Ships
- USS Walke (DD-416) Captain from 27 April 1940
Carl H. Sanders, listed in Navy command records as Carl Herman Sanders, Jr., was born on 29 April 1898. He had been a lieutenant commander since 25 November 1936 when the Boston Navy Yard commissioned the new Sims-class destroyer Walke (DD-416) on 27 April 1940 and placed him in command. The yard had laid the hull down on 31 May 1938. She was launched on 20 October 1939, named for Rear Admiral Henry A. Walke of the Civil War river squadrons, with his grand-niece, Mrs. Clarence Dillon, as sponsor.
Sanders spent the first weeks of the commission on fitting out and engineering trials. He then took Walke to the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island. On 25 June 1940 the ship loaded torpedoes, warheads, and exercise warheads and sailed for Norfolk the next day, arriving on the 27th. Second Lieutenant Donald B. Cooley and 47 Marines came aboard for passage to the heavy cruiser Wichita, then cruising in South American waters, and Walke left the same day with Wainwright, bound for Cuba. After fueling at Guantánamo Bay on 4 July, the two destroyers stood out on the morning of 6 July for Rio de Janeiro. They were diverted to the mouth of the Surinam River so that Walke could take aboard a man from Wainwright who needed treatment for appendicitis and land him at Paramaribo. Sanders continued to Rio, collected mail, freight, and passengers from Wichita, and brought the destroyer back by way of Bahia and Guantánamo Bay. She reached the Boston Navy Yard on the morning of 4 September 1940.
Repairs after the shakedown filled the rest of September and all of October. Walke then joined the United States Fleet in Destroyer Division 4, Destroyer Squadron 2, of the Patrol Force. Germany had already overrun western Europe, and Atlantic Fleet destroyers were busy on Neutrality Patrol. In December 1940 Sanders took her from Guantánamo Bay to San Juan, patrolled with O'Brien, and met Moffett and Sims off Fort-de-France, Martinique. On 15 December Walke entered Castries, in the British West Indies, and became flagship for Commander Lyman K. Swenson, commander of Destroyer Division 17. She returned to Guantánamo Bay for upkeep alongside the tender Prairie and remained there for the rest of the year. Through 1941, still under Sanders, she carried on that patrol in the Caribbean and the North Atlantic while the United States stayed short of a declared war.
Lieutenant Commander Thomas E. Fraser relieved him on 10 November 1941. The Navy promoted Sanders to commander on 1 January 1942 and gave him the temporary rank of captain on 21 June 1942.
Walke entered the Boston Navy Yard for overhaul on 25 November 1941 and finished that work on 7 December, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fraser took her to the Pacific. She operated with the carrier Yorktown in the early raids, served with the cruiser and destroyer support group at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, and that autumn joined the campaign for Guadalcanal. On the night of 15 November 1942, screening Rear Admiral Willis A. Lee's battleships off Savo Island, she was sunk by Japanese torpedoes and gunfire. Fraser was killed with a large part of the crew. Sanders had turned Walke over a year before that battle.