Ships
- USS Van Valkenburgh (DD-656) Captain from 2 August 1944
The middle name is not a guess. The 1932 Lucky Bag heads his sketch “Alexander Bacon Coxe, Jr.” The Register of 1 January 1933 prints the same full name, signal 5942, ensign, ship Tennessee. Hall of Valor and the East Carolina finding aid use Alexander Bacon Coxe, Jr., and the Navy’s later file number for that man is 071493, the service number 0-71493 on the citations.
He is not Captain Lewis Coxe, who on 1 January 1933 was in command of Salt Lake City and who by the Directory of 1 October 1937 is carried at 1015 Adella Avenue, Coronado, off the active ship list. He is not Lewis Crocker Coxe of the Civil Engineer Corps, born 19 August 1912 in the 1944 Register, file 073364, a commander in 1950 and a captain, designator 5100, in the 1960 index, later a rear admiral in the 1968 index. He is not Charles Ray Coxe of the Marine Corps, not Robert Frederick Coxe, and not the Elmyra, Joseph, Louis, Theodore, or William Coxes who turn up in the 1951 Register index. He is not his father, Colonel Alexander Bacon Coxe of the cavalry, and not the Alexander Bacon Coxe, III, whose name the Town of Chapel Hill burial index places in the same lot with the year 1956. No other Alexander B. Coxe appears in the Navy directories and registers read for this essay. He is the only Coxe on Sean’s list.
Origins
The birth date the Navy repeated most often is 18 February 1910. The Register that carries his name in the lieutenant commanders, the 1943 volume, prints “18 Feb. 10” and a date of entry “30 July 28.” The 1944 Register repeats both. The 1 July 1947 body line, read against his classmates Otto Axel Scherini and Howard Eugene Born, puts month 2, day 18, year 10 in the birth columns, and the Registers of 1 January 1957, 1 January 1958, and 1 January 1960 do the same. Hall of Valor prints 18 February 1910. The 1945 Register does not. On the line for signal 3666 it prints “13 Feb. 10,” with the same entry day, 30 July 1928. Compiled pages that give 13 February 1910 are following that one book, or each other. This essay uses 18 February, and the conflict is kept below.
The East Carolina guide to his own papers says he was born in Arizona in 1910. It does not name a town. The guide to his father’s papers says the father, Alexander Bacon Coxe, was born in December 1872 at Fort Seldon, New Mexico, the son of Lieutenant Robert E. Coxe of the Army and Helen Bacon Coxe, and that he died in February 1965 at ninety-three. The same guide says the father claimed to be the first white child born in that state. That is the collection’s report of a claim. New Mexico was a territory in 1872, and the claim is not treated here as a fact about the birth. What the papers do establish is three generations of officers: Robert E. Coxe, a second lieutenant of the 8th Cavalry who resigned in 1874; the colonel; and the naval captain. A photograph in the father’s collection is identified as Susan Larkin Thomson, Mrs. Alexander B. Coxe, Sr., St. Louis, October 1892. The son’s finding aid says the photographs include one of his mother and one of his sister, Anne. The father’s photograph notes call the sister Annie and place both children, over the years, at Batangas, Zamboanga, Jolo, and Camp Stotsenburg in the Philippines, at Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont, at White Bear Lake in Minnesota, and at Fort Riley.
The father’s career, as the East Carolina guide summarizes the diaries, commissions, and official file, is the household the boy grew up in. Alexander Bacon Coxe the elder was in the Minnesota National Guard, went to the Philippines with the 39th Volunteer Infantry, served with the Allied force at Peking during the Boxer rising, and was commissioned in the Regular Army. He was a cavalry officer at the posts the photographs name. In the First World War he helped Colonel Ralph H. Van Deman set up the Army’s intelligence section, served on the General Staff in France, and received the Distinguished Service Medal and the Legion of Honor. The guide says that from 1920 until his retirement in 1936 his duties included secretary of the Cavalry School at Fort Riley, command of the 13th Cavalry, and chief-of-staff billets in Washington and at Fort Bliss. He was recalled in 1940 to help rebuild the intelligence system and was relieved from active duty by order of the President on 15 March 1941. A Silver Star for gallantry at Carmona, Luzon, on 3 January 1900 reached him, the certificate note in the collection says, with his own endorsement that it had taken twenty-seven years and seventeen days to get a one-cent star.
