Ships
- USS De Haven (DD-469) Captain from 21 September 1942
Charles E. Tolman was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on 25 June 1903. He entered the United States Naval Academy in the summer of 1921 and graduated on 4 June 1925. His first duty afloat was in the battleship Utah. The next year he moved to the destroyer Worden.
He spent most of the years before the war in submarines. In 1934 he served in S-46. From April 1935 to May 1937 he commanded S-30. A tour of about seventeen months in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations followed. On 7 October 1939 he took command of the fleet submarine Spearfish. In January 1941 he joined the staff of Commander, Submarines, Atlantic Fleet.
The war returned him to destroyers. On 21 September 1942 Commander Tolman commissioned De Haven (DD-469), a new Fletcher-class ship built by Bath Iron Works at Bath, Maine, and became her first commanding officer. After trials she sailed from Norfolk for the South Pacific and reached Tongatapu, in the Tonga Islands, on 28 November 1942, escorting troopships bound for Guadalcanal to relieve Marines who had been ashore since the August landings. From 7 to 14 December she screened transports off Guadalcanal, then worked from Espiritu Santo and Nouméa as the Solomon Islands campaign continued.
In January 1943 Tolman led De Haven as group leader in bombardments of Japanese-held plantations on New Georgia. The gunfire demolished important buildings and set off large fires and explosions in ammunition dumps nearby.
On the afternoon of 1 February 1943, De Haven was escorting landing craft off Guadalcanal near a beachhead at Maravovo, with the destroyer Nicholas in company. Nine aircraft were sighted, and six Japanese dive bombers turned in on her. Her guns shot three of them down. A bomb struck the navigating bridge, stopped the ship, and killed Tolman. Two more hits and a near miss tore her open. De Haven sank in about two minutes, roughly two miles east of Savo Island, in the water later called Iron Bottom Sound. She had been in commission 133 days. One hundred sixty-seven of her crew were lost. Landing craft took off the survivors, and men of the crew made the depth charges safe as the ship went down.
Tolman was thirty-nine. He received the Navy Cross posthumously for his command of De Haven in the Solomons through January and February 1943, including the air attack in which he was killed. His name is carried on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery. The Navy named the destroyer minelayer Tolman (DM-28) for him.