Ships
- USS St. Louis (CL-49) Captain from 19 May 1939
Charles H. Morrison was born Charles Henry Morrison on 3 May 1885 in St. Louis County, Missouri. He was appointed to the United States Naval Academy on 1 May 1905 and graduated with the Class of 1909. During the First World War he served with the Atlantic Fleet, service later marked by the Victory Medal with the Atlantic Fleet clasp. The Navy promoted him to captain on 1 July 1937. Captain was the highest rank he attained.
On 19 May 1939 he took command of the new light cruiser St. Louis as she was commissioned at Norfolk, Virginia. Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company had laid the keel on 10 December 1936 and sent the hull down the ways on 15 April 1938, with Nancy Lee Morrill of St. Louis as sponsor. At the commissioning, the cruiser lay where the guns of the battleship New York framed her, and Morrison was the officer who stood ready to take her once the yard turned the ship over to the Navy. St. Louis (CL-49) was a large light cruiser developed from the Brooklyn design, about 10,000 tons, 608 feet 4 inches long, and 61 feet 8 inches in beam, with a designed speed of 33 knots. Fifteen 6-inch guns in five triple turrets made up the main battery, eight 5-inch guns the secondary battery, and the crew numbered 888. A captain from St. Louis County had been given a cruiser named for the river city of his home state.
Morrison kept St. Louis at Norfolk through fitting out and shakedown. That first cruise, and the work that closed it, was finished on 6 October 1939. War had already begun in Europe, and the cruiser's opening employment was the Neutrality Patrol. For about eleven months he took her from the West Indies into the North Atlantic. The duty was a steady round of passages and drills on a ship that had only just entered service, while American warships watched the approaches to the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard and the United States remained officially neutral. Morrison spent that year working a new crew and a new hull into the habits of a fleet cruiser.
In the early autumn of 1940 the patrol gave way to a special cruise. On 3 September St. Louis sailed from Norfolk with an inspection board on board. The United States and Britain had arranged to transfer fifty older American destroyers to the Royal Navy in exchange for the right to build naval and air bases on British territory stretching from Newfoundland to the Caribbean and British Guiana. Morrison's cruiser carried the board along that run of coast so the proposed sites could be examined from the sea. The ship was back at Norfolk on 27 October 1940. For those weeks a cruiser commissioned in peacetime had been the platform for a bargain that drew the Navy further into the Atlantic crisis.
He sailed for the Pacific almost at once. On 9 November 1940 St. Louis left Norfolk, passed through the Panama Canal on 14 November, and reached Pearl Harbor on 12 December. The Pacific Fleet was already gathered in Hawaiian waters. Through the winter of 1940 and 1941 Morrison took the cruiser into fleet maneuvers and out on patrol with that force. When her overhaul came due, he brought her to the Mare Island Navy Yard in California. On 27 May 1941, with the ship still at the yard, he turned command over to Captain George A. Rood. Morrison had been her captain from the day she was commissioned, a tour of a few days more than two years. St. Louis finished the yard period and arrived again at Pearl Harbor on 20 June 1941.
The decorations tied to his career are a Commendation Ribbon, the Navy Expeditionary Medal, and the World War I Victory Medal with the Atlantic Fleet clasp. He lived many years after the Second World War. Morrison died on 17 May 1974 in Coronado, in San Diego County, California, at the age of eighty-nine. He was buried at Glen Abbey Memorial Park in Bonita, a short distance inland from Coronado.