The Lucky Bag of 1932, page marked two hundred one, gives the son’s Academy home as Fort Riley, Kansas, and the nicknames “Alex” and “A. B.” The sketch says the call of the sea was heard in far-off Kansas, and that from an Army post came Alex. “Knowing what the Army was like, he chose the Navy — a choice by which both he and the Navy profited.” That is classmate prose. It is also the only sentence that says, in so many words, that the choice was conscious. The sketch calls him light-haired and blue-eyed, a son of the Mid-West, a hard and conscientious worker who boned navigation or juice when he thought he was weak instead of reading the Cosmopolitan. During youngster year, it says, he nearly succumbed to a young lady in Washington. After that, “our ‘Baba’” struck a happy medium between a snake and a red mike. The girl is not named. The sentence is a joke about how much of his liberty he spent on women. He loved athletics. The sketch puts him on the diamond in baseball season and in the stands at football practice, however small. The activities line is “Plebe Baseball; Class Football; Class Swimming; 2 P. O.” Two stripes is a midshipman petty-officer mark, not a decoration. The last lines say friendships would spring up wherever he went, “for he is a man among men, and a real shipmate.” Yearbooks say that about men the writers liked. It is not a fitness report.
No wife’s name appears in the registers or the directories. The Town of Chapel Hill burial index, as a search of that page returned it, places three names in section 2, lot 093: Alexander Bacon Coxe, III, year 1956; Frances Wagstaff, year 1972; and Alexander Bacon Coxe, Jr., year 1996. The index does not say wife, or son, or cause of death. The shared lot and the names are what it supports. The day of the son’s death, if 1956 is his death, and Frances Wagstaff’s given relationship, were not opened in a marriage record or an obituary. Mrs. David D. Hawkins of Corte Madera, California, gave the family papers to East Carolina with the captain in 1973. The finding aid does not say she was Anne.
Formation
He entered the Naval Academy on 30 July 1928. That is the entry date beside his name in the 1943 and 1944 Registers, and it matches the finding aid’s statement that his letters home begin with his arrival at Annapolis in July 1928. The guide, describing those letters and not quoting them at length, says the Academy years are academics, sports, leisure, grade reports, a few academic warnings, and orders for leave and cruises. Summer 1929 he wrote from Utah. Summer 1931 he wrote from Wyoming. The guide says the letters mention Barcelona, Weymouth, Glasgow, and Cadiz. The Annual Register of the Academy for the volume read here lists “Coxe, Alexander Bacon, jr” on the class roll with the class of 1932. The order-of-merit column was not recovered.
The Navy’s later books give him 2 June 1932 as the date that sits in the entry or pay-entry columns of the 1947, 1950, and 1958 Registers, beside the class year 32. That is the commissioning day the Register uses for this class. The Register of 1 January 1933 already has him an ensign. On 1 January 1933 and again on 1 April 1934 the Directory puts Ensign Alexander B. Coxe, Jr., on Tennessee. The 1 January 1933 ship’s roster lists him among the ensigns, with no billet after his name. The finding aid says the letters after graduation describe a junior officer’s life on the West Coast, including being caught in the Long Beach earthquake in March 1933 and the drydocking of Tennessee in November 1933. Those are the archivist’s headings for the letters. The letters themselves were not read for this essay. What they fix, if the guide is right, is that the first sea duty was not an abstraction. The battleship went into dock, and the ground moved, while he was a new ensign on her.
Between the Directory of 1 April 1934, still Tennessee, and the Directory of 1 January 1935, the station changes. On that New Year he is an ensign, Destroyer Squadron 5, Asiatic Fleet, “u s s Black Hawk, assign.” Black Hawk was the tender. “Assign” is the Directory’s way of hanging a squadron officer on the tender, not a statement that he was one of her watch officers. The finding aid puts a different ship in the gap. It says letters of May to August 1934 describe coastal surveying in the Aleutians on Oglala, the land, the people, and some of their customs, and that by November 1934 he was writing his first impressions of Shanghai. Oglala is not in any directory line read here. She is the finding aid’s summary of his letters. If both are right, the summer of 1934 was a survey ship in the Aleutians, and the autumn was the passage out to the Asiatic Fleet.
