Ships
- USS Louisville (CA-28) Captain from 24 June 1943 · Relieved on 5 January 1944
Alexander Somerville Wotherspoon was born in Utica, New York, on 2 December 1892. His parents were Mary Adams of Utica and William Wallace Wotherspoon, a career Army officer who served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army in 1914. Wotherspoon graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1915. In June 1917 he married Margaret P. Larner.
In the First World War he served at sea in the North Atlantic and rose from ensign to lieutenant. Ordnance became his specialty. During the 1930s he was assigned to the Washington Navy Yard, in the works that built the heavy guns for American cruisers and battleships, from 12-inch weapons up to 16-inch. The duty earned him the nickname Mr. Gun Factory. He was promoted to commander on 30 June 1936 and to captain on 1 July 1941.
On 24 June 1943 he took command of the heavy cruiser Louisville. The ship had been built at the Puget Sound Navy Yard and commissioned on 15 January 1931, with Edward J. Marquart as her first commanding officer. Before Wotherspoon came aboard she had escorted shipping from the East Indies toward Hawaii at the opening of the Pacific war, joined the early carrier raids, operated in the Aleutians, and taken part in the last months of the Guadalcanal campaign.
His own time in the ship fell in the closing months of the northern campaign. In August 1943 Louisville went north with the force that occupied Kiska. The Japanese garrison had already left the island. The cruiser afterward came south from the Aleutians for overhaul on the West Coast. Wotherspoon was relieved on 5 January 1944.
That same month Louisville returned to the southern Pacific as flagship for Rear Admiral Jesse Barrett Oldendorf, who commanded the naval gunfire support groups in the amphibious operations then beginning. Later in the war Wotherspoon himself shifted to the transport service. He led a squadron of troopships that carried Marines into the assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and in 1945 he was aboard the attack transport Rutland with the squadron signalmen. On 30 April 1945, during the Okinawa campaign, he was given the temporary rank of commodore.
In 1949 he retired as a rear admiral and settled in Jamestown, Rhode Island, where his father had built a house on East Shore Road in 1897. Wotherspoon died in Warwick, Rhode Island, on 9 March 1976, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.