Ships
- USS Capps (DD-550) Captain, 23 June 1943 – 24 October 1944
Bruce Edward Scofield Trippensee was a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and the first commanding officer of the destroyer Capps. He took command on 23 June 1943 and remained captain until 24 October 1944.
Capps (DD-550) was a new Fletcher-class destroyer, built for the carrier screens and shore bombardments of the Pacific war. The day Trippensee assumed command was the day she went into commission, so her first months afloat were his: machinery trials, gunnery practices, and the drills that turned a fresh crew into a ship ready for fleet duty.
When that work was done he took Capps into the Pacific as the Central Pacific offensive gathered speed. Destroyers of her type were needed around the fast carriers, and under his command she joined the screens that covered the strikes against the island bases standing between Hawaii and the Philippines.
Through 1944 he kept her in that carrier war. The ship’s path under him ran through the Marshalls campaign, the Marianas—including the air battle of the Philippine Sea in June—and the later operations against the western Carolines, Formosa, and the Philippines. On a carrier screen the captain’s days were station-keeping, radar watch, and the sudden turn to anti-aircraft fire or rescue when Japanese aircraft reached the formation.
Trippensee left Capps on 24 October 1944, in the midst of the Leyte campaign, after sixteen months aboard. He had brought her from a newly commissioned hull to a veteran of the fast-carrier offensive at the edge of the Philippines.