By 1 October 1935 he is a lieutenant (junior grade) on Parrott. The ship’s roster that day, under Lieutenant Commander L. R. McDowell, lists him with no billet word: gunner Farrell, then Ross, Reed as communications, Fahle as engineer, Lucier, and Coxe. On 1 July 1936 the same captain is still in command, and the roster gives Coxe the job: “Lt. (jg) A. B. Coxe, jr, commun.” On 1 January 1937 and again on 1 April 1937 he is still on Parrott, and the billet has changed to engineer. McDowell is still commanding on the January roster. The finding aid says Manila was the home port, and that the letters through 1937 take him to Shanghai, Kobe, Chefoo, Amoy, and Saigon, a bus trip from Olongapo to Manila, a Chinese funeral in Amoy, the arrival of the China Clipper, and his occasional comments on Philippine independence. It also says the letters run from battle maneuvers and gunnery to communication and navigation. That last pair matches the billets the Directory actually prints. He learned the Asiatic destroyer from the radio shack and then from the engine room, on a flush-decker whose captain did not change in the three rosters that name him.
On 1 September 1937 the Directory has moved him. Lieutenant (junior grade) Alexander B. Coxe, Jr., is on Enterprise. On 1 January 1938 he is on Yorktown. On 1 January 1939 he is back on Enterprise. None of those three roster lines gives him a billet. He was a lieutenant (junior grade) in the ship’s company of a new carrier, twice, with a year on the other new carrier between. What he did in the air department, or on deck, or in engineering, is not said. The carriers’ later wars are not his.
On 1 June 1940 the Directory places him at the Naval Academy, Annapolis, still a lieutenant (junior grade) in that book. The Register of 1 July 1940 indexes him as a lieutenant. The Directory of 1 November 1940 has caught up with the ship and not yet with the rank: “Coxe, Alexander B, jr, lt (jg), u s s Breese,” and on the roster, under the commanding officer whose name the optical line has clipped, “Lt. (jg) A. B. Coxe, jr, exec.” By 1 April 1941 the Directory and the roster agree on the higher rank. Lieutenant A. B. Coxe, Jr., is executive officer of Breese. The commanding officer on that roster is H. F. Stout. The 1941 Register, in the lieutenants, prints “17 June 40” on Coxe’s own line, where his neighbors carry other days. The 1947 and 1950 Registers, in the permanent-rank field, read as 1 July 1940 for him and for Scherini and Born beside him. June 17 and July 1 are both in the books. They are not edited here into one day.
War years as lived
On the morning of 7 December 1941 he was still Stout’s executive, and he was the nest duty officer.
Breese was a Wickes-class destroyer, redesignated a light minelayer, DM-18, in 1931. Stout’s action report of 9 December, written at sea off Pearl Harbor to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, via Commander Mine Division Two, says the ship was moored in berth D-3, Middle Loch, nested with the division. His order of ships from starboard is Ramsay, Breese, Montgomery, and Gamble, the flagship. Breese had the division guard. Officers on board, in his list: Lieutenant Commander H. F. Stout, commanding; Lieutenant A. B. Coxe, Jr., executive; Lieutenant (junior grade) H. D. Warden of the Medical Corps, the division surgeon; and four ensigns, Barbee, Cobey, Carlson, and Graves. Coxe’s own report, the enclosure, dated the same day, gives the nest from the north as Gamble, Montgomery, Breese, and Ramsay. The two reports do not list the ships in the same order. Both put Breese inside the nest, not on the outside where she could have slipped her lines and gone.
Coxe writes that at 0755 two dive bombers came at Ford Island from the west at about two hundred feet, in horizontal flight, and bombed the seaplane hangar and the gasoline tanks on the west end of the island. He sounded the general alarm. The ship opened fire with .50-caliber guns at 0757, “the first ship to open fire in the Middle Loch area.” He told the duty officers of all the ships to prepare to get underway. Utah was bombed just after the hangar, listed to starboard, and turned bottom up. Fires were on Ford Island. Black smoke came across from the direction of the submarine base. The sky, he writes, was full of high-explosive bursts. Bombs were falling around Medusa, Curtiss, and the cruisers next to Utah. The stern of Curtiss was on fire. A PBY took off from Ford Island and passed directly overhead. He thought the bombing became less effective as the antiaircraft fire increased.
