Ships
- USS San Francisco (CA-38) Captain, 19 June 1939 – 27 May 1941
Charles Moulding Yates was born in Palmyra, Wisconsin, on 21 October 1884. He enlisted on 14 January 1903 as a landsman for training, became an ordinary seaman, and on 10 September 1904 was discharged from the enlisted ranks to enter the Naval Academy on an appointment from Wisconsin. He graduated in June 1908. The rules of the day required two years at sea before a graduate could be commissioned, and Yates spent that time in the armored cruiser Maryland and the protected cruiser New Orleans. He was commissioned an ensign on 6 June 1910 while New Orleans was serving on the Asiatic Station, left that ship in December 1910, and remained in the Far East until September 1913.
From October 1915 until April 1918 he was stationed at the Mare Island Navy Yard. He then joined the battleship Michigan as navigator and finished the First World War with the Atlantic Fleet. From December 1918 to May 1921 he was navigator of the battleship Texas. Shore duty at the Naval Training Station, Great Lakes, Illinois, followed, and from June 1922 until he left in March 1924 he had charge of the station’s Radio School. Promoted to commander on 16 September 1925, he served in the late 1920s as executive officer of the light cruiser Milwaukee. A three-year tour with the naval reserve training unit at the University of California, Berkeley, came next. In June 1934 he took command of the stores ship Arctic and kept her until June 1936. Promoted to captain on 1 July 1936, he spent the following three years in the Bureau of Navigation in Washington.
On 19 June 1939 Yates assumed command of the heavy cruiser San Francisco (CA-38). The New Orleans-class ship had been built at Mare Island and commissioned in February 1934 under Royal E. Ingersoll. Yates had her through the last peacetime cruises of the Pacific Fleet and the months of American neutrality, and he was detached on 27 May 1941. That sea duty brought him the American Defense Service Medal with the Fleet Clasp. The cruiser’s hardest fighting came after he had left. In the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, Rear Admiral Daniel Judson Callaghan and Captain Cassin Young were killed aboard her, and Lieutenant Commander Herbert Emery Schonland received the Medal of Honor for the work of saving the ship.
In July 1941 Yates reported to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, with additional duty at General Headquarters, U.S. Army Field Forces, at the Army War College in Washington. In February 1942 he shifted to the staff of the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, and continued the same additional duty. From October 1942 until April 1943 he was professor of naval science and tactics with the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps unit at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
He was then ordered to the Mediterranean as commandant of the Naval Operating Base at Oran, Algeria, and was advanced to commodore in 1943. Before and during the landings in Sicily and on the Italian mainland, he reorganized the base so that it could maintain the forces afloat, dealt steadily with Allied authorities, and turned the port’s combined facilities to the support of both operations. The Legion of Merit followed. In August 1944, still commandant at Oran, he also sailed as commodore of follow-up convoys for the invasion of southern France. He pushed major repairs through and kept the ships and craft at Oran ready for sea, then brought Allied convoys carrying troops, ammunition, vehicles, and supplies through swept channels to the assault anchorages and got the cargo ashore. A Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit marked that service, and he received the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal.
Yates also held the World War I Victory Medal with the Atlantic Fleet Clasp for his time in Michigan. He retired as a commodore. His home of record was Vallejo, California, and he died on 14 November 1964.