Ships
- USS Claxton (DD-571) Captain from 21 September 1945
Commander Albert P. Stello of the United States Navy took command of the destroyer Claxton on 21 September 1945. Japan had surrendered, and the Fletcher-class ship he inherited was already on her way home from the western Pacific.
Claxton had been built at the Consolidated Steel yard in Orange, Texas. She was launched on 1 April 1942 and commissioned on 8 December 1942, with Herald Franklin Stout as her first commanding officer. Early in 1943 she watched Casco Bay in case the German battleship Tirpitz sortied, then escorted a convoy to Casablanca. In May she left Charleston for the Pacific. After workups at Noumea and Espiritu Santo she covered the Rendova landings in June and July and joined Destroyer Squadron 23. In the Solomons she screened troop movements, shelled shore positions, and fought Japanese ships and aircraft.
On the night of 1–2 November 1943, at Empress Augusta Bay, Claxton was among eight destroyers operating with four cruisers against a Japanese force of four cruisers and six destroyers bound for the shipping off Bougainville. Torpedo attacks from the American side broke up that approach, and two Japanese ships were sunk and four damaged. Later that month destroyers of the squadron intercepted Japanese ships near Cape St. George. Early in 1944 an explosion during a bombardment wounded men aboard. She finished the shoot with her forward guns and then went to the West Coast for repairs. By August she was back, supporting the Palau landings and the Philippine campaign. In Leyte Gulf a suicide plane struck her, flooded the living spaces, and killed or wounded members of the crew. She still took survivors off the sinking destroyer Abner Read. In 1945 she served off Okinawa, and on 6 June her guns turned back a flight of twelve suicide planes.
Maxim William Firth had commanded Claxton from 20 November 1944. Stello relieved him on 21 September 1945, after the ship had sailed from Okinawa on 10 September. She reached Washington, D.C., on 17 October, and on 19 October the Presidential Unit Citation awarded to Destroyer Squadron 23 was presented there. An overhaul in New York followed. His command covered that homeward passage and her last months in commission. On 18 April 1946 Claxton was decommissioned at Charleston, South Carolina, and placed in reserve.
Stello remained in the Navy and retired as a commander. He and his wife, Marion G. Stello, had several sons, among them Albert P. Stello Jr., born at Franklin, Massachusetts, on 8 April 1946. In later life he lived at Hanahan, South Carolina. He died before that son, whose death came on 7 July 2010.