He counted four planes shot down in the Middle Loch area, one of them by a 3-inch projectile from Breese that blew the after part of a fuselage away, the rest of the plane crashing in flames into the west bank of the channel. A fifth, he says, was flown deliberately into the stern of Curtiss. Stout’s report puts that 3-inch hit at 0913, a projectile set at three seconds, just aft of the pilot’s cockpit of a dive bomber winging over after an attack on Curtiss, the forward section with the motor landing on the north shore of Waipio Peninsula. Stout adds that the hit was probably accidental and that the tracer could be followed at the short range. Coxe does not call it an accident. He also writes that he estimated about 760 planes were used in the attack. That number is his, written on 9 December. It is not the count later histories settled on. He thought the dive bombers slow, with two machine guns forward and one aft, and most of the bombs released from a horizontal position. He saw about thirty high-altitude bombers, painted white underneath so they disappeared into the alto-cumulus, and he writes that all the antiaircraft fire was below them.
Stout says that at 0825 the tower signaled to get underway immediately and that the ship, being interior in the nest, could not. Both reports describe a submarine in the channel northwest of Ford Island, Monaghan trying to ram, and depth charges. Coxe says Breese got underway at 0917. Stout says 09017, the same minute with a digit slipped, and that she cleared the entrance at 0942 and took an offshore patrol sector. Both then describe the afternoon hunt: a motor torpedo boat’s periscope report, two depth charges with no result, then a sound contact and more charges, oil and debris on one attack, a second attack with four deep-set charges and no further tangible result. Stout thought that if their first attack had not sunk the submarine, the heavier charges of the newer destroyers working the same water probably had. Ammunition in both reports: 45 rounds of 3-inch, 1,700 rounds of .50-caliber, 11 depth charges. No one was hurt by the enemy. Shell fragments fell on deck. Two loaders were injured by the recoil of the 3-inch: Wesley Ernest Ford, fireman second class, an abrasion of the right index finger, and Kenneth Faucett, fireman first class, a deep laceration of the palm. Coxe’s report spells the service numbers with different spacing and calls Faucett a reservist. The names are the same men.
The last pages of Coxe’s report are the ones that show what he thought the ship could and could not do. He lists the men who were not on board, including a man on emergency leave and men who had reported aboard Gamble. Then he writes that the antiaircraft battery was inadequate: two .50-caliber machine guns and one 3-inch 23-caliber gun. They augmented it with landing-force weapons, Lewis guns and Browning automatic rifles, “and although its effectiveness is doubtful it served a means of satisfying the offensive spirit of the crew.” That sentence is his. A nest duty officer on a minelayer, boxed in by other ships, with a gun that hurt its own loaders, watching Utah turn over, and still concerned that the crew have something to shoot. Stout’s report praises the speed with which the guns were manned. Neither report claims a decoration for that morning.
Where he went for the next nine months is not in a directory. The public Directory had stopped. The Registers of the war years drop the ship. The 1942 Register’s index calls him a lieutenant commander. The 1943 Register still calls him a lieutenant commander, signal 4097, birth 18 February 1910. The 1944 index calls him a commander, file 71493. The 1950 Register prints “CDR” and the figures 11, 18, 42 beside the birth date 18 February 1910 and the entry 2 June 1932. Read as his classmates’ lines are read, that is a commander’s date of 18 November 1942. The 1947 optical line looks more like 16 November 1942, and the digit is not clean. If 18 November 1942 is a commander’s date, it sits awkwardly against a 1943 Register that still says lieutenant commander. The rank in 1942 and 1943 is lieutenant commander. The rank from the 1944 Register onward, through 1950, is commander. The November 1942 day is what the later books print. It is not a clean story of one promotion.
The ship he is next tied to, by a citation and by compiled lists that do not agree with each other, is still Breese. NavSource’s mine-warfare page gives Lieutenant Commander Alexander Bacon Coxe, Jr., class of 1932, command from 20 September 1942 to 31 March 1944. The destroyer page, crediting Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, gives 30 September 1942 to 31 March 1944. uboat.net repeats 20 September and cites NavSource. No change-of-command order was opened. The dates are a compiled list, and the lists disagree by ten days at the start. They agree that he had left her by the end of March 1944.
