Ships
- USS Halligan (DD-584) Captain from 19 August 1943
The Navy Register expands the initials. He is Clarence Edward Cortner, Naval Academy class of 1927, file number 61387, the commander the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships names when the destroyer Halligan was commissioned. He is not Frederick Dale Cortner, the Marine officer who sits next to him in the wartime indexes, and not Howard Max Cortner, a later lieutenant commander with a different file number. He is not the Clarence Cortner of Tullahoma whose son’s notice names a wife, Edna Prince. What follows is the life the registers, the Navy Directory, the Academy yearbook, the ship’s history, a Comptroller General decision, and one daughter’s obituary will support. Where they stop, the blank is marked.
Origins
He was born on 12 June 1904. That date is in the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of 1 July 1945, in the date-of-birth column beside signal number 2351, and it is still there on the lineal list of 1 January 1950 and of 1 January 1957. The registers do not give a town. The Naval Academy recorded the state. On the Register of 1 January 1927 he is a first-class midshipman, Clarence Edward Cortner, appointed from Tennessee, admitted 11 July 1923. The same day’s year in the 1945 register’s date-of-entry column is printed, in the optical-character text, as 25. The 1927 book, set in type while he was still at the Academy, says 23. Eleven July 1923 is the date used here.
The 1927 Lucky Bag heads his page “Cortner, Tennessee.” The town name did not survive the copy read for this essay. The sketch says the young man “hails from the sunny part of” and then the line breaks. Classmates called him Smut, Dude, and Mary. Smut is the name that lasted. His daughter’s obituary, nearly a century later, still put it in quotation marks.
The yearbook says that after earlier schooling at Bryson College he thought he could take on the Navy. Bryson College was a school in Fayetteville, Tennessee. It opened in 1919 and closed in 1929. The yearbook does not say he lived in Fayetteville, and the registers never do. Nothing in the Navy books names a father, a mother, a brother, or a sister. The “Edward” is not attached to a parent. No marriage appears in the registers read here. A wife’s name comes only later, and only from the daughter.
Formation
The Lucky Bag sketch is classmate prose, written to be clever, and it should be read that way. It gives him a sunny disposition, dimples, a smiling face, and “a knot of blonde hair.” It says he never tried athletics, the reason being that he was too lazy, and that his marks were fair even when he complained that a professor would not take his word. It says the profession of law lost a good man, because he had proved himself some sea-lawyer, and then records one failure of that talent: he could not convince the duty officer that smoking in the corridor was harmless. “Result, ship.” At the Academy, the ship was the punishment. The sketch says he was inclined to be non-regulation and that he had the characteristics of a gentleman, and it wishes him success in the fleet. The jokes about other men’s girls are jokes. They are not evidence of a courtship.
The activity line under the sketch is broken in the copy used here, but it reads as the Masqueraders. The 1926 Lucky Bag, the book of the class ahead of his, lists “Cortner, C. E.” in that society and puts him in the standing line of the cast photograph for the season that opened with Bull Dog Drummond. It does not name the part he played.
He graduated with the class of 1927. The lineal lists of 1 January 1950 and 1 January 1952 print 2 June 1927 in the date column his classmates carry for commissioning. On 1 January 1928 the Navy Directory has him an ensign on Galveston. On 1 January 1929 he is an ensign on the battleship Arkansas. On 1 January 1930 he is still an ensign, an instructor at the Naval Air Station, Pensacola. The directory does not say what he taught. Later registers give him the line-officer designator 1100, not an aviator’s number, and nothing read here calls him a naval aviator. Pensacola, for him, is a shore line in a book.
By 1 July 1930 the directory lists him a lieutenant (junior grade) on the shore-establishment personnel roll. No alphabetical station for that date came out of the copy searched. On 1 January 1931 he is a lieutenant (junior grade) on the destroyer Greer. He is on the destroyer Elliott on 1 January 1932, on 1 April 1933, and in the Register of 1 January 1933. On 1 January 1934 the register has moved him to the cruiser Concord, and the directory of 1 April 1934 says the same. The day he left the ensign’s grade sits between the 1 January 1930 directory and the 1 July 1930 list. The day is not printed in the books read here.
