Ships
- USS Anthony (DD-515) Captain from 26 February 1943
Blinn Van Mater (16 October 1904 – 1 June 1991) was a United States naval officer, born in Brooklyn and brought up in Peru, Indiana, a graduate of the Naval Academy in the class of 1927. He put two new destroyers into commission and commanded both: USS Anthony, which he took from the builder's yard at Bath, Maine, through the Solomons, Rabaul, Emirau and the Marianas, and USS Zellars, which he took out of a Seattle shipyard in the last months of 1944. After the war he served as a naval attaché in Turkey, commanded the heavy cruiser Columbus, retired in 1957, and then spent another fourteen years in civilian administration, the last decade at a school of psychiatry in Washington.
He was born in Brooklyn on 16 October 1904, the son of Dr. George G. Van Mater and Lillie Blinn Van Mater. Blinn was his mother's maiden name. His father was an ear, nose and throat doctor, born in New York on 9 June 1863 into a family that had been in the city for generations (his own father was a tailor); he had married Lillie Blinn on 21 June 1900. The couple had four children, two daughters and two sons. In 1912, when the boy was seven or eight years old, the family left Brooklyn for Peru, Indiana, a town in Miami County, where Dr. Van Mater practiced and in January 1917 was elected to the board of the county's Red Cross chapter. He served in the First World War as a major in the Army Medical Corps, in his middle fifties, Blinn was twelve when the United States entered the war and fourteen at the armistice. Dr. Van Mater retired from his practice in 1940 and died on 29 August 1945, when his son was forty.
A second Van Mater from Peru, Schermerhorn, entered the Academy four years behind Blinn and graduated in 1931. His entry in the 1931 Lucky Bag says he was born in Brooklyn, "migrated first to the great expanses of the Mid West," saw Lake Michigan from Chicago and "longed to see what life on the salt water was like." Dr. Van Mater and his wife had two sons, and the two midshipmen share a surname, a Brooklyn birth and a Peru address, but none of the sources examined says in so many words that they were brothers.
Nothing in the surviving record says why a doctor's son in an inland Indiana town wanted the Navy. The 1927 yearbook calls him "this Hoosier boy" who "came to the Academy in July, 1923." He was eighteen years old, three months short of nineteen.
The Lucky Bag of 1927 gives him three nicknames, "Van," "Bus" and "Cupid," and a sketch that is mostly a joke at his expense. It opens with a gibe that he had become "a faculty member of Bobby's War College through long service there," a joke the sketch does not explain. It then dwells on his "austere dignity" and what it presents as his popularity with young women, "a new one every week," adding that "he always escapes any amorous entanglements." His motto, it says, was "Give 'em all a chance." As a student he did not star: "a persistent wooing of Morpheus spoiled his chances of starring, but Van always had plenty of velvet laid away and was never in danger of being sunk by the Ac department," which the yearbook offers as proof that he slept more than he studied and still never came near failing. He belonged to the "Radiator Club," whose members sat on radiators and discussed "anything from the high cost of living to the high cost of loving." The last paragraph drops the joking: "A true friend, always ready and willing to lend a helping hand, this young man has but one weakness — he likes to ride in automobiles." He graduated in June 1927, at twenty-two.
The Navy Directories trace the next fourteen years in outline. In 1928 he is an ensign in the battleship Colorado; in 1929 he is in the destroyer Paul Hamilton; in 1930 he is in the engineering department of the destroyer Stoddert and then in Tattnall, where he is a lieutenant (junior grade) in 1931 and 1932. By 1932 and 1933 he is in the cruiser Indianapolis, and in 1934 and 1935 in the Argonne. From 1935 into 1937 he is ashore in Washington, listed at the "hydro office" of the Bureau of Navigation. The 1937 directory assigns him to the 16th Naval District at Cavite in the Philippines, and the directories of 1938 and 1939 place him in the destroyer Barker, a ship of the Asiatic Fleet; the Navy's history of that ship says she returned to China "during the opening fighting of the Second Sino-Japanese War" in 1937–1938. The Navy Register of 1938 lists him as a lieutenant.
In 1940 and 1941 the directories show him in the destroyer Farragut, with a ship's roster that names "Lt. B. Van Mater, exec, nav": executive officer and navigator, second in command of a ship of 1,365 tons. Farragut was moored at buoy X-14 in East Loch, Pearl Harbor, on the morning of 7 December 1941, in a nest with Aylwin, Dale and Monaghan, and the Navy's history says that her commanding officer was ashore when the attack began and that the engineer officer, whom it names as the senior officer on board, took command and sailed her down the channel. It does not mention an executive officer, and the sources examined do not say whether Van Mater was still in the ship or where he was that morning.
The next certain record is the commissioning of USS Anthony (DD-515) at the Boston Navy Yard on 26 February 1943, "Lt. Comdr. Blinn Van Mater in command." She was a new Fletcher-class destroyer of 2,050 tons, built at Bath, Maine, and named for Private William Anthony of the Marine guard of the battleship Maine, who had gone forward in the dark in Havana harbor in 1898 to tell his captain that the ship had blown up. Van Mater was thirty-eight. The ship's own history, written by one of her lieutenants, quotes what he told the crew and the families who had come to the ceremony: "Let's make our ship smart and lets keep ourselves smart so that both at sea and ashore the Anthony will be a smart, thorough, efficient ship that will bode no good for any vessel or object not flying the colors of the United States." The same account says that he was promoted to commander before he left her. The destroyer went through shakedown at Guantanamo Bay, sailed for the Pacific in May with the first of the new Essex-class carriers in her charge, and reached Pearl Harbor on 31 May. On the way, on 20 May, she pulled a naval aviator out of the water, the first of many fliers the ship would rescue.