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the text carried for DD-122, does not name him. It says Breese operated in the Central Pacific from 7 December 1941 until 10 October 1944, and only then went west into the Marianas and the Philippines. Inside the compiled window, and only as the ship’s history, that text gives her minesweeping during the consolidation of the Solomon Islands in May 1943, the dates garbled by the optical copy as “1; 13 May,” and the New Georgia–Rendova–Vangunu operation from 29 June to 25 August 1943. Leyte, Lingayen, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa in that same article fall after 31 March 1944. They are not narrated here as his.
What is in his name is one night. The Bronze Star citation, as Hall of Valor prints it, is to Commander Alexander Bacon Coxe, Jr., service number 0-71493, for 29 June 1943, as commanding officer of a destroyer-minelayer in a task group during minelaying and bombardment of Japanese shore positions on Kolombangara, Shortland, and Bougainville. The citation says he was operating in poorly charted waters under inclement weather, executed the missions, and brought the ship through without damage. It says the mining was of waters used extensively by enemy vessels. It calls him lieutenant commander in the body and commander in the heading, which fits a man whose commander’s rank was temporary and recent, or a citation written after the rank had changed. The citation does not name Breese. Breese is the minelayer the compiled lists and the East Carolina combat-report collection attach to him, and 29 June is the day DANFS starts her New Georgia operation. That is as tight as the identification gets without the action report. The report is in the East Carolina collection. It was not read here. The famous mining of Blackett Strait earlier in May, and the Japanese destroyers lost on that field, are not in the citation and are not claimed for him in this essay.
He is next on the record at a ship’s birth, not at a relief. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships for Van Valkenburgh (DD-656) says she was laid down 15 November 1942 at Chickasaw, Alabama, by the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation, launched 19 December 1943, sponsored by Mrs. Marguerite Van Valkenburgh, widow of the captain who had commanded Arizona at Pearl Harbor, and commissioned at the Alabama State Docks in Mobile on 2 August 1944, Commander Alexander B. Coxe, Jr., in command. The ensign hoisted that afternoon, DANFS says, was the one that had flown above Arizona’s fantail on the morning of 7 December 1941. The East Carolina guide says he was her commanding officer from June 1944 through September 1945. June is before the commissioning DANFS dates. If both are right, June is fitting-out, and 2 August is the day the ship became his in the legal sense. uboat.net and NavSource end the command on 24 September 1945. The finding aid says September, without the day. No relief order was opened.
DANFS then tells the ship’s war in a detail no other source read here matches, and it quotes “the destroyer’s commanding officer” and “Van Valkenburgh’s ship’s historian” without putting Coxe’s name on those sentences. He is the only commanding officer the article names for the war. The Silver Star covers 1 April through 31 May 1945 and calls him commanding officer of a United States destroyer. The quotations that fall in those weeks are treated as his ship’s record of that captain. The ones after 31 May are the ship’s history inside a command the finding aid and the compiled list both carry at least into September.
She stood by an Army tug, LT-18, with three barges of explosives, on 7 and 8 August 1944, on the way back from gunnery tests, then left Mobile for Bermuda on 20 August. Shakedown was out of Great Sound into late September, then Charleston, then Hampton Roads. On 22 October she rendezvoused with the new light cruiser Wilkes Barre, escorted her to the Canal, and transited on 27 October. Mannert L. Abele joined at Balboa. From 10 to 16 November the three escorted troop transports to Hawaii. DANFS says the training off Lanai and Maui, and then out of Pearl Harbor through December, was heavy enough that a sailor wrote that the real thing could be no more of a strain. That sentence is the ship’s historian, as DANFS uses him. It is the last quiet complaint in the article.
She left Pearl Harbor on 27 January 1945, touched Eniwetok, rehearsed at Saipan, and was off Iwo Jima on the morning of 19 February, which DANFS calls gray and wet. For a week she screened the transports three deep and took turns at gunfire support. She escorted empty ships back to Saipan, returned to Iwo at noon on 3 March, made another run to Saipan, and was back on 18 March. The East Carolina guide says his official combat report of the Iwo bombardment is in the collection, with his comments on ordnance personnel, communications, medical problems, and rescue. The report was not opened. What DANFS gives is the pattern: screen, escort, bombard, and then do it again.
