualification." The separate table of deaths, resignations, and the rest, covering 23 September 1932 to 28 September 1933, lists him again: symbol b, class of 1933, date resigned a ditto of the line above. That line is Bellinger's, and Bellinger's date is 1 June 1933, which was graduation day. The class statistics on the same pages sort the men who were not commissioned: 41 required to resign upon graduation as physically disqualified, 13 who resigned voluntarily, 127 honorably discharged for lack of vacancies, one Filipino not commissioned, and 250 commissioned, of whom 217 were line ensigns, 20 Marine second lieutenants, and 13 Supply Corps ensigns. His symbol is the physical one, not the vacancy one, and not the Supply Corps mark. The man in the next row, Howard Troutman Bierer, carries SC. Beyer does not.
He is not in the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers for 1934, nor in the registers of 1935, 1936, 1938, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, or 1945, under Aaron, A. F., or file 071273. The other Beyers in those books are different men. The Navy that had let the accident of plebe summer pass had, on the day it handed him a diploma, accepted his resignation because of his body. The register does not say what the disqualification was, or whether it was the old injury, or whether he asked to go or was told to go. The symbol b is "accepted," not the separate symbol for a man found disqualified and required to resign. The summary line that counts forty-one men "required to resign" is the Academy's total, not a sentence about him alone. What can be said is narrower and harder. On 1 June 1933 Aaron Frederick Beyer, Jr., graduated, and on 1 June 1933 he was out.
The yearbook had already gone to press with the comfortable ending, that fate had spared him for the Navy. The register is the ending that counted.
The years with no ship
Then the record stops. No directory, no newspaper in hand, no reserve register read here, names a job, a city, a wife, or a child for the next ten years. uboat.net prints a rank ladder that begins with ensign on 10 October 1933 and a command of PC-589 in late 1942, and it says he transferred from the Naval Reserve to the regular Navy in 1946. That page is a compilation. It does not show the documents. The ensign date collides with the Academy's resignation on 1 June 1933 and with his absence from the regular registers, and it is not used here. The patrol-craft command is not in the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships under any PC-589 history that could be opened, and it is not used either. NavSource's dates for his later ships are the same kind of list. Where a date below rests only on those sites, it is marked. Where it does not appear in an official history or a register, it is left out.
What the official history does say is that on 11 June 1943, at the Mare Island Navy Yard, the escort vessel Wileman (DE-22) was commissioned, Lieutenant Aaron F. Beyer, USNR, in command. He was thirty-one. He had been a civilian, or at most a reservist the registers do not show, for a decade. He came back not as a line ensign of the class of 1933 but as a reserve lieutenant, and the Navy gave him a brand-new destroyer escort of the Evarts class. The Wileman history does not say when he had been appointed in the Reserve, or who recommended a man the Academy had let go for his body, or what he had done in the interval that made a command reasonable. The gap is the whole of his twenties after graduation. It is also the reason the list's label, USN, is only half the truth. In June 1943 the Dictionary calls him USNR. In January 1956 the Register calls him a line officer of the regular Navy. Both can be true. They are not true at the same time.
The ship that kept her own diary
Wileman had been laid down for the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease, then taken back and named for the Navy. Beyer commissioned her. From that sentence on, the Dictionary follows the ship and not the man. It never says who relieved him. He cannot have been her captain on 15 April 1944, because on that day he was at Orange, Texas, commissioning Raymond. Anything the Wileman history tells after the day he actually left is someone else's cruise, and the history does not give that day.
What it tells for the months after commissioning is the life he had been handed, whether or not he rode all of it. Shakedown on the west coast. On 20 August 1943 she left San Francisco with the destroyer Fletcher and a three-ship convoy and reached Pearl Harbor on the 27th. A week later she took the transport Wharton south: Tutuila, Nouméa, Suva. At Suva they parted. Wharton went back to San Francisco. Wileman stayed for a month of patrol and escort in the Ellice Islands, sailed for Oahu on 25 October, and entered Pearl Harbor on 2 November. In the last half of November she screened a convoy of garrison troops to Makin, in the Gilberts, and got there at midday on the 24th. Japanese bombers from Jaluit and Mili came out. Three Bettys singled out the convoy. The escorts and the ships fired. Two of the planes were turned off. One dropped a torpedo, and it passed wide. Nobody on either side was hit. After that she spent about a month on convoy and patrol among the Gilberts, the Phoenix group, and the Ellice Islands, and she was back at Pearl Harbor on 8 January 1944.
