Ships
- USS Vincennes (CA-44) Captain from 24 February 1937
Burton H. Green, a captain in the United States Navy, took command of the heavy cruiser Vincennes on 24 February 1937, the day she was commissioned. He was her first commanding officer.
Vincennes (CA-44) was a New Orleans-class ship, the second in the Navy to carry the name of the city in Indiana. Bethlehem Shipbuilding laid her down at the Fore River yard in Quincy, Massachusetts, on 2 January 1934, and she was launched on 21 May 1936. Harriet Virginia Kimmell, daughter of the mayor of Vincennes, sponsored her. She displaced about 9,400 tons, measured 588 feet in length, and was built for a speed above 32 knots. Her main battery was nine 8-inch guns in three triple turrets, with eight 5-inch guns as a secondary battery, and she could operate four floatplanes.
After commissioning she fitted out, and on 19 April 1937 she sailed from Boston on her shakedown. The cruise took her to Stockholm, Helsinki, Le Havre, and Portsmouth. The passage tried her machinery and her guns and gave a new crew their first long voyage in a cruiser that had only just joined the fleet, with Captain Green as the officer who had accepted her into service.
In January 1938 Vincennes was assigned to Cruiser Division 7 of the Scouting Force. She passed the Panama Canal, reached San Diego, and in March joined Fleet Problem XIX in Hawaiian waters before spending the rest of that year off the California coast. She returned to the Atlantic in 1939. After war began in Europe that September she patrolled to enforce American neutrality along the East Coast and in the Caribbean, and in June 1940 she carried a shipment of gold from Morocco to the United States.
Green's command is fixed at the start of that first commission. By 23 April 1941 Frederick L. Riefkohl was captain of Vincennes, and the cruiser went to war under that later command. In 1942 she screened the carriers that launched the raid on Japan, fought at Midway, and took part in the landings at Guadalcanal. During the night battle off Savo Island on 9 August 1942 she was sunk by Japanese gunfire and torpedoes. The Navy struck her from the list that November and awarded the ship two battle stars.