On 27 March, in Task Group 51.2, she sailed for Okinawa. The group’s job was a feint against the southwest coast while the main landing went in on the west. On the morning of 1 April, DANFS says, opposition ashore was slow and the air opposition was not. A suicide plane crashed LST-884, loaded with ammunition and with Marines embarked. The plane had no bomb. It holed the ship near the waterline and started fires in the double bottom. Van Valkenburgh stood by for eight hours. A fire-and-rescue party went across under Lieutenant Commander W. Brown, of the staff of Captain W. D. Chandler, the screen commander embarked in Van Valkenburgh. DANFS says the fires were put out in large part by that party, and that LST-884 reached Kerama Retto under tow despite a starboard list. Three officers and fifteen enlisted men from the destroyer were decorated. The highest, in that account, were Silver Stars to Brown and to Lieutenant J. D. McCormich, USNR. Coxe’s own Silver Star is a different citation, for the whole picket period, not for this one ship.
The feint group retired east on 4 April, stayed as a floating reserve, and reached Saipan on 15 April. Four days later she was back. The commanding officer, in the words DANFS quotes, said of the first night that they had eighteen raids and not one of them turned out to be friendly. She went into Kerama Retto, fifteen miles off the southwest coast, and the crew saw what the suicide planes had already done to other ships. She then went out to radar picket station 14, seventy-two miles northwest of Okinawa, as support to Wickes. The commanding officer’s line, again as DANFS quotes it, was that the station was “more nearly in the direction of Japan than anywhere else.” Within six hours the combat air patrol controlled by Wickes had shot down twenty-one planes. Van Valkenburgh accounted for one and helped with a second.
The Silver Star, as Hall of Valor prints it, covers 1 April to 31 May 1945. It says that on picket duty off Okinawa for nineteen days the ship was attacked on seventeen occasions, that her gunfire destroyed three enemy planes and assisted in destroying three others, and that fire-fighting and medical aid were given to five ships damaged by the enemy. DANFS is the narrative behind those round numbers, and it does not stop at three planes.
She picked up survivors of LCS-15, hit and sunk at once, and the doctor and the pharmacist’s mates worked into the morning on men who were badly burned. On 28 April she went alongside Daly, whose doctor had been killed when a kamikaze exploded just short of the bridge. Van Valkenburgh sent over her own doctor, Lieutenant M. E. Smale, and Pharmacist’s Mate Third Class Charles B. Reed, then took them back at Kerama Retto. Between picket tours she had upkeep there and one night of shore bombardment in Buckner Bay, against pockets on the southern tip of the island, and went back to the line the next day. DANFS says that over half of sixty-three days in Okinawan waters were spent on one of the fifteen stations around the island, that the picket ships drew the kamikazes on purpose because that was the job, and that few men undressed to sleep. Two general-quarters alarms a night was ordinary. Four or five between 2100 and dawn was not rare.
The evening of 17 May, on station 9 with Douglas H. Fox and four LCIs, the combat air patrol had just gone home when planes came in from the west, very low. DANFS quotes the commanding officer: they were marked for liquidation that night, as station 10 had been on the night Little was sunk. For thirty minutes it was “everybody for himself.” Five blips were inside four miles at one point. Two planes splashed from her own fire, one of them fifty yards off the fantail. Douglas H. Fox splashed two. The two destroyers shared a fifth. A kamikaze hit Fox’s forward gun mount. Van Valkenburgh closed her and, while alongside, fired at a seventh plane that DANFS says disappeared from the radar at twelve miles. She then searched for men in the water. Only one man of Fox’s company, she later heard, was unaccounted for.
On 29 May, at 0010, a plane crashed Shubrick astern while Van Valkenburgh was on station 16 with Robert H. Smith. The hole in the starboard side was thirty feet. One of Shubrick’s own depth charges exploded. At 0113 Van Valkenburgh came alongside and took survivors, classified material, and the men who were not needed to save the ship. DANFS quotes the commanding officer: gear was carried, dumped, and hurled across; the wardroom became a dressing station; plasma flowed; the decks and passageways bore the stretchers of the dead and dying. ATR-9 towed Shubrick to Kerama Retto. DANFS calls it the fourth time she had done that work. On the evening of 5 June, on station 11 with Cassin Young and Smalley, four or five planes came in low with bombs and torpedoes. One torpedo passed a hundred yards ahead. The 40-millimeter guns put that bomber in the sea. A second torpedo passed astern. After that, DANFS says, the attacks slackened. She left the forward area late on 24 June for San Pedro Bay, Leyte, and had about a fortnight there.