If he was still aboard for Makin, that empty torpedo run was the first time the war reached him, and it reached him as noise and a miss. The history does not say he was still aboard. A NavSource list gives his Wileman tour as 11 June 1943 to 10 January 1944, which would put the relief at Pearl two days after that return and would make the Makin convoy his. NavSource is a compiled photograph archive, not a log, and the date is not in the Dictionary. It is the sort of date that fits the later fact of Orange in April. It is not established.
What is established is the shape of the work. Wileman did not make the assault landings. In the Marshalls operation, which began after 8 January, the Dictionary has her escorting garrison troops, the 16th Marine Defense Battalion and a naval construction unit, into Kwajalein after the atoll had already been secured. By 30 March she was in a hunter-killer group around the escort carrier Altamaha. On 15 April, the day Beyer was commissioning Raymond in Texas, that group was still in the eastern Marshalls, and a torpedo passed ahead of Altamaha. Those weeks are not his. The point of reciting them is the limit. The ship he had brought out from Mare Island went on screening oilers and transports through the Marianas and did not see San Francisco again until November 1944. Her captain of June 1943 had already been gone for months, standing on a dock in Orange with a newer and larger escort.
Orange to the equator
Raymond was a John C. Butler-class destroyer escort, built by Consolidated Steel at Orange. The 2019 Dictionary, which is fuller than the short DANFS text long circulated from the 1960s volume, gives her the dates. Laid down 3 November 1943. Launched 8 January 1944, sponsored by Mrs. Helen Raymond, mother of the submarine officer for whom the ship was named. Commissioned 15 April 1944, Lieutenant Commander Aaron F. Beyer, Jr., in command. The older published entry says the same thing in one clause: commissioned 15 April 1944, Lieutenant Commander A. F. Beyer, Jr., in command. The compiled list's "Captain from 15 April 1944" is that commissioning. It does not mention the day he gave her up.
He had a little more than eight months. The Dictionary's cruise, up through the day before she sailed from Pearl Harbor at the end of December, is his, because the command table does not put another officer aboard until 27 December.
Shakedown was off Bermuda, 10 May to 5 June 1944. Then the Boston Navy Yard for the usual post-shakedown repairs. She left Boston for Norfolk on 18 June and on the 19th became a training ship for the Norfolk Training Station. The older DANFS compresses this into a clause, training ship and then the Canal on 1 July. The 2019 history puts the Boston yard in between. There is no disagreement about the Canal. On 1 July she went through with the amphibious flagship Mount Olympus. Pearl Harbor on 23 July. Five days in the yard. Operational training from 29 July to 11 August.
On 12 August she sailed with Task Group 32.2 for Guadalcanal. She crossed the 180th meridian on the 17th and the equator on the 22nd, and the history notes the crossing-the-line ceremony without saying what her captain did in it. Guadalcanal on the 24th. At 1920 the next day she left for Manus in the Admiralties, screening the escort carrier Fanshaw Bay with the escorts Richard M. Rowell and John C. Butler. Manus on 28 August. Patrol and drills until 10 September, then out with Task Group 77.1 for Morotai. She screened escort carriers whose planes were striking Japanese bases in the Dutch East Indies, was detached on 25 September, and went back to Manus. The older history names 15 September as the day she screened the Morotai attack. The newer one gives the whole detachment, 10 to 25 September, and does not isolate the 15th. The difference is compression.
On 12 October she sailed with Task Unit 77.4.3. Four days later the unit supported the air strikes against Leyte. The unit's radio call, which the ship's own later memory and every account of the battle use, was Taffy 3: six escort carriers, three destroyers, four destroyer escorts, under Rear Admiral Clifton A. F. Sprague. Raymond was one of the four small escorts. Her work, up to the morning of 25 October, had been the work Wileman had done. Screen the carriers. Keep station. Do not expect a fleet.
The morning off Samar
The 2019 Dictionary is the official narrative of what Beyer did with her, and it is specific enough to follow without borrowing the battle's fame from ships he did not command.
On 25 October 1944, off Samar, Taffy 3 met the Japanese Center Force under Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo. Raymond laid smoke to cover the escort carriers from ships that were coming down fast. Then Lieutenant Commander Aaron F. Beyer, commanding officer, ordered her to make a torpedo run. She left the port side of the carrier formation and fired three torpedoes at the heavy cruiser Haguro. The Dictionary names Haguro's captain, Uozumi Jisaku. The torpedoes missed. Haguro fired on Raymond with fifteen 8-inch salvos "from only approximately 200 yards." The ship turned back to the carriers, "miraculously escaping damage" from those salvos, and at 0814 engaged the heavy cruisers Chikuma and Tone with her 5-inch guns. The history says the damage those guns did to the two cruisers was minimal, and that American aircraft were hitting Kurita's force with torpedoes and bombs at the same time.