The ship reached the New Hebrides late in August 1943 and, after weeks of training, escorted transports to the Solomons for the Bougainville landings at Empress Augusta Bay on 1 November. Her history says she was one of two destroyers sent ahead of the second convoy of Marines in the early hours of 8 November, and that a plane which the ship took to be a friendly Liberator dropped a stick of bombs about 125 feet off her port quarter and then strafed her with machine guns "from the stern to the bridge" as the signalmen blinked recognition signals at it. "Fortunately no one was hurt," the account says, though bullets passed between two men at a torpedo mount and over the ship's doctor, who was lying down in the wardroom where he had been standing a few minutes earlier. That same day, it says, more than a hundred Japanese planes attacked the transport area and the ship's guns brought down eleven. The Navy's official history says that despite numerous air attacks she "emerged unscathed."
There followed what the crew called the milk run, months of convoys between Guadalcanal and Bougainville, broken by a night action on 20 January 1944 in Bougainville Strait. The official history says she destroyed a gunboat and several barges. The ship's account adds that the gunboat's fire sent "a stream of tracers" that "passed over the bridge," that a night patrol plane overhead reported the high-speed wakes of enemy torpedo boats, and that the ship dodged a torpedo "by radical maneuvering." In February she escorted LSTs to Green Island and in the last days of that month took part in the bombardment of Rabaul, a night action in which, the ship's history says, her division steamed into the outer harbor, opened fire "with all five guns," and put out a battery that fired on them. The crew "never could figure out why the shore batteries didn't blast us out of the water." On 20 March she covered the Marines landing on Emirau. In late April she escorted the battleships of the task force to Sydney for six days of liberty, and early in June she sailed north for the Marianas.
On 14 June 1944 Anthony fired on Saipan and the next day screened the landings; on the 16th she bombarded Guam. She then joined Task Force 58 and was with the carriers for the Battle of the Philippine Sea on 19 and 20 June. Her duty there was largely rescue: she picked up the crews of two cruiser floatplanes forced down north of Guam, together with carrier crewmen who had landed to help them, and destroyed the planes by gunfire. On the night of 20 June, when the strike planes came back low on fuel and many landed in the sea, her division was assigned to search for them. The ship's history does not say how many she recovered. On 1 July 1944 the crew mustered on the fantail "in much the same manner as they had done sixteen months previously," and Van Mater read his orders, followed by Lieutenant Commander Clyde J. Van Arsdall Jr., who relieved him. The narrator wrote that the crew "would have at least as much confidence in our new skipper as in our old one who had found us an inexperienced and untried group of individuals and had welded us into the trained fighting team that we now are." The account says that a few days later he left "in the same manner as Captain Tedder had arrived," which was by boatswain's chair from an escort carrier. He was thirty-nine. The sources examined do not say what he did in the months after.
On 25 October 1944, at Seattle, he commissioned another new destroyer, USS Zellars (DD-777), one of the larger Allen M. Sumner class, which carried six 5-inch guns and ten torpedo tubes. The ship was named for Thomas Edward Zellars, a lieutenant (junior grade) who in 1924 was in command of a turret of the battleship Mississippi when a powder fire killed forty-eight men; the Navy's history says that before he died he turned on the flood valve that put out the burning powder and "undoubtedly saved the ship." He had turned forty on 16 October, nine days earlier. After six weeks of shakedown out of San Diego, the ship went north to Bremerton, spent Christmas 1944 there, and sailed for Pearl Harbor and a second phase of training. Navy command lists give his tenure as ending on 8 February 1945, during the ship's training period at Pearl Harbor. She went on without him, reached Okinawa in March, and was hit by a kamikaze while screening the battleship Tennessee on 12 April. The hobbyist database uboat.net dates his temporary promotion to captain to 20 March 1945.
No source found describes his assignments between February 1945 and early 1949. The Turkish newspaper Ulus of 1 February 1949 reports that Admiral Richard L. Conolly, commander of American naval forces in the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, arrived in Ankara on 31 January and that a dinner in his honor was held at eight that evening at the Ankara Palas hotel, and it names the naval attaché of the American Embassy as Van Mater. His obituary adds that he was assistant chief of staff for intelligence at a NATO command in Malta, without dating the post. NavSource's list of the heavy cruiser Columbus gives him command of her from 28 January to 18 November 1954, beginning when he was forty-nine. The Navy's history of the ship says that, as flagship of Cruiser Division 6, she returned to the Mediterranean from September 1954 to January 1955. He retired in June 1957, at fifty-two, from a post in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations that his obituary calls director of new developments and operational evaluation, which it describes as the end of a thirty-year career. The obituary credits him with four Bronze Star medals with the combat "V" and describes him as a retired rear admiral. The citations themselves were not found.
His second career was in administration. He joined the National Academy of Sciences, where he worked on the American committee for the International Geophysical Year, then went to a research firm, Human Sciences, Inc., and in 1961 became executive officer and administrator of the Washington School of Psychiatry, a post he held until 1971, when he was sixty-six. Afterward he volunteered for more than a decade at the Smithsonian Institution in the division of naval history, "helping to set up exhibits and document the history of World War II." He belonged to the Naval Academy Alumni Association, the Army and Navy Club, the National Press Club, the Holland Society of New York and the Netherland-American Foundation.
His first wife, Marguerita, died in 1979. He was married again, to Ileana F. Henderson Van Mater. For his last two years he lived at the Ginger Cove retirement community in Annapolis, where he died on 1 June 1991 in the nursing facility, at eighty-six. He had Alzheimer's disease. The obituary in The Washington Post, headed "Navy Admiral, Administrator," lists his wife and a sister, Bishop Williamson of South Bethany, Delaware, among the survivors, and no children.