Ships
- USS Van Valkenburgh (DD-656) Captain from 8 March 1951
Commander C. A. Marinke of the United States Navy took command of the destroyer Van Valkenburgh on 8 March 1951. He came aboard as a commander, the rank in which he is recorded as captain of the ship.
Van Valkenburgh (DD-656) was a Fletcher-class destroyer, built to run with fast task forces, to screen heavier ships, and to fight with five-inch guns, torpedoes, and depth charges. She carried the name of Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh, commanding officer of Arizona, who was killed at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and was awarded the Medal of Honor.
The destroyer had entered service in 1944 and spent the last year of the Pacific war with the forces pressing in on Japan. After that war she remained a fleet destroyer of the kind the Navy kept ready for another call to sea.
That call had already come when Marinke assumed command. Fighting in Korea had been underway since June 1950, and by the spring of 1951 United States naval forces were holding the waters around the peninsula, escorting carriers, patrolling the coast, and firing in support of troops ashore. A Fletcher-class ship was suited to every part of that work.
From 8 March 1951 the captain’s responsibilities on Van Valkenburgh were the ones that go with a destroyer in a wartime fleet: the crew, the engineering plant, the gunnery, the navigation, and the ship’s place in formation. Marinke’s command belongs to that season of the ship’s life, when she was again at sea under a commander during the Korean War.