Ships
- USS Renshaw (DD-499) Captain from 5 December 1942
The Navy Register gives the name in full: Charles Frederick Chillingworth, Jr., an officer of the United States Navy, born in Hawaii on 6 March 1903, entered from Michigan, and by the middle of the Pacific war a commander with a Legion of Merit already on the record. He is the man who had the new destroyer Renshaw when she was commissioned. He is not his father, the Honolulu lawyer and territorial senator of the same name, and he is not Curtis Eugene Chillingworth, the Florida circuit judge who was murdered with his wife in 1955.
Origins
The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers, in the volumes dated 1 January 1933, 1 July 1940, and 1 July 1942, prints the same vital line for him: born 6 March 1903 in Hawaii, and entered the Naval Academy on 9 July 1921 from Michigan. The dagger against that entry date means, in the register’s own note, that he was commissioned ensign on 4 June 1925. The Lucky Bag of the class of 1925 puts a hometown under the name: Honolulu, Hawaii. The appointment state and the hometown are both in the record, and they are not the same place. Nothing in the registers says why a boy born in Hawaii was appointed from Michigan.
A published sketch of his father, circulated in the biographical series later transcribed by USGenWeb, is the clearest separation of the two Charles Fredericks. The elder man, the sketch says, was born on the island of Hawaii on 17 February 1877, son of Samuel F. and Elizabeth (Lindsay) Chillingworth. He read law in his father’s office on Maui, was admitted to the bar in 1897, had been deputy marshal of the Republic of Hawaii in Honolulu in 1896, became deputy high sheriff of the Territory in 1904, and sat in the territorial senate from Oahu from 1906, as president of that senate at every session from 1915 through 1922, and again after his election in 1924. In 1921 he went to Washington with Walter F. Dillingham and Albert Horner on an Emergency Labor Commission. The sketch says he married Victoria Stratemeyer of Honolulu in 1898, and that the children were Mrs. Edward Burke Peterson, wife of a naval officer, and Charles F. Chillingworth, Jr., a graduate of the Naval Academy. That is the family the son came out of: a territorial political house, a sister already tied to the Navy, and a father who was a public man in Honolulu while the boy was still a child.
A later article that says it is following a Naval History and Heritage Command biography calls the mother Anna V. (Stratemeyer) rather than Victoria. The father’s own sketch names Victoria and names Charles Jr. as their son. Both cannot be quoted as a single settled form of her name. The schools that same later article gives the boy, Blackman’s School and Punahou Academy in Honolulu, are not in the Lucky Bag entry or in the registers used here. Punahou does appear in the father’s sketch as the father’s school. It is not, on that evidence, proof of the son’s.
Formation
Classmates in the 1925 Lucky Bag printed him as Charles Frederick Chillingworth, Jr., of Honolulu, and gave him the names they actually used: Chili, Charley Boy, and Sheik. The yearbook’s little essay on him is the usual midshipman comedy, including a joke that he had not decided whether he wanted to be a millionaire or a naval officer and had since decided on the first. That is a joke, not a plan. What the same page lists as a record, in the Academy’s own shorthand, is Navy football in his second-, first-, and first-class years, Navy crew across the same three years, plebe crew, water polo, class swimming in all four years, and the plebe hustlers. It also gives him the Block N and the class of 1925 crossed oar. In the regimental roster of the third detail he is carried as first platoon officer of the Seventh Company.
The football write-up remembers him as a kicking guard. Against Princeton, a punt of his from behind Navy’s goal line was blocked; he recovered the ball, and the play was ruled a Princeton touchdown. Against Army, the same account credits him with a punt that put the ball on Army’s five-yard line. On the crew, the 1925 book says that he and a teammate named King “fell victims to the academics” and came out of the boat for a time. Water polo got him the other way. The season story says crew lost an oarsman, and water polo gained a back, when Chillingworth, “the kicking guard of football fame,” went into the tank with Pat Sullivan and Coale. At the end of that season the book pairs him with Sullivan as men whose careers in the sport were over, and it praises the example without making either of them the star. A claim that he also received the Naval Academy Athletic Association sword for 1925 comes from a 2023 retelling, not from the Lucky Bag pages read for this essay. The yearbook records the letter, the oar, and the sports. It does not, in the text examined here, record the sword.