On 1 October 1934 he is back at Annapolis, a lieutenant (junior grade), an instructor at the Naval Academy. He is still there on 1 January 1935. On 1 January 1936 the directory has shifted him: lieutenant (junior grade), instructor at the Marine Corps Schools, Marine Barracks, Quantico, Virginia. By 1 July 1936 he is a lieutenant (junior grade) on the battleship Mississippi. He is a lieutenant on Mississippi on 1 January 1937, 1 April 1937, 1 September 1937, 1 January 1938, and 1 January 1939. One ship-roster line in the 1938 directory reads “C. B. Cortner.” The alphabetical line in the same book is Clarence E., on Mississippi, and the next officer on the roster is a classmate who sits beside him in the registers. The initial is treated here as a misreading. The promotion to lieutenant falls between 1 July 1936 and 1 January 1937. A secondary list puts it on 1 July 1936. That day is the edge of the window and is not confirmed from a register line read in place, so it is not stated as fact.
The billet on Mississippi is not given. A battleship tour of that length was the ordinary making of a lieutenant in those years. The record gives the ship and the rank and stops.
On 1 June 1940 the directory has taken him off Mississippi and put him on a staff. The alphabetical line calls him a lieutenant on the staff of the Commander, Atlantic Squadron, and names the battleship New York. The organization pages of the same book, under Atlantic Squadron and Battleship Division 5, with the flag in Texas, list signal 3415, “Lt. C. E. Cortner, asst oper officer.” The two lines agree on the staff and on the billet. They do not agree on which battleship flew the flag. Both names are left standing. On 1 April 1941, the last Navy Directory before the series stopped, he is a lieutenant in the Bureau of Navigation, Navy Department, Washington, in the Detail Section of the Officer Personnel Division. He had come off a fleet staff into the bureau that was about to spend the war making and moving officers. His own next move is the gap.
The 1 January 1941 register, filed in one copy under a 1940 title, gives him the course and qualification marks 21, 31, and 75-a. The same marks are on the 1 July 1942 register. The course key in the 1945 volume did not line up cleanly enough, in the copy read here, to translate those numbers without guessing. They are left as numbers.
War years as lived
From 1 April 1941 until 19 August 1943 there is no directory and, in the registers examined, no statement of where he was. On 1 July 1942 the register lists him a lieutenant commander. The 1 July 1945 register, in the captains’ block, dittos a permanent status of lieutenant commander and a permanent date of rank of 1 January 1942 from the classmate at the head of that block, Robert Edgar Braddy, Jr. If the ditto holds, 1 January 1942 is the day of the permanent rank, and the July 1942 book is showing a rank already his. He was a commander by the day Halligan commissioned. The 1 July 1944 register indexes him as “Cortner, Clarence E., Cdr.,” file number 61387. The day he left the lieutenant commanders’ grade sits between 1 July 1942 and 19 August 1943. It is not printed in the books read here.
Halligan (DD-584), a Fletcher-class destroyer, was laid down at the Boston Navy Yard on 9 November 1942, launched on 19 March 1943, and commissioned on 19 August 1943. The older Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships says “Comdr. C. E. Cortner in command.” The revised history of July 2019 says “Cmdr. Clarence E. Cortner.” Both are the same man. He was her first captain, and on the revised history’s commanding-officer table he remained her only captain until 20 March 1945. The ship’s story for those nineteen months is the story of his command. The history does not quote him. It does not say what he felt. It says what the ship did while the table has his name at the head of it.
She stayed at Boston for fitting out, trials, and calibration, and she was in dry dock from 26 to 29 August. On 11 September she sailed alone for Bermuda and arrived at Great Sound on the afternoon of the 13th. For the next month she shook down with Gatling and Colahan in the destroyer shakedown group: antisubmarine work, gunnery, torpedoes, depth charges, formation, engineering casualties, damage control, night steaming, towing. The new ship hit things. On the afternoon of 18 September, after radio-direction-finder calibration, Gatling struck Halligan’s starboard bow and dented the hull. The next morning, getting underway, Colahan hit her port side. She spent three days alongside the tender Altair for emergency repairs. On 4 October, during a towing exercise, Colahan’s starboard anchor scraped along her bulwark. She sailed for Boston on 16 October, was back in dry dock from 20 to 23 October, and on 31 October reached Norfolk. On 3 November she reported, with Hall, to Destroyer Squadron 51, Destroyer Division 101.
Her first fleet work was a president. On 13 November 1943 Halligan, Hall, and Macomb left Bermuda to screen the battleship Iowa, which was carrying Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Tehran conference. They screened her until the 17th, fueled at Horta in the Azores, and were then sent not to Casablanca but to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they arrived on the 24th. On the night of 29 November the German submarine U-68 sank the French freighter Fort de Vaux about 120 miles south of Freetown. The three destroyers were sent out at once. They searched until the early hours of 3 December and made no contact. They joined Iowa and her other escorts that afternoon, went back to Freetown, and on 6 December were at Dakar. On 11 December they picked up Iowa again, the president aboard for the voyage home, screened her until the 13th, and detached for Bermuda. On the 14th a round from Halligan’s own number 5 gun struck the barrel of a 40-millimeter gun and left it useless, and the magnetic compass was knocked four to six degrees out. On the afternoon of the 17th, still at sea, Seaman First Class Edward J. LaRue, Naval Reserve, died suddenly. The medical officer’s first judgment was acute enteritis. The body was guarded until Charleston on the 18th, and the hospital took it for autopsy. The ship’s first death was not in battle. It was a man who died on the way back from Africa, on Cortner’s ship, before she had fired at an enemy.
