Ships
- USS Harrison (DD-573) Captain, 25 January 1943 – 27 April 1944
Carl Malcolm Dalton (1904–1989) was a regular officer of the United States Navy, a member of the Naval Academy class of 1927 who came to Annapolis from Piggott, Arkansas. He spent most of his career in destroyers. In the Second World War he commanded three of them in turn: the old four-stacker Breckinridge on the Florida and Caribbean patrols of the first winter of the war, the destroyer Trippe in the North Atlantic through the autumn of 1942, and the new Harrison (DD-573), which he put into commission in January 1943 and took from the Atlantic to the Solomons, Tarawa and Kwajalein. He was a captain by the end of that war. Ten years later, in the last week of the Korean War, he commanded a destroyer squadron and the naval defense unit off Wonsan. He should not be confused with George Francis Dalton, a younger officer of the same surname who was an ensign in the destroyer Moffett in 1940 and a lieutenant in 1942, or with several other Daltons who served in the Navy in the same decades: Burr Dalton of the Medical Corps, Donald M. Dalton, a retired lieutenant commander, and the junior officers Joseph F., John S. and Donald H. Dalton.
Almost nothing about his childhood survives in the sources found. The Navy's registers give his birth date as 31 July 1904, and they give it the same way in 1943, 1945, 1950, 1955 and 1957. A Social Security death record, as reproduced by genealogical aggregators, gives 3 July 1904 instead. The Navy's date is used here. His Social Security number was issued in Arkansas, and the 1927 Naval Academy yearbook, the Lucky Bag, heads his page with the town of Piggott, Arkansas. Piggott is one of the two county seats of Clay County, in the flat farm country of the state's northeastern corner, near the Missouri line. The yearbook gives it as his home when he was appointed. It does not say that he was born there.
No parent, brother, or sister of his is named in any source read for this article. Several Daltons lived and died in Piggott in his century, and none of them can be tied to him on the evidence found. The registers give 7 August 1923 as the day he entered the Naval Academy. He had just turned nineteen.
The Lucky Bag is the only record of what his classmates thought of him. They gave him two nicknames, "Arkie" and "Jack," and like most yearbook sketches of the period the page mixes teasing with a farewell. It opens with plebe year: Jack "learned how to hoist the colors, salute, fire the gun; but that was only a small part of the day's work Plebe year, for he also had to 'change the name of Arkansas.'" They made fun of how green he had been. "Arkie came to us the most bashful little desert flower that ever grew. But now, after four years of education, official and otherwise, he could hardly be anything but the regular fellow he is, wise to the ways of the world, and a man among men."
The sketch admits that he nearly did not make it. "Plebe year was a long, hard trial for him, for the Acs were a big obstacle. The end of the year found him panting, but still with us. Ever after that he managed to keep several good jumps ahead of the game." His classmates remembered his generosity above everything else: "Jack has the biggest heart we have ever come across. What's his is ours, and what's ours we can keep. 'Stand your watch for you? Sure, old man, with pleasure.'" In his second-class year, they noted, he "suddenly appeared in a new role, and was frequently thereafter seen promenading about the Armory on Saturday evenings," which was the yearbook's way of saying he had started going to the dances with a girl. The page does not name her. The only activity listed under his name is the Chess Club, in his last two years. The sketch closes: "Arkie has been a great classmate and shipmate, and lucky will be they who ship with him. His clean habits, generous nature, and likeable personality have endeared him to us, and made him a friend not soon forgotten. Best o' luck, Arkie, old man."
He was commissioned ensign on 2 June 1927. The Navy Directory follows him through the next fourteen years with the regularity of a ship's log. In 1928 he was an ensign in the battleship Colorado. By 1930 he was in the destroyer Smith Thompson. From 1931 into 1932 he was a lieutenant (junior grade) in the destroyer Stewart. From 1933 through 1935 he served in the tender Holland. Then he went back to Annapolis. The 1936 register lists him under instruction at the Naval Academy, and the Academy's own annual register for that year names Lieutenant Carl M. Dalton among the student officers of the Postgraduate School. He came out of it with a qualification the registers mark in code after his name for the rest of his career: 22-f, which the key explains as "completed postgraduate course in naval engineering (operating)."
