Ships
- USS Thatcher (DD-514) Captain, 10 April 1945 – 23 November 1945
Origins
Charles Richardson Chandler came out of Washington, D.C., and out of a Navy household. The 1939 Lucky Bag, the Naval Academy yearbook written by his own class, put it in the shorthand classmates use when they already know the story: he was the son of a Navy man, and getting into the Academy was the ambition he had carried into the place. The book does not name his father, or his mother, or the ships that father had served. It does say he was small, and that the size had not kept him off the mat.
The date of birth that later sits beside his name in the Navy Register is 19 November 1917. The Register of 1 July 1942, in the lieutenant list, gives that date on the line whose signal number, course code, and index entry belong to Charles R. Chandler, and the same day and month reappear beside "Charles Richardson Chandler" in the registers of 1 July 1944 and 1 July 1945. Hall of Valor, compiling the same officer's awards, prints 19 November 1917 and Washington, D.C., as home. He entered the Naval Academy on 13 June 1935, the date of entry the 1942 register records for him, and he graduated with the class of 1939.
At Annapolis the class called him Charlie, and also Olds and Sparky. A third nickname is printed under the sketch; the available text of the yearbook does not read it cleanly, and it is left unread here. The sketch says that in spite of his size he made a name in wrestling, lacrosse, and soccer, and that the "N" came in wrestling. The wrestling pages of the same book put him at 128 pounds in the national intercollegiate championships at Franklin and Marshall: he won his first match, then lost to Rorex of Oklahoma A. & M. after what the yearbook calls a stiff fight. The activity line under his sketch credits wrestling through the four years, lacrosse, soccer, and two stripes. Classmates also wrote that he stood near the head of the class without living in the books, and that he would help a classmate who was behind. They called him full of pep, cheerful, and considerate. The one trouble they chose to remember was the electrical laboratory. He had, they said, a facility for making short circuits, and he had learned that sometimes they burn. It is a yearbook joke. It is also the only sentence in the sketch that later reads like a warning.
The relative-standing tables in the Academy's annual register for 1938–39 list his name among the first class. The scan does not keep the numerical standing attached to the name, so the yearbook's "near the head" is as far as the class rank can be taken.
Formation
He was commissioned ensign on 1 June 1939. That is the date of rank dittoed down the class of 1939 block in the Navy Register of 1 July 1940, where signal number 6325, Charles Richardson Chandler, ensign, is carried with present duty on California. The battleship is the first ship the registers put under his name. They do not say what he did aboard her, or how long he had already been there. They say that on 1 July 1940 an ensign thirteen months out of Annapolis was serving in her.
By the Register of 1 July 1942 the picture had changed, and the change matters because later accounts fill the gap with a war cruise the register does not support. He was then a lieutenant. The temporary rank is dated 15 June 1942. His permanent rank was still lieutenant (junior grade), dated 1 June 1942. Signal number 6171. Special course 30, which that year's explanatory notes define as completion of the course in submarine instruction. He is not marked with the codes for "qualified in submarines" or "qualified for command of submarines." The sea-service columns on the facing page, aligned to that first line of the printed page, give him one month in the grade of lieutenant and three years, zero months, of total sea service. Present shore duty, or the leave that the column also covers, is dated July 1941. The expiration of his last cruise, or of his last tour of sea service, is dated March 1941. Date of birth, 19 November 1917. Date of entry, 13 June 1935.
Read straight, the register says that his last sea tour had ended in March 1941, that he had been ashore since July 1941, and that what he had finished ashore included submarine school, not a qualification for submarine command. A memorial profile circulated for him says something else about those months: that he left California for submarine school and that on 7 December 1941 he was assistant signal officer in Pompano, entering Pearl Harbor after the attack, with his father commanding Northampton offshore and his mother waiting on the island. The July 1942 register is hard to reconcile with his being at sea in a submarine on the morning of the attack. The profile is discussed with the other unverified claims below. What the register itself will bear is narrower. He had been to sea, the sea time had stopped in the spring of 1941, and the Navy had sent the Washington midshipman the yearbook remembered as small through the submarine course without, on the evidence of the code, keeping him as a qualified submariner.
He was a lieutenant commander by the Register of 1 July 1944, signal number 5851, still carrying course code 30, still with the birth date 19 November 1917. The same rank holds in the Register of 1 July 1945, signal number 5634. Those wartime registers, in the copy available here, do not preserve a readable present-duty column for him. They establish rank and identity. They do not by themselves name Drayton or Thatcher.