She grounded leaving Charleston on 21 December, in twelve feet of water in the channel. She backed off in five minutes. The sound dome was bent and the gear would not lower fully. She went on anyway, with Hall, escorting a small convoy to Cristóbal, reported to the Pacific Fleet, and transited the canal on the 27th. In dry dock at Balboa a suction hose burst in the number 1 fire room. Four men were burned. She sailed anyway. Pearl Harbor, 11 January 1944.
From there the revised history is a long Pacific cruise under the same captain: the Marshalls with the escort carriers of Task Group 52.9, Kwajalein at the end of January, a first rescue when an ensign’s Wildcat went into the water off Coral Sea, three weeks of screening south and east of the atoll, then Eniwetok. On the afternoon of 26 February the captain, the executive officer, the gunnery officer, and the medical officer went ashore. The history does not print the captain’s name in that sentence. The command table has no other captain. The war diary, as the history quotes it, noticed the fly-ridden camp and the lack of shade, and was grateful for the ship. That is the nearest thing to his voice the paper preserves, and it is the diary’s, not a letter.
Through April and May 1944 Halligan ran blockade patrols out of Majuro around Wotje, Erikub, Jaluit, and Mili. The history records one night of lights on Wotje and otherwise nothing. In June she helped screen Natoma Bay and Manila Bay while they flew Army Thunderbolts into Saipan. At noon on 23 June four Japanese fighters came out of the overcast and dive-bombed Manila Bay. The bombs missed. The ships went back to Eniwetok, then to Pearl. July and August were training, plane-guard duty, and a turn as gunnery and torpedo school ship. On 1 August a Hellcat went off Cowpens on takeoff. Halligan’s boat brought back the body of Lieutenant John Collier Maxey, Jr.
On 24 September 1944, on the way from Pearl Harbor toward Eniwetok with a transport convoy, two steward’s mates fought in the wardroom pantry. Otis R. Hopson stabbed Kenneth Brown. Brown died that afternoon and was buried at sea the next morning. A board investigated. Hopson was charged with voluntary manslaughter, faced a general court-martial on 11 October, and was put ashore at Manus three days later to wait for sentence. The captain of a destroyer in that year was also the officer who lived with a killing in his own pantry.
The ship crossed the equator on 2 October and held the shellback ceremony. She reached Seeadler Harbor, Manus, the next day, and on 14 October sailed with the Seventh Fleet’s Southern Attack Force for Leyte. At dawn on 20 October the transports went in near Dulag. At 1601 a Japanese carrier-attack plane made a run at the cruiser Honolulu. Halligan and the ships around her fired. The plane got a torpedo into Honolulu and got away. The cruiser listed and lived. Overnight on 21–22 October Halligan fired star shells every five minutes for seven hours. At 0605, less than half an hour after she stopped, a dive bomber came through the smoke fifty feet off the water, dropped two bombs, and was gone before the guns could answer. The bombs passed between the stacks, missed, and struck the water twenty-five yards to port without exploding. On the morning of the 24th she fought off two more.
That afternoon the ship was told to prepare for Japanese surface ships in Surigao Strait. Halligan, Haraden, and Twiggs were kept in San Pablo Bay to guard the transports. The battle line went south and destroyed the Japanese force. The three destroyers spent a quiet night and then, at dawn on 25 October, a day of air attack. Halligan fired on a Betty; the engine caught and the plane was seen to crash after it left. The three destroyers fired on four bombers forming on the transports and splashed one. They were then ordered out to the escort carriers of “Taffy 3,” which had just survived the Japanese force off Samar and were retiring, badly hurt. The destroyers steered the wrong way for an hour on a misunderstood order and found no survivors in the dark. On the afternoon of the 26th they joined what was left of the carrier unit and started for Woendi. On the 27th Halligan made a sound contact and dropped eleven depth charges. The result was inconclusive. She could not stay to develop it. The damaged carriers needed the screen.
