Ships
- USS Heywood L. Edwards (DD-663) Captain from 25 December 1944
Albert Lee Shepherd was a United States Navy officer whose wartime command of the destroyer Heywood L. Edwards placed him on the bridge of a Fletcher-class ship during the last months of the Pacific War. The Navy lists him as commander of Heywood L. Edwards (DD-663) from 25 December 1944, the date he took the ship as captain.
The destroyer had already been in commission through much of 1944, named for Lieutenant Commander Heywood Lane Edwards, who was killed aboard the battleship Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. By the time Shepherd assumed command, Heywood L. Edwards was an established unit of the Pacific Fleet's destroyer force, screening larger ships, escorting formations, and carrying out the gunfire and anti-submarine work expected of a 2,100-ton fleet destroyer.
Shepherd's tour began in the period when American forces were closing on the Japanese home islands and the Philippines campaign was still absorbing destroyers into fast carrier and bombardment groups. A captain of a Fletcher-class ship in that season managed a crew of roughly three hundred, a five-gun main battery, torpedo tubes, depth charges, and the radar and sonar fit that let a destroyer both hunt submarines and stand in the anti-aircraft screen. Christmas Day 1944 was an unusual day to change captains, but the record fixes his assumption of command on that date.
Through the first half of 1945, ships of this class supported the landings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where destroyers on radar picket stations absorbed heavy kamikaze attack. Heywood L. Edwards served in that broad campaign. Public accounts of the ship do not isolate a single action as Shepherd's personal exploit, and no sinking is credited here to the ship under his hand. What the command line does establish is that he was the captain, responsible for the ship and her people while the fleet finished the war at sea.
Among the officers associated with the same wartime Navy was Joe Wood Boulware. Shepherd's own later life is not carried in the same public detail as his wartime command. The rank given for him on this record is commander, the grade in which he is remembered as captain of Heywood L. Edwards from 25 December 1944.
That Christmas change of command is the firm point in his naval story. From it, Albert Lee Shepherd stands as the officer who took a fighting destroyer into the final year of the Pacific War and held her as captain while the fleet closed the conflict.