War years as lived
The first action that a citation attaches to his name is not a command. It is the executive officer's job on a destroyer already deep in the Southwest Pacific.
On 5 December 1944, Drayton (DD-366) was screening a convoy of landing craft, LCMs and LCIs, toward San Pedro Bay in the Philippines. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, which does not name Chandler, gives the day's sequence. A twin-engine bomber scored a near miss and killed two of the crew, wounding seven. About an hour later the ship beat off strafing planes before they could get at the craft she was guarding. Later that morning she engaged ten or twelve enemy fighters. One crashed a 5-inch mount. Six men were killed and twelve wounded. Drayton put out her fires, took the convoy into harbor, and then sailed for Manus unassisted.
The Silver Star citation for Lieutenant Commander Charles Richardson Chandler, file number 0-82319, puts him inside that morning as executive officer. Commander, Seventh Fleet, serial 03036, dated 25 May 1945, says that when the ship was under air attack he led and directed the extinguishing of a fire and the jettisoning of ammunition, after ready-service powder had already ignited, and with the further danger of projectiles scattered in the area. He was severely burned doing it. The citation's claim is that the work helped save the ship. The ship's history and the citation do not have to be forced into a single paragraph to be the same day: both are 5 December 1944, both are Drayton, and both are a fire among ammunition. What the citation adds, and the ship history does not, is the officer's name, the burns, and the decision to keep men on the ammunition while it was going over the side. What the ship history adds, and the citation does not, is the count of the dead and the fact that the convoy still made harbor.
He was in command of another destroyer before the next citation was written. Lieutenant Commander Charles Richardson Chandler is named as commanding officer of Thatcher (DD-514) on 20 May 1945 in the second Silver Star, a gold star in lieu of a second award, Commander, Amphibious Forces, Pacific, serial 02908, dated 27 October 1945. Lists kept by NavSource, credited there to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and by uboat.net, put the command from 10 April 1945 to 18 November or 23 November 1945. Those lists are not deck logs. The citation is the document that proves the command on the day that mattered.
Thatcher was a Fletcher-class destroyer, commissioned in February 1943. By May 1945 the Naval Historical Center's summary of her war has her sent out to reinforce the destroyers off Okinawa. DANFS, again without naming the commanding officer, says that on 13 May she got underway for Kerama Retto and was put on radar picket, the duty of seeing the aircraft before they reached the transports. On 20 May she detected large numbers of Japanese planes coming in. The ships opened fire. Thatcher maneuvered to bring her batteries to bear. A low-flying "Oscar," which is the word DANFS uses, passed down her port side. She came up to 25 knots and fired 20-millimeter and 40-millimeter guns. The plane climbed, did a wingover, and dived into her aft of the bridge.
The damage, in the ship's history, was immediate and specific. Power and steering control on the bridge were gone. Both radars were out. The gyro was out. External communications were gone. There was a hole six by nine feet between the keel and the bilge. Boyd (DD-544) and Pavlic (APD-70) came alongside, took off wounded, and helped fight the fires. Fourteen of Thatcher's people were killed or missing. Fifty-three were wounded. The ship limped into Kerama Retto.
The citation says what the commanding officer did when the bridge died. All power and control there were lost after the suicide plane hit. Chandler went through the flames and the debris to the after steering station. From there he fought the ship, directed the damage-control and firefighting parties, and maneuvered Thatcher under her own power into a rear area, which the citation credits with keeping further damage off a ship that could no longer be steered from where a captain usually stands. After steering is a place of last resort: a wheel, or a trick wheel, aft, with the ship still moving and the bridge already a wreck. The citation does not say how long he was there, or who died while he was going aft. It says he got the ship out under her own power. DANFS says she entered Kerama Retto with those fourteen dead or missing and those fifty-three wounded. Both can be true. Saving the hull is not the same thing as saving the crew.
She waited for a drydock until 1 July. On the 13th, DANFS says, she was ready for sea and had to ride out a typhoon in Buckner Bay. On the 19th another kamikaze got into the bay, dived on her, bounced off the port side above the waterline, and exploded and burned alongside. Damage was slight. Two men were wounded. The ship history does not say who had the conn. The officer lists that run his command into November would still have him aboard; a list is not a muster. The Naval Historical Center's account says she did not reach the United States until after Japan's mid-August decision to surrender, that the Navy then decided the repair was not worth it, and that