At Seeadler Harbor on 2 November the commanding officer arrested the supply and disbursing officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) George Hansen, secured the safes and storerooms, and charged him with conduct unbecoming an officer. Hansen resigned “for the good of the service” and left the ship on 8 November. Again the history says “commanding officer,” not the name. The table still has Cortner.
On the morning of 10 November the ammunition ship Mount Hood blew up 3,000 yards off Halligan’s quarter. Metal tore two holes in the destroyer’s number 2 stack. No one aboard her was hit. Other ships were wrecked. Halligan sent a rescue party and took three injured men off the attack cargo ship Alhena. She spent the rest of 1944 screening escort carriers between the Palaus, Leyte, and the Admiralties, and she searched after two Wildcats collided off New Guinea. She recovered pieces of an airplane and no one alive.
On New Year’s Day 1945 she sailed as a screen for the Lingayen force. In the Sulu Sea on the evening of 4 January a kamikaze hit the escort carrier Ommaney Bay. Survivors were taken off, and Burns sank the burning ship with torpedoes. The next afternoon Halligan splashed one fighter. Manila Bay, Savo Island, Stafford, and the Australian cruiser Australia were hit. At 1814 Halligan was sent to Stafford, holed at the waterline, both after engineering spaces flooded. She took aboard eight injured men and a pharmacist’s mate. The escort was patched enough to make ten knots on one engine. During the night unidentified planes circled and attacked once. At 1030 on 6 January Halligan buried Water Tender Third Class Victor Masi of Stafford, who had died of his wounds. She was back with the carriers that evening. Over the next days she picked aviators out of the water: a crew from an Avenger that crashed taking off from Manila Bay, a Wildcat pilot whose tailhook would not extend, two men from another Avenger. A third man from that airplane, George K. Mann, was not found.
She reached Ulithi on 25 January, trained, bombarded Tinian as a rehearsal, and was off Iwo Jima before dawn on 16 February. For three days she screened the bombardment ships. On the morning of the 16th she saw a moored mine a thousand yards to port, could not destroy it with her 40-millimeter guns, and called in a patrol craft. At 0635 on 17 February, twenty-five miles north of the island, a Betty came in low on the port bow. The ship fired everything, set the airplane on fire, and turned. The bomb or torpedo fell about a hundred yards to port and did not explode. The Betty crashed well clear. Halligan then went north as a lifeguard for the strikes on Haha Jima and Chichi Jima.
At 0600 on 19 February she took a station 2,750 yards off Mount Suribachi. The heavy ships opened at 0615. She opened at 0825. The Marines landed at 0900. In the day’s firing for the Fifth Marine Division her guns destroyed a building and a camouflaged gun. That afternoon another ship relieved her, and she spent the rest of the month and the first days of March as a screen and plane guard southwest of the island. On 3 March she picked up a pilot whose Wildcat had gone over the side of Natoma Bay. On 11 March she left with the task group. Ulithi, 14 March. A week alongside the tender Cascade. Ammunition on the 20th.
On 20 March 1945, at Ulithi, Lieutenant Commander Edward T. Grace relieved Cortner as commanding officer. The revised history says so in the narrative and in the command table: Clarence E. Cortner, 19 August 1943 to 20 March 1945; Edward T. Grace, 20 March to 26 March. The same day, 20 March 1945, is the date of temporary rank printed for the captains’ block on the Register of 1 July 1945, and Cortner’s line dittos it. The register styles him a captain, temporary, from that day, permanent lieutenant commander from 1 January 1942. The ship’s history and the register do not say that the promotion was why he left, or that he left because of the promotion. They fall on one date. That is all they show.
Halligan sailed the next morning, 21 March, with the gunfire force for Okinawa. Cortner was not aboard. At about 1830 on 26 March, patrolling between Okinawa and the Kerama Islands, she hit a mine. The forward magazines went up. Everything forward of the number 1 stack, including the bridge, was gone. Smoke and debris rose at least two hundred feet. The only surviving officers were two ensigns, Bert Jameyson and Richard L. Gardner. They collected the wounded and ordered the ship abandoned. About half the crew died. The revised history says 167 men lived out of 327. The older history says half of about 300, and only two of twenty-one officers. The hulk drifted onto a reef at Tokashiki and was shot at by shore batteries. Her name was struck on 28 April 1945. The ship Cortner had taken from the Boston yard, through the collisions, the president’s voyage, the grounding, Leyte, Lingayen, and Iwo, was destroyed six days after he walked off her, under another captain, with the men he had commanded still in her. No letter, no deck-log remark, and no memoir of his says what he knew, or when he knew it.
The ship was awarded six battle stars. One of them is Okinawa. That star was earned after he had been relieved.
