Ships
- USS Paul Jones (DD-230) Captain, 10 January 1942 to 6 November 1943
Lieutenant Commander Charles Richard Herms commanded the Clemson-class destroyer Paul Jones from 10 January 1942 to 6 November 1943. She was an old four-stacker of the Asiatic Fleet, already at war in the Netherlands East Indies when he took her. His tour ran through the last weeks of that campaign and then through more than a year of escort duty in the eastern Pacific.
He relieved John Joseph Hourihan on 10 January 1942. Paul Jones was then with Destroyer Division 59 off Borneo, as Japanese landing forces moved down the coast and the Allied naval force in the Indies shrank. Two weeks later the division was sent against the shipping gathered for the landing at Balikpapan.
On 24 January 1942 Paul Jones was the last ship in the column of Destroyer Division 59. In the dark the destroyers ran in among the anchored transports and fired torpedoes at close range. Paul Jones came through the night afloat and still able to fight. The transports lost in that anchorage are not credited to her. Some accounts of the action still name Hourihan as her commanding officer, although his tour had ended on 10 January, and Herms was in command that night.
In late February 1942 Paul Jones fought in the Battle of the Java Sea. She launched torpedoes with the other American destroyers and then turned back toward Surabaya, short of fuel. After the Allied cruiser line was broken, she left Java with the surviving American destroyers, passed through Bali Strait, and reached Australia. The old ship was intact when most of the Asiatic Fleet’s surface force had been lost.
From Australia she steamed for home, reached the California coast in the early summer of 1942, and was at Mare Island in July for repair and refit. For the rest of Herms’s command she escorted convoys between the West Coast and Pearl Harbor. On 6 November 1943 he turned Paul Jones over to George Paul Unmacht. Howard Martin Payne commanded her later in the war. Herms afterward commanded the newer destroyer USS Collett, which entered Tokyo Bay on 12 September 1945, and he remained in that command into March 1946.