The training showed in his next job. From 1937 the directories place him in the destroyer Warrington as her engineer officer. By 1940, and still in April 1941, he was her executive officer and navigator, second in command under Commander F. G. Fahrion. That is the usual path to a destroyer command: the man who keeps the plant running becomes the man who runs the ship for her captain. He spent four years in one destroyer, moving from the engine room to the bridge. By the autumn of 1941 he was ready for a ship of his own.
The first one was old. Compiled tables of commanding officers give him the destroyer Breckinridge (DD-148) from 15 October 1941 to 28 May 1942, as a lieutenant. She was a Wickes-class four-stacker built at Philadelphia in 1918, laid up twice between the wars and brought back into commission in September 1939 for the Neutrality Patrol. The ship's official history says that after May 1941 she was based at Key West, patrolling and taking part in underwater experiments, and that she then worked under the Commander, Caribbean Sea Frontier, on patrol and escort duty. It does not name her captain, and no action report or citation ties him to any particular day in her. So the record of his first command is only its outline: an elderly destroyer, a lieutenant in his late thirties, and the waters off Florida and in the Caribbean during the months after Pearl Harbor. The 1942 register, corrected to the middle of that year, already lists him as a lieutenant commander. A later register dates that rank to 1 January 1942.
At the beginning of June 1942 he moved to a modern ship. The same compiled tables give him Trippe (DD-403), a Benham-class destroyer, from 1 June to 12 November 1942. One contemporary record confirms him on her bridge. British Admiralty records, as summarized by a convoy historian, show that around dawn on 31 August 1942 Trippe, "Lt.Cdr. C.M. Dalton, USN," joined Rhind and Wainwright to take over the escort of the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Atlantic from three British destroyers. The four ships arrived in Hampton Roads on 5 September. Trippe's official history describes the rest of that period in general terms: coastal convoys along the eastern seaboard, convoys handed over to and taken from British escorts in mid-ocean, patrols from Argentia to the North Carolina capes, two fruitless attacks on contacts believed to be U-boats, and a search for survivors of a torpedoed merchant ship near Bermuda in June.
The worst night of his command came in October. Trippe had come north to Newport on 7 October and spent two weeks working with the new battleship Massachusetts while she practiced shore bombardment for the coming landings in French North Africa. In the darkness before dawn on 19 October, as Trippe steamed for Casco Bay, the destroyer Benson struck her on the starboard quarter. Four of Trippe's men were killed and three were injured. The official history says nothing more. No court of inquiry, no finding of fault, and none of the dead men's names turned up in the sources found for this article, so it cannot be said here how the collision happened or who was held responsible. For a destroyer captain, though, the plain facts carry their own weight. The ship was his, the dead were his crew, and the invasion she had been preparing for went ahead without her. Trippe finished repairs at New York on 13 November, five days after the landings in North Africa. By the compiled dates he had been relieved the day before.
The sources do not say whether the collision had anything to do with when he left. There was a plain reason for him to go, however. The new Fletcher-class destroyer Harrison had been launched at the Consolidated Steel yard in Orange, Texas, in May 1942, and she needed a commanding officer. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, the Navy's official ship history, records that she was commissioned on 25 January 1943, "Comdr. C. M. Dalton in command." She was a far larger and newer ship than the one he had taken over in 1941. He was her first captain and he had the job of making a crew out of the men who came aboard at Orange.
The ship's history follows Harrison through 1943 without naming him again, but these were his months in her. After shakedown in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean she escorted a merchant ship to the Canal Zone and came north to New York on 6 April. She crossed to Casablanca with a convoy, touched at several Mediterranean ports, and was back in Charleston on 1 June. She practiced antisubmarine work in the Caribbean with the new carrier Yorktown and did escort duty there until 22 July. On that day she left Norfolk with the carrier Lexington for the Pacific, and she reached Pearl Harbor on 9 August. From late August she screened the fast carriers in their strikes on Marcus, Wake and Tarawa, putting back into Pearl between them.
In the autumn she went into the fighting. Harrison arrived at Espiritu Santo on 4 November, sailed the next day, and was off Empress Augusta Bay on Bougainville on the 7th, screening transports that were bringing reinforcements to the Marines who had landed a week before. On the night of 8–9 November Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes made a heavy attack. The ship's history records that her gunners "accounted for at least one plane." The history does not name any earlier action in which she fired on an enemy.
