Ships
- USS Young (DD-580) Captain from 15 November 1945
Carl Elliott Olson served in the United States Navy through the last months of the Pacific War and the first months of the occupation that followed. By late 1945 he held the rank of lieutenant commander.
On 15 November 1945 he took command of the destroyer Young, a Fletcher-class ship commissioned in 1943 and named for Captain Cassin Young, who was killed at Pearl Harbor and later awarded the Medal of Honor. The ship had already spent the war in the Pacific, screening fast carriers and supporting landings from the Marianas through the Philippines and Okinawa. When Olson came aboard, the fighting was over and the fleet was turning to occupation duty and the long passage home.
Young had come out of the Okinawa campaign with damage from a Japanese suicide plane and had been repaired in time to rejoin the screen before Japan surrendered. In the weeks before Olson assumed command, the destroyer had been operating with the occupation forces in Japanese waters. His tour began as those duties wound down and the ship prepared to leave the western Pacific.
Olson’s shipmates in that period included George Bernard Madden and Donald Granville Dockum, officers whose service overlapped the same destroyer force. Command of a Fletcher-class destroyer in the immediate postwar months meant getting a veteran crew and a hard-used ship through the administrative and seagoing work of demobilization rather than through another campaign.
Little of Olson’s earlier wartime assignments or his life after he left Young is recorded in the same public command lists. What those lists fix is the date he became captain and the ship he led: Young, from 15 November 1945, as the Pacific fleet shifted from war to occupation and the voyage back to the United States.