A compilation kept by Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and printed by NavSource, gives him the ship only until 1 March 1945 and then gives Grace a command that starts on that earlier day. The revised Dictionary history, which is built from the war diary, is the authority used here for 20 March. The one-day difference is a conflict, not a second cruise.
After
The registers drop his station. On 1 July 1945 he is in the captains’ block, temporary captain, permanent lieutenant commander, file 61387. The alphabetical index of the 1 July 1947 register still prints him as a captain. The 1 January 1950 lineal list prints him as a commander, with 20 March 1945 and 12 June 1904 and 2 June 1927 in the date columns. By 1 January 1952 the lineal list has him a captain again. He is a captain on 1 January 1955, 1 January 1956, and 1 January 1957, designator 1100. On 1 January 1958 the register lists Clarence E. Cortner, captain, retired, file 061387. The retirement falls in 1957. The day is not in the books read here.
Where he went when he left Halligan is not in those registers. A daughter’s obituary is the only account of the years between the war and India, and it is a child’s geography, not a set of orders. Dixie Ann Cortner, who died as Dixie Brooke in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on 24 November 2023, at the age of eighty-seven, was the child of Norma Wood and Clarence “Smut” Cortner, “a destroyer captain in WW2.” The nickname is his. The obituary says she was born in Long Beach, California, grew up in Washington and New Orleans, and in her teens sailed around the world with her father to the Woodstock School in India while he served in New Delhi. It does not date the birth, the marriage, or the voyage. An age of eighty-seven in November 2023 puts her birth in 1935 or 1936, years when the directory has him at the Naval Academy, at Quantico, or on Mississippi, not in Long Beach. A child can be born where the father is not stationed. The sources do not say which happened.
The one official paper on New Delhi is not a biography. It is a refusal, mostly, of a household-goods claim. On 5 May 1955 the Comptroller General decided the case of Captain Clarence E. Cortner. By orders of 26 February 1952 Cortner was transferred from duty at New Delhi, India, to the United States for temporary duty, and then to duty as Commander, Destroyer Squadron 28, aboard Trathen (DD-530), whose home yard was Norfolk. The government shipped 11,841 pounds of household effects from New Delhi to the Boston Naval Shipyard. At his request they were hauled, at a government cost of $118.41, to Worcester, Massachusetts, and put in commercial storage. The Boston yard reported that government storage had been available. On 31 July 1952, 8,260 pounds went by van from Worcester to Evanston, Illinois. On 5 August, two footlockers weighing 170 pounds went by rail from Worcester to Norfolk. He had paid $1,069.85 for packing, transportation, storage, and unpacking. A settlement of 23 February 1954 allowed him $9.12. He wrote on 6 December 1954 and asked for a review. The Comptroller General held that storage in a government warehouse, when it is available, is a privilege in kind, not a right to be paid back for a commercial warehouse, and that he could be repaid only a computed part of the packing and hauling, not the storage. One sentence of the decision misspells the ship “Trethen.” The hull number and the first spelling are Trathen.
The orders say he was assigned to command the squadron. They do not say he hoisted a pennant, how long he stayed, or whether the Evanston shipment was a family home or only a place to send the crates. No squadron history read for this essay names him. He was a captain when the orders were written. The 1 January 1952 register already had him one. He was still a captain, and still writing to the government about the crates, in December 1954.
No citation for a personal decoration turned up in the sources read here. The ship’s battle stars are the ship’s. No newspaper obituary of his own was found. A widely copied commanders’ list on the internet gives his death as 1986 and his age as eighty-one, which would fit a birth in June 1904. That list does not show a grave, a funeral notice, or a place. It is not used here as fact.
He was a Tennessee midshipman called Smut, a blonde sea-lawyer who lost an argument about a cigarette and was put on the ship, an ensign on a cruiser and a battleship and then at Pensacola, a junior lieutenant on two destroyers and a light cruiser, a teacher at the Academy and at the Marine Corps Schools, a lieutenant on Mississippi for three years, an assistant operations officer on the Atlantic Squadron staff, and a detail officer in the Bureau of Navigation while the war began without him. From August 1943 to March 1945 he was the first captain of Halligan, through a shakedown that dented her, a presidential crossing, a grounding, Leyte, Lingayen, and Iwo. He left her at Ulithi on the day his temporary captain’s rank is dated. Six days later she hit a mine and half the crew died, including the captain who had just relieved him. The Navy later sent him to New Delhi and ordered him home to a destroyer squadron. He retired a captain in 1957. The rest — parents, the date he married Norma Wood, any other children, the two missing years before Halligan, why he was relieved, and the manner of his old age — is not in the record used here.