Ships
- USS Alabama (BB-60) Captain from 20 August 1946 · Relieved on 9 January 1947
Captain Charles B. Phillips, United States Navy, commanded the battleship USS Alabama (BB-60) from 20 August 1946 until 9 January 1947. He was her captain when her commissioned service ended.
Alabama was a South Dakota-class battleship built at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. Her keel was laid on 1 February 1940, she was launched on 16 February 1942, and she was commissioned on 16 August 1942. In the war she first served with the British Home Fleet on the northern convoy routes, then with the fast carrier forces in the Pacific, through the Central Pacific campaign, the Philippines, Okinawa, and the bombardments of Japan in the summer of 1945. She earned nine battle stars and came home with no battle damage. The captains of those years were George Barry Wilson, who took her into commission; Neil Kittrell Dietrich, who held temporary command for a few days in March 1943 while Wilson was ill; Fred Durrel Kirtland; Vincent Raphael Murphy; and William Bernard Goggins.
The fighting was over by the time Phillips took the ship. Alabama entered Tokyo Bay on 5 September 1945, sailed for home on 20 September, and embarked about 700 men at Okinawa for the return of servicemen from the western Pacific. She reached San Francisco on 15 October 1945 and on Navy Day, 27 October, received about 9,000 visitors. She shifted to San Pedro on 29 October and stayed there until 27 February 1946, when she left for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard to be prepared for reserve. Edward Harris Pierce commanded her from 26 November 1945 through that voyage and the yard period that followed. Claude Fenn Bailey relieved Pierce on 12 August 1946, and Phillips relieved Bailey on 20 August.
For the months Phillips was in command, Alabama lay with the Pacific Reserve Fleet at Puget Sound while the remaining work of inactivation went on. On 9 January 1947, at the Naval Station in Seattle, the battleship was decommissioned and assigned to the Bremerton group of the Pacific Reserve Fleet. Phillips was relieved the same day. She remained at Bremerton until she was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 1 June 1962. In 1964 the state of Alabama took her over. She was towed from Seattle, brought to Mobile Bay that September, and preserved there as a museum ship, the public memorial to a commissioned career that had run from Wilson in 1942 to Phillips on the day she hauled down her commission pennant.