Ships
- USS Samuel S. Miles (DE-183) Captain, 23 July 1945 – 5 November 1945
Arthur T. Wendells was a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, from Seattle. In the summer of 1945 he became captain of Samuel S. Miles, a Cannon-class destroyer escort, DE-183. Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company of Newark, New Jersey, had laid her keel on 5 July 1943 and launched her on 3 October 1943. She was commissioned at the New York Navy Yard on 4 November 1943. The name honored Samuel Stockton Miles, a Naval Reserve medical officer killed on 7 August 1942 at Tulagi while he was going forward under fire to treat wounded men. The Silver Star was awarded to him after his death.
Her Pacific war was already behind her when Wendells took the bridge. George B. Coale commanded from commissioning until 21 May 1944 and carried her from New York through the Panama Canal to the Marshall Islands, where she arrived in February 1944. In those first months she screened fleet oilers for carrier strikes in the Carolines and off Hollandia, New Guinea. Henry G. Brousseau, Jr. then had her through the rest of the fighting. On 18 June 1944, while she covered the landings at Saipan and Tinian, the escort shot down two Japanese aircraft. She went on to Leyte and Luzon, and on 3 October 1944 she destroyed the Japanese submarine I-177 near the Palau Islands. In 1945 she guarded the assault shipping at Iwo Jima and screened the bombardment ships off Okinawa. Eight battle stars stood for that service. Brousseau remained in command until 23 July 1945.
Wendells took Samuel S. Miles on 23 July 1945 as she was heading for the West Coast. She had just finished screening escort carriers operating north of Okinawa. Japan surrendered in mid-August, while he still had the ship and the fleet was standing down from combat. His command then settled into the overhaul that followed her arrival on the West Coast, the slow work of inspecting and repairing a destroyer escort worn by more than a year of Pacific duty. He kept her through that yard period.
With the overhaul complete, he took Samuel S. Miles through the Panama Canal and north into the Atlantic. She reached Norfolk on 21 October 1945. The voyage brought her back to the coast she had left at the end of 1943, this time in peacetime, with her crew looking toward discharge and reserve. Wendells had been captain for a little more than three months, the stretch in which the escort came home from Okinawa, finished her overhaul, and crossed the isthmus.
Edward A. Marelius relieved him on 5 November 1945. Three days later the ship entered the St. Johns River in Florida, and on 28 March 1946 she was decommissioned into the Reserve Fleet at Green Cove Springs. France received her on 12 August 1950 and renamed her Arabe. The Navy struck her from the list on 26 September 1950, and she was broken up in 1968. Wendells left her at Norfolk in the first autumn of the peace, having commanded the escort from the last weeks of the Pacific war through her return to the East Coast.