At 0840 Raymond joined the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts and the two of them fired on the Japanese cruiser line from 5,900 yards. The Dictionary's sentence on what happened next is the history's judgment, not a log entry: their rate of fire, together with the air attacks, convinced Kurita to retire. Taffy 3 had saved the landing, in that history's words, and had lost the escort carrier Gambier Bay, the escort Samuel B. Roberts, and the destroyers Hoel and Johnston. Later the same morning kamikazes arrived. One crashed into the escort carrier St. Lo and sank her at 1125. Raymond was the primary rescue ship and took 108 survivors out of the water. On 26 October she transferred forty badly wounded men from St. Lo to LST-464, a landing ship fitted for casualties, and left for Manus.
A National Archives still that the Dictionary captions, 80-G-288144, was taken from the escort carrier Kalinin Bay at the start of the action. It shows Gambier Bay, Raymond, and another escort making smoke, with Japanese ships faint on the horizon. He was in that smoke. The photograph is not a portrait.
The "200 yards" will not sit quietly next to the rest of the paragraph. A heavy cruiser's 8-inch battery, firing fifteen salvos from two hundred yards, is a different event from a destroyer escort that then escapes without damage and, less than twenty minutes later by the same account, is in a gun action at 5,900 yards. A family page for a Raymond sailor, Julius Miller, retells the morning from the Dictionary and from Robert Jon Cox's The Battle Off Samar (1996). In that retelling the torpedo run closes to about 6,000 yards, Haguro puts about fifteen 8-inch salvos roughly 200 yards astern, and Raymond fires 414 rounds of 5-inch in the course of the surface action. "Two hundred yards astern" and "from only approximately 200 yards" are not the same sentence. One is a miss. The other is a range. Cox's book and Raymond's action report were not in hand for this essay. The Dictionary's wording is what an official history currently prints. The other wording is what a secondary account, closer to the way naval gunfire is usually described, prefers. They are left in disagreement. What does not depend on the distance is the order of the decisions the Dictionary attributes to him by name. He had laid smoke. He took the escort out of the screen and fired the torpedoes. They missed. He came back. The 5-inch guns did not stop a cruiser. The ship, in that account, was not hit by the salvos that were fired at her. Then he spent the rest of the morning picking up the men of a carrier that had been sunk by an airplane.
The Navy Cross citation, as printed by the Hall of Valor and there attributed to Commander Seventh Fleet serial 0678 of 11 February 1945, is the Navy's sentence on that morning. The original serial was not seen. The Defense Department's list of Navy Cross recipients for the war includes "Beyer, Jr. Aaron F," lieutenant commander, and nothing more. The citation as Hall of Valor gives it says the President took pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Lieutenant Commander Aaron Frederick Beyer, Jr., United States Navy, commanding the destroyer escort Raymond, for extraordinary heroism in a surface engagement with a large Japanese task force near Samar on 25 October 1944. It says he maneuvered "his little ship" under intense fire from heavy forces superior in numbers, armament, and armor, and that by his own courage he encouraged his officers and men. It names no torpedo, no cruiser, and no range. It is a citation, which means it is praise written to a form. It is also the only official prose that tries to say what he was like under fire, and it says he was the man who conned the ship and was seen doing it.
The citation says United States Navy. The Wileman history, sixteen months earlier, says United States Naval Reserve. One later label says USN. The disagreement is real and is not resolved by picking the later label and reading it backward. Wartime citations sometimes ignore the reserve. Sometimes a man had already been transferred. No order transferring him was found. In February 1945, when the serial is dated, he was still a lieutenant commander. The 1956 register gives his date of present rank as commander as 20 July 1945, in a block of commanders who all carry that same day. The promotion, if that column is his date of rank, came after Samar, after the citation's serial, and after he had left Raymond.
The task unit's Presidential Unit Citation is the ship's, and the Dictionary says Raymond received it for her part in the battle off Samar, along with five battle stars for her whole wartime service. The stars are the ship's. His tour covers Morotai, the Leyte landings, and Samar. It does not cover the Iwo Jima and Okinawa escort duty the same history narrates after 29 December 1944. Counting five stars as his would be counting another captain's war.
The shaft, and the day he left
After Manus she screened escort carriers back to Pearl and arrived on 18 November 1944. On 5 December she sailed with Task Unit 12.5.2. Trouble in the port shaft turned her around. She went into dry dock at Oahu and stayed there, the history says, until the day after Christmas. On 27 December Lieutenant Commander John R. O'Meara relieved him. On 29 December Raymond left Hawaii with Task Unit 16.8.1, for Eniwetok and everything after.
