Ships
- USS Bell (DD-587) Captain from 10 April 1945
Burton Herbert Shupper was born in New York on 9 May 1915. He was a lieutenant (junior grade) from 3 June 1940, a temporary lieutenant from 2 January 1942, and a temporary lieutenant commander from 1 July 1943.
In the last year of the Pacific war he held two destroyer commands. From 26 August 1944 to 10 March 1945 he commanded the destroyer Macdonough (DD-351). On 10 April 1945 he took command of the Fletcher-class destroyer Bell (DD-587).
Bell had been built at the Charleston Navy Yard, launched on 24 June 1942, and commissioned on 4 March 1943 under Lynn Chism Petross. By the spring of 1945 she had already served from the North Atlantic into the Central Pacific and the Philippines campaign, and she was on the West Coast after a repair period at the Puget Sound Navy Yard. Shupper, still a temporary lieutenant commander, joined her there.
The ship left the West Coast on 22 April 1945, trained out of Pearl Harbor from 28 April to 6 May, and reached Leyte late in May. Under Shupper she supported the Brunei Bay landings from 7 to 10 June and the Balikpapan landings on Borneo from 1 to 3 July. She then patrolled and escorted convoys in the Philippines through the end of the war. On 20 July 1945, while he still had Bell, Shupper was promoted to temporary commander.
After Japan’s surrender, Bell served on occupation duty at Okinawa and on the coasts of China and Korea. She sailed for the United States on 14 December 1945 and arrived at San Francisco on 4 January 1946. Shupper remained in command until 14 June 1946, the day Bell was decommissioned.
Shupper remained in the Navy and later served as a rear admiral. From October 1967 to March 1968 he commanded Anti-Submarine Warfare Group Five and Task Group 70.4 with the Seventh Fleet, duty for which he received the Legion of Merit. He died on 25 November 2002 at the age of 87.