Ships
- USS Salt Lake City (CA-25) (from battle record)
Bertram Joseph Rodgers was born on 18 March 1894 in Knoxville, Pennsylvania, one of eight children of Linus James Rodgers, a glass decorator, and Clara Werling. He went to St. George's Catholic School and South Pittsburgh High School, and entered the Naval Academy in 1912. He won his varsity "N" in baseball all four years and graduated in June 1916 in a class that produced Arthur Radford, Robert Carney, C. Turner Joy and many other admirals.
His first ship was the battleship South Carolina, on Atlantic patrol and convoy duty in the First World War, where the executive officer was Chester Nimitz, who became his friend. In 1919 he trained in submarines and went on to command H-8 and R-8 off southern California, served as engineer and repair officer at Coco Solo in the Canal Zone, and was executive officer of the new Bonita under Charles Lockwood. In 1928 he qualified as a naval aviator in lighter-than-air craft and served in the airships Los Angeles, Akron and Macon. He then commanded the destroyers Blakeley and, from 1938, Selfridge, taking her through Fleet Problem XXI off Hawaii in 1940.
He finished the Naval War College in 1941 and was in War Plans in Washington when the war began. Promoted to captain on 1 January 1942, he served on Admiral Ernest King's staff until he asked for sea duty, and in early 1943 he took command of the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City at Pearl Harbor.
She went north to the Aleutians in Rear Admiral Charles McMorris's small force, with the light cruiser Richmond and four destroyers. On 26 March 1943, near the Komandorski Islands, they met a much stronger Japanese force escorting reinforcements to the Aleutians. In a three-and-a-half-hour fight Rodgers handled her so well, his Navy Cross citation says, that she inflicted severe damage on one heavy cruiser and lesser damage on another heavy cruiser and a light cruiser. The Japanese turned back, and the convoy never arrived.
In September 1943 he became a commodore and the senior American planner on Lord Mountbatten's South East Asia Command staff. Made rear admiral in January 1944, he went to the Mediterranean and commanded Task Force 85, "Delta Force", which landed the 45th Infantry Division in southern France in Operation Dragoon that August, earning a Distinguished Service Medal and French and British honours. He then brought his group, renamed Amphibious Group Eleven, to the Pacific, where it supported the landings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa under air and suicide-boat attack, and he received a second Distinguished Service Medal.
After the surrender his ships landed occupation troops at Kure, Hiroshima and Matsuyama, and in 1946 he moved Chinese Nationalist troops to North China and Manchuria. In May 1948 he watched his old Salt Lake City sunk as a target. He commanded Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet, the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco, and U.S. Naval Forces Germany, and retired on 1 April 1956 as a vice admiral. He settled in Coronado, California, and died there on 30 November 1983.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Bertram J. Rodgers" (accessed 2 Nov 2026).
Live Pacific Ships page for this officer (Salt Lake City, Komandorski Islands).