The Navy Unit Commendation DANFS records is the ship’s, for Okinawa. The three battle stars are the ship’s. They are not entered here as personal awards. The personal ones this essay can name are the Bronze Star with Combat “V” and the Silver Star, both from the Hall of Valor texts, both tied to the file number 071493.
In early July she went out with Alaska, Guam, four light cruisers, and seven destroyers, along the China coast between Formosa and Shanghai. Nothing opposed them. A sailor wrote, in the words DANFS uses, that the tension relaxed and the sweep took on the aspect of tactical maneuvers in Chesapeake Bay. The task-force commander’s consolation, as DANFS quotes it, was that the lack of action at least meant the East China Sea was under their control. She was at anchor in Buckner Bay at 2100 on 10 August when, DANFS says, all hell broke loose: searchlights, tracers, flares, and star shell from some hundred and fifty ships, about fifteen minutes, on the word that Japan was thinking of surrender. The demonstration stopped. Two days later Pennsylvania was torpedoed, and the war was not over. The signal to cease present operations waited until after 15 August.
On 7 September she sortied with four destroyers screening Suwannee, Chenango, Cape Gloucester, and Birmingham, for occupation duty off Kyushu, southwest of Nagasaki, while the carrier planes looked for mines. On 15 September she steamed into Nagasaki. DANFS says every topside vantage point was occupied by men looking at what the bomb of 9 August had done, and that during the week there she stood by while Allied prisoners were taken aboard the hospital ship Haven. The East Carolina guide singles out the same visit, in the cruise history written from the crew’s side, as one of the documents that also describes the captain. That manuscript was not read. The harbor entry on 15 September falls inside both the finding aid’s “through September 1945” and a compiled end date of 24 September. The next six weeks of courier runs to Wakayama, and the departure from Sasebo on 17 November, are the ship’s story past the point where those two sources may already have taken him off her. She reached San Diego on 6 December, Charleston before Christmas, and went out of commission on 12 April 1946. Her Korean War recommissioning, under Commander C. A. Marinke on 8 March 1951, is not his command, and it is not told here.
After
On 1 July 1950 the Register still indexes him as a commander, file 071493, the body line reading commander, the November 1942 date, birth 18 February 1910, entry 2 June 1932. By the 1955 index he is a captain, designator 1100, the line officer who is not an aviator. The Registers of 1 January 1957, 1 January 1958, and 1 January 1960 all give the captain’s date of rank as 1 July 1951, source code 01, year group 32, designator 1100, birth 18 February 1910. The 1960 index gives file 071493, captain, lineal number reading 00367. Hall of Valor says he retired as a captain. The 1 January 1966 Register index, searched for the name, still has Lewis Crocker Coxe and does not have Alexander Bacon Coxe, Jr. Retirement fell somewhere between those two books. No retirement order was opened.
A compiled list gives him Charles S. Sperry (DD-697) from October 1948 to March 1950. That list was not traced to a register, a directory, or a newspaper, and the cruise is not told. The East Carolina guide says that in 1958 he commanded Destroyer Squadron 8 out of Newport, and that a December 1958 issue of All Hands in the collection is an article about him as commodore of that squadron. The article was not opened. The same guide says he was at Guantanamo Bay during the Bay of Pigs invasion. That is the finding aid’s statement. No deck log and no newspaper were opened to test it. The 1960 Register still has him on the active list, so a presence at Guantanamo in April 1961 is not ruled out by the officer list. It is not confirmed by anything read beyond the guide.
If the Chapel Hill index is read as a family, 1956 is the year a namesake a generation younger was buried in the lot, while Coxe was a captain in the Registers of 1955 through 1960. Frances Wagstaff’s year on that index is 1972. In January 1972, the custodial note says, Captain Alexander B. Coxe, Jr., of Chapel Hill, lent the combat reports and the Van Valkenburgh cruise history for copying. In June 1973 he and Mrs. David D. Hawkins gave the letters of 1928–1933. The father’s papers came the same way. Among them, the guide notes a biographical sketch of the colonel written by the son in 1972. The son outlived the father, who died in February 1965, and he outlived the two other names in the lot. Hall of Valor gives his death as 2 September 1996. uboat.net gives the same day and says Chapel Hill. The town index gives the year 1996 and the lot. No obituary was opened. The ensign from Arizona that went up on his ship in Mobile in 1944, and the letters from Annapolis that his family kept, are what the record shows surviving him.