On 14 November she left for the Gilberts. The order of battle for the Southern Attack Force at Tarawa, printed in Vice Admiral George Dyer's history of amphibious operations in the Pacific, lists Harrison (DD-573), Commander Carl M. Dalton (1927), in Task Unit 53.1.4, the transport screen under Captain Edward M. Thompson. In the same screen was Heermann, under Commander Dwight M. Agnew of the class of 1925. The assault troops went ashore at Betio on 20 November. Harrison stayed off the atoll through the battle and until 29 November, while the Marines took the island at a cost that became notorious. Then she patrolled off Makin. She went to Funafuti on 7 December and was anchored at Pearl Harbor on New Year's Day 1944.
Kwajalein followed. Harrison sailed with the Southern Attack Force on 22 January 1944 and was off the atoll on the 31st, screening the battleships New Mexico and Mississippi while they shelled the shore installations. According to the ship's history, a small Japanese tanker tried to get out of the lagoon, and Harrison's guns sank it. On 4 February she went into the lagoon herself to give close fire support to the troops ashore. She spent the next four weeks patrolling and lying in the lagoon, left on 1 March for Efate in the New Hebrides, screened a task group in the strike on Kavieng on 20 March, and on 1 April arrived off New Guinea for the operation against Hollandia. The compiled tables end his command on 27 April 1944, in the days of that landing. His relief was Walter Vincent Combs, Jr., who would take Harrison through the kamikaze attacks off Okinawa the next year. The compiled relief date has not been traced to a log, so whether Dalton or his successor had the ship on any given day of the Hollandia operation cannot be settled from the sources found.
He had commanded her for fifteen months. No award citation for those months, and no action report written in his hand, was found. Where he went after Harrison is a blank in the record. By 1 July 1945 the register lists him as a captain. Registers of the 1950s give 20 March 1945 as his date of rank in that grade.
Three years after the war he was teaching. The University of Oklahoma's alumni magazine, Sooner Magazine, in its February 1951 issue, describes "a genial Navy captain" who held forth a few doors down from the Army's offices in the campus armory. He was Captain Carl M. Dalton, commanding the university's Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps unit and directing what the writer called an "extension of the Naval Academy at Annapolis." He was then completing his third and final year in Norman, so he had arrived in 1948. He was due to be reassigned at the end of the academic year, "because of naval policy." A photograph from the 1950 ceremonial parade shows him standing in the center while an Air Force general presents a scholarship award to one of his students, who was already on active duty as an ensign by the time the article appeared.
The magazine gives the only words of his found for this article. Asked whether the national emergency, with American troops fighting in Korea, had sharpened his midshipmen's interest, he said: "Yes, I can see several changes. First by the number of 'bull sessions' that are conducted. Secondly the men are thinking progressively and are thinking about being prepared to meet responsibility." He thought part of the reason was that young officers commissioned at Oklahoma came back to visit while on active duty, and their visits were "conclusive proof that the men, now in school, will soon be needing all the training they can get." His staff was seven officers and seven enlisted men. The writer found him "pleased with the results of the training here." Among the routine numbers about quotas and summer cruises, he comes across as a man who had seen a war start once before and understood what the students in front of him were probably headed for.
Two years later he was in the war they had been preparing for. All Hands, the Navy's magazine, in June 1954 listed Captain Carl M. Dalton among recipients of the Legion of Merit. The citation, as summarized there and in the Military Times Hall of Valor, recognizes "exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services" as Commander, Destroyer Squadron Eleven, and Commander, Wonsan Defense Unit, from 19 to 27 July 1953, and authorizes the Combat "V." Wonsan was the North Korean east-coast port that United Nations naval forces had blockaded and shelled for more than two years. The armistice was signed on 27 July 1953. His citation covers the last nine days of the war and ends on the day the fighting stopped. The printed summary does not describe what he did in those days.
He remained on the active list as a captain at least until the register of 1 January 1957. When he retired was not established. According to the Social Security death record he died on 24 August 1989, at the age of eighty-five, with his last residence in San Diego, California. No obituary, burial record, wife, or child was found in the sources available for this article. The classmate who promised in 1927 to stand anyone's watch "with pleasure" left behind a set of duty stations, a commissioning line in the history of one destroyer, a name in the order of battle at Tarawa, a few sentences spoken to a student journalist in Oklahoma, and a citation for the last week of the Korean War.