Ships
- USS Stephen Potter (DD-538) Captain, 21 October 1943 – 21 May 1944
Charles Helmick Crichton (1905–1984) was a United States Navy line officer of the Naval Academy class of 1929, Navy file number 62684. The Registers print his full name without abbreviation. He should not be confused with Robert Bruce Crichton, an older officer whose file number was 34621 and who appears beside him in the same indexes for decades; with Ian Robert Crichton and Philip Schaefer Crichton, later names in postwar Registers; with Charles G. Helmick, the Army artilleryman whose middle name is only a coincidence of spelling; or with Charles Crichton, the British film director born in 1910. A wartime commanders compilation also lists a “Charles Helmick Crighton” for the minelayer Ramsay; the birth date and Academy class match this man, and the spelling is treated here as a copyist’s variant, not a second officer.
The Register gives his birthday as 21 September 1905 and his entry into the Naval Academy as 27 June 1925. He was commissioned ensign on 6 June 1929. Temporary captain dated from 30 March 1945; the 1960 Register carries him as a rear admiral on the retired list under the same file number. What can be said about the inside of the war years rests on two destroyer commands ascribed to him by ship histories and compilers, a Legion of Merit citation that describes a depth-charge action, and the long quiet of the Directories before December 1941. The rest is billets, a yearbook smile, and the gaps where a wife, a birthplace certificate, and an obituary would be if they had been found.
The Navy Register does not print a town of birth. It prints only the day: 21 September 1905. The Lucky Bag of 1929 sets “Parkville, Missouri” under his name and calls him a Mid-Westerner from Missouri in the class sketch. That is the Academy’s home address and the class’s geography, not a civil birth record. A widely copied wartime-commanders page later gives Chetopa, Labette County, Kansas, as the birthplace; no census page, county birth register, or contemporary newspaper confirming that town was read for this account. The Hall of Valor reprint of his Legion of Merit lists “Loveland, Colorado” as home. Three places attach to the name in different kinds of books. Only the birthday is hard in the Register.
Nothing of his parents’ names, their work, or any siblings has turned up in the officer books, the yearbook, or the newspapers searched here. The middle name Helmick sits in every Register line that spells him out in full. Guy Benton Helmick, a classmate-era officer who appears near him in some lineal lists, is a different man with a different birthday. No family paper connecting the two was read.
At Annapolis the class called him Charlie and Curlie. The sketch on page 141 of the 1929 Lucky Bag is the only sustained contemporary portrait. It gives him five feet nine, a hundred and eighty pounds, curly blond hair, a ruddy face, and a jaw the writers call battle-scarred. It says he battered his way onto first-string lacrosse and a football playing job, and that the smile was the part friends would die for. The activity lines under the sketch list class football, class lacrosse, class water polo, class boxing, B-squad football, Gymkhana, varsity lacrosse, and two stripes. The adjectives are yearbook language. The lists are the book’s own. No appointment state survives cleanly beside his name in the optical copies of the Academy annual registers that were read; the admission day in those volumes and in the later Navy Registers agrees on late June 1925.
He graduated with the class of 1929 and was commissioned ensign on 6 June 1929. The Navy Directories of the early thirties move him through a short string of ships and then ashore. On 1 January 1930 the directory has him an ensign in Texas. Another 1930 directory has him an ensign in Pensacola. The two issues are not the same month; both are printed, and neither is discarded here. By 1931 he is an ensign in Niagara. In 1932 and into 1933 and early 1934 he is in Fulton, first as ensign and then as lieutenant (junior grade). By mid-1934 and through 1935 the directories put him a lieutenant (junior grade) in Peary, with the specialty mark “(eng.)” on the ship page—engineering in an Asiatic Fleet destroyer. The directories do not narrate China Station weather or any particular cruise. They only place him.
From 1936 through 1938 the directories have him at the Naval Air Station, Pensacola—still a lieutenant (junior grade) in 1936 and 1937, a lieutenant by the 1938 book. The 1936 Register marks him “(V),” which that volume’s own notes define as “On promotion list,” not as naval aviator. No flight designation, no squadron number, and no wings citation were found beside his name. Pensacola in those years was a shore billet at the air station. What desk or shop he kept is not in the directory line.
The Register of 1938 gives his date of rank as lieutenant as 21 June 1937 and already shows duty in Honolulu. The directories catch up in 1939: lieutenant, Honolulu. By 1940 and April 1941—the last directories before the series ended—he is still a lieutenant in Honolulu, and the ship pages mark him “commun,” communications. Honolulu was a light cruiser. The April 1941 directory is the last printed station that can be read for him before the war swallowed the billet lists. Whether he was still in her on 7 December 1941 is not answered by any source opened here. The Directory does not reach that morning.
After April 1941 the official trail thins. The Registers keep the ranks. He is a lieutenant commander in the 1942 and 1943 books (date of rank 30 June 1942 in the later columnar Registers). He is a commander in the 1944 Register, file 62684. Temporary captain dates from 30 March 1945. Those are dates of rank. They are not stations.