The Dictionary does not say why he was relieved in a repair yard, two days before the ship sailed, rather than kept for the next operation or sent home earlier. It does not say whether the shaft, or eight months in command, or the Navy Cross already in train, or a medical board, had anything to do with it. The physical disqualification of 1933 is not mentioned again in any record read here. Inventing a connection would be a guess about his body. He had been fit enough, or passed as fit enough, to commission two escorts and to fight one of them. That is as far as the paper goes.
What he did not do is the rest of Raymond's war. The fueling of Task Force 58 off Iwo Jima, the escort runs to Kerama Retto and Okinawa, the typhoon of 5 June 1945 that she steamed into and came out of with no casualties, the second storm at the end of July, the surrender, the occupation, the return to San Pedro in November 1945, the decommissioning in 1947, the Atlantic years after 1951: other officers. O'Meara had her until 27 May 1946, in the 2019 table, and Lieutenant George N. Epstein after that until she went out of commission. NavSource divides those months differently. The Dictionary's table is the one used here, and only the first line of it is Beyer's.
What the Register still knew in 1956
The next official snapshot is eleven years after he left the ship. The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the Navy of the United States, including officers of the Marine Corps, the volume whose own footnotes are dated for 1 January 1956, lists him among the commanders. The name is Aaron Frederick Beyer, Jr. The permanent rank is commander. The designator is 1100. The register's table of designators says that 110 means a line officer, and that a fourth digit of 0 means an officer of the regular Navy whose permanent grade is ensign or above. He was no longer, in this book, the USNR lieutenant of the Wileman commissioning. When the transfer happened is not in the register. The uboat.net date of 1946 is not used.
The columns for date of present rank, read in the order the register prints them, month, day, and year, are 7, 20, and 45. That is 20 July 1945, and it is the date carried by the commanders listed around him, a mass date of rank rather than a private ceremony. The next three figures, in the date-of-birth column, are 12, 01, and 11. The signal number printed with him is 2706, and an asterisk follows it. The register's note says an asterisk in that place means the officer has been selected for promotion to the next higher grade. Selected is not promoted. On 1 January 1956 the book still calls him a commander. Hall of Valor says he retired as a captain. That may be what the selection became. It was not checked against a later register, a retirement order, or an obituary, and it is not stated here as fact.
The index of the same volume gives file number 071273, the name truncated by the narrow column to BEYER AARON FREDE, the rank commander, the designator 1100. That is the number on the Hall of Valor page. It ties the citation's man to the register's man.
Nothing in that register says where he was stationed in 1956, whether he had gone back to sea, or whether he was at a desk. The running-mate and special-qualification figures that follow his birth date were not read against a clean page image, and they are not interpreted. There is no wife in the book. There are no children.
The end, which is not in the file
Hall of Valor prints his dates as 1 December 1911 to 1 January 1970, and uboat.net adds San Diego County. The birth date matches the register. The death date and the place do not match any obituary, death certificate, or grave record that was found. Find a Grave, in the searches made for this essay, did not produce him. No Tyrone paper, no San Diego paper, no Navy retirement list, was in hand. He may have died on New Year's Day 1970 in San Diego at fifty-eight. That sentence is what two secondary sites agree on. It is not a fact established here.
So the life that can be told ends in a column of a register, a commander of the regular line, selected for captain, born in 1911, with a file number and no home address. The war that can be told ends in a dry dock at Pearl Harbor, the week after Christmas 1944, when he turned Raymond over to O'Meara and the ship left without him.
What he left a family, if he had one, is not known. The yearbook's talk of girls and blind dates is 1933. It does not become a marriage. The Navy Cross is a piece of paper the Navy addressed to him. Whether anyone framed it, and where, is outside the records. The cost that is on paper is earlier than the battle and plainer. The Academy measured him, graduated him near the bottom of the top three quarters and just short of a "with credit," and then, because of his body, did not keep him. He spent ten years outside the registers. He came back as a reservist in time to be trusted with a new escort, and then with another, and on the second of them he took a torpedo attack against a heavy cruiser because that was the order the morning required. The torpedoes missed. The ship came through. He picked up the carrier's survivors, got Raymond home as far as Pearl Harbor, and left her there. The Navy, which had resigned him for physical disqualification at twenty-one, later made him a regular commander and selected him for captain. It did not, in any document read for this essay, explain either decision.