He was commissioned ensign on 4 June 1925. The register of 1 January 1933 still has the class block’s date of rank as lieutenant (junior grade) running, by an unbroken ditto, from 4 June 1928, three years to the day after that commissioning. On that date he is number 455 in grade, signal number 3825, and his duty is Naval Operations. The facing page dates the shore duty then in effect from 2 October 1932, and the end of his previous cruise from September 1932. Sea service in the rank of lieutenant (junior grade) is given as three years and eleven months, total sea service as seven years and three months. He had not spent those seven years as a staff lawyer. The qualification numbers printed beside his name, 1, 30, and 31, are the register’s own codes: qualified for command of submarines, completed the course in submarine instruction, and completed the course in torpedo instruction. Those three numbers are still beside his name in the registers of 1 July 1940, 1 July 1942, and 1 July 1944. Whatever ships the war later gave him, the Navy had already marked him, before he was thirty, as a submarine officer who also knew torpedoes.
The register does not name the boats. A later biographical paraphrase says he went to the Submarine Base at New London in January 1929, served in S-24, finished that tour as her executive officer, had a short attachment to Chaumont in the summer of 1932, and then spent three years in Naval Communications under the Chief of Naval Operations. The January 1933 register supports only the shore end of that story, and it supports it in different words: duty at Naval Operations, begun in October 1932, after a cruise that expired in September. It does not say S-24, and it does not say Communications. The submarine qualification is real. The cruise that produced it is not recoverable from these volumes.
War years as lived
On 1 July 1940 the register lists him as a lieutenant commander, signal number 2571, still carrying qualifications 1, 30, and 31, with 1 January 1940 printed as the date of rank, and with his station given in the plainest words the book uses: Commanding Preble. The volume of 1 July 1942 prints the date of that rank as 29 December 1939. The two dates sit three days apart. The later book is the one that states the permanent rank outright, lieutenant commander from 29 December 1939, and it is the date used here when a single day is required. By 1 July 1942 the same register, which in wartime no longer printed the name of a man’s ship, still showed the shape of the tour. The sea cruise then in progress had begun in June 1940. The cruise before it had ended in May 1938. Sea service in the rank of lieutenant commander stood at two years. Total sea service stood at twelve years and one month. He was thirty-seven, a qualified submarine commander by the book, and the Navy had him at sea in a minelayer’s or a destroyer’s war, not in a submarine’s.
Preble is DM-20, a light minelayer, and a compiled order of battle of the Pacific Fleet for 1 October 1941 still places Lieutenant Commander Charles F. Chillingworth, Jr., in command of her, in Mine Division One of Mine Squadron One, alongside Pruitt, Sicard, and Tracy. That compilation is not a Navy Directory. It agrees with the register of the year before, and it is specific. It is also the last dated public listing found here that still gives him the ship.
He was not her commanding officer on the morning of 7 December 1941. The Roberts Commission’s table of “regularly assigned commanding officers of ships present” during the attack lists Preble with H. D. Johnston, and marks that officer as aboard. Secondary commander lists put the change of command on 21 November 1941. Those lists were not confirmed from a register or from the Roberts table, which does not give the day Johnston relieved him. What the commission fixes is the result. When the aircraft came over Pearl Harbor, the regularly assigned captain of Preble was another man. A later paraphrase of a Navy biography says Chillingworth “participated in engagements at Pearl Harbor.” The officer-presence list does not put him on Preble’s bridge that morning, and no report read for this essay puts him on another ship that day. The six weeks between the October fleet list and the December commission list are a blank.
The next ship that can be tied to him by an official history is not a ship he inherited in the battle line. It is a ship that did not yet exist when the war began. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships says the third Renshaw (DD-499) was laid down on 7 May 1942 at the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, Kearny, New Jersey, launched on 13 October 1942, and commissioned on 5 December 1942 with Lieutenant Commander C. F. Chillingworth in command. He took her from the builder. DANFS then follows the ship, not the man: shakedown, the Pacific Fleet in the spring of 1943, escort of transports in the Solomons, and, on 2 July 1943, a bombardment of the Vila Stanmore and Shortland Island areas in Kula Gulf, during which the ship came under the fire of shore batteries. Every dated list of his relief that turned up in this search, whether it ends his tour on 10 July 1943 or carries it into August, still has him in command on 2 July. The bombardment belongs to his cruise. What DANFS describes after that, the November firing in Empress Augusta Bay, the Bougainville landings, Tinian, Ormoc Bay, the torpedo hit in 1945, belongs to the ship’s later life and is not told here as his.
How he left Renshaw, and what he felt about leaving a ship he had commissioned, is not in the register and not in DANFS. The ship’s own association dates his tour from December 1942 to August 1943 and still calls him a lieutenant commander. Other commander lists, which trace back to the same unofficial compilations, end the tour on 10 July 1943 and call him a temporary commander. The Navy Register of 1 July 1944 is the document that settles his rank for that date, and it settles it against the story that he was already a captain in July 1943. He is in the commanders’ section. The alphabetical index calls him Cdr. The signal number is 2167. The qualifications are still 1, 30, and 31. The letter after his name is (D), and in that year’s explanatory notes (D) means the Legion of Merit, awarded by the Navy Department. It does not mean the Distinguished Flying Cross, which was (D) in the 1940 book and is a different letter by 1944. The Bronze Star, coded (G-1) in the same 1944 notes, is not printed against his name.