Ship-photograph compilers list him as commanding officer of the light minelayer Ramsay (DM-16) from 21 January 1942 to 4 July 1943. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships narrative of Ramsay does not name him. If the compilers’ dates are right, his command begins six weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor—he was not her captain on the morning of 7 December—and runs through her Samoa and Fiji mining work in the spring of 1942, her return to Pearl Harbor in early July, and into the Aleutian escort and patrol months that followed a California overhaul. The DANFS text for those months is the ship’s. It is not a personal action report. Until a war diary or deck log with his signature is read, the Ramsay command rests on the compilers and on the matching (misspelled) entry in a wartime commanders list.
What the Navy’s own ship history does name is the Fletcher-class destroyer Stephen Potter (DD-538). She commissioned at San Francisco on 21 October 1943 with “Comdr. C. H. Crichton in command.” That is DANFS language, and it is the firmest wartime sentence attached to him. Photograph-index and wartime-commander lists put his relief on 21 May 1944. Between those two dates the destroyer’s DANFS itinerary—and only the part that falls inside the command span—is the war as the ship lived it under the man the history says took her out.
She shook down off San Diego, returned to San Francisco on 8 December, reached Pearl Harbor on the last day of 1943, and sortied with the fast carriers in mid-January 1944 for the Marshalls strikes that opened the amphibious assault at the end of the month. She was in the screen for the first carrier strike on Truk on 17–18 February. When Intrepid took an aircraft torpedo on the 17th, Stephen Potter escorted the damaged carrier back to the Marshalls. She touched Pearl Harbor again, made the West Coast in mid-March, and by late March was bound back to Majuro to rejoin the carriers. In late April she screened the Hollandia strikes, then returned with the force to bomb Truk once more.
On 30 April 1944, south of Truk, MacDonough made radar contact on a submarine that submerged. Sonar contact followed. MacDonough delivered two depth-charge attacks. Stephen Potter came in to assist, and an aircraft from Monterey joined. DANFS, as reprinted in the ship’s public histories, records deep explosions, oil, and debris. Contemporary identification of the boat has not stayed fixed across later writing; the citation that names Crichton does not name the submarine. What the citation does say is plain enough for the man.
Bureau of Naval Personnel Information Bulletin No. 333 (December 1944), as reprinted by the Hall of Valor, awards the Legion of Merit to Commander Charles H. Crichton “while commanding a destroyer during World War II.” The text says he established contact with a Japanese submarine, dropped a depth-charge pattern that probably inflicted serious damage, and, in conjunction with another vessel, so coordinated the action as to probably destroy the enemy. The 1945 Register marks him “(DMH-l).” That volume’s own key defines “(D)” as Legion of Merit, Navy Department. The remaining letters in the concatenated mark are not independently confirmed by a second award text read here; the Legion of Merit itself is.
On 1 May, still inside the May 21 relief date given by the compilers, DANFS has Stephen Potter in the bombardment of Ponape. Marcus Island was struck on 19–20 May. Wake followed on the 23d, two days after the listed relief, and is not treated here as his. By then Leonidas Walthall Pancoast’s name is the next on the compilers’ list. Crichton left a new Fletcher that had gone from commissioning yard to Truk screen in six months, and he left with a Legion of Merit citation that sounds like the afternoon south of Truk.
Temporary captain dated from 30 March 1945. The columnar Registers of 1947 still show him among the lieutenant commanders for permanent grade while carrying the March 1945 date in the adjoining column; by 1950 he is a commander with date of rank 30 March 1945; by 1955 and 1957 he is a captain with the same date of rank, still on the active list, still file 62684. No Directory after 1941 and no Register duty column read for this account names a postwar ship or shore station. The books keep the rank and the birthday and go silent on the work.
The Register of 1960 lists “CRICHTON CHARLES H,” rear admiral, retired, under file 062684. He had been a captain on the active list in 1957. The promotion to rear admiral appears with retirement, in the familiar pattern of the postwar retired lists. The exact day he left active duty was not recovered from the volumes opened here.
A wartime-commanders compilation gives his death as 24 September 1984 at Southern Pines, Moore County, North Carolina. No obituary, Social Security transcript, or cemetery survey entry confirming that date and place was found for this essay. Mount Hope Cemetery’s published surname list for Southern Pines does not include Crichton in the survey that was read. The death, like the Kansas birthplace, sits in secondary compilations until a civil record is produced.
No wife’s name, no children’s names, and no memoir in his own hand turned up in the Registers, the Directories, the yearbook, the award reprint, or the newspapers searched. What survived him in the open record is a file number, a class sketch with two stripes and a pipe, a commissioning line in a destroyer’s history, a Legion of Merit paragraph about a submarine that probably died, and a retired rear admiral’s name in the 1960 book.