So the war, as the paper leaves it, is this. A Honolulu boy who had qualified to command submarines spent the two years before Pearl Harbor, or most of them, in Preble, and was gone from her before the attack. A year after the attack he commissioned a new Fletcher destroyer and took her into the Solomons, where on 2 July 1943 her guns and the shore guns found each other in Kula Gulf. By the next summer the Navy had given him a Legion of Merit and was still carrying him as a commander, not as a captain. The citation that would say what he did to earn the medal was not in the register, and it was not in the decoration lists searched here.
Cost
The record is almost silent on the private cost. No letter, no deck-log extract in his own words, no casualty list with his name, no wife, and no child turned up in the registers, the Lucky Bag, DANFS, or the award notice used here. Classmates had joked that he was keeping his options open. The service numbers say otherwise. From ensign in 1925 to a sea cruise that by July 1942 had already run two years without a recorded break ashore, the choice on the page is the Navy’s.
What the war put in front of him, on the evidence, was not the submarine command his qualifications advertised. It was a minelayer in the old Battle Force, then a gap in which another officer stood on Preble at Pearl Harbor, then a brand-new destroyer and a night bombardment under shore fire in poorly known waters of the Solomons. DANFS does not say that Renshaw was hit on 2 July, or that anyone aboard was killed. It does say the ship was under the fire of enemy batteries. That is the only moment in his own wartime command, among the sources that can be checked, in which the enemy shot back at a ship he is known to have commanded.
The Legion of Merit is the Navy’s judgment that something in those years was more than ordinary. The judgment is recorded. The reasons are not. By 1 July 1944 the medal is on his name and the Bronze Star is not. Later retellings award him a Bronze Star with gold stars, and combat “V”s, for Dewey in the Coral Sea, for Renshaw on a mining night off Kolombangara, and for a destroyer division at Truk and Saipan. Those narratives are discussed with the conflicts below. They are not used here as the story of what he did, because the one official award list that can be opened, the 1944 register, has the Legion of Merit and does not have the Bronze Star, and no action report was found that puts those operations under his name.
After
The next time a Navy publication puts him on a ship’s bridge is not in 1945. The July 1945 register text searched for this essay does not yield his name at all, which is a gap in the file or in the recognition of it, not a finding that he had left the service. He reappears in print as a captain. All Hands for March 1954, in its list of Legion of Merit awards, enters a gold star in lieu of a second award to Charles F. Chillingworth, captain, U.S. Navy, commanding officer of Rochester (CA-124) from 28 January to 19 April 1952, with the combat “V” authorized. The magazine prints the medal’s stock opening line and then the name, the ship, and the dates. It does not print a narrative of the gun strikes. The dates are the period of the award. They show that he was Rochester’s captain across those weeks of the Korean War. They do not, by themselves, say that he assumed command on 28 January or gave it up on 19 April.
That gold star is the second Legion of Merit. The first is the one the 1944 register had already recorded. Between the commander of July 1944 and the captain of January 1952, the promotion to captain happened. The day of it was not in the volumes read here. Accounts that put the captaincy on 20 July 1943 run into the register of a year later, which still has him a commander.
Flag rank, a London tour with the Military Sea Transportation Service, the Joint Staff, retirement on 1 August 1956, and advancement to vice admiral on the basis of combat awards, are all asserted in the same secondary biographies that misspell nothing essential and still disagree with each other on the date he became a rear admiral. The registers of 1952 and 1956 on hand did not yield his name in a search that should have found it if the optical text had kept the spelling. His death is in the same condition. One compilation says 4 March 1976 at Hilo, Hawaii. The article drawn from the Navy biography says 4 March 1976 and does not say where. No obituary was found. A family memoir speaks of an admiral’s winter house at Hilo and of a lunch of macaroni and cheese. That is a descendant’s memory, not a service record, and it is not used here to invent a domestic life the registers never mention.
What the paper leaves is a submarine-qualified officer of the class of 1925 who commanded Preble into the last autumn of the peace, missed her on the morning of the attack by the commission’s own list, commissioned Renshaw and had her under shore fire in Kula Gulf, wore a Legion of Merit while he was still a commander, and a decade later, as a captain, took a heavy cruiser through a recorded piece of the Korean War that earned him the second one. The rest of the life, including how it ended, is not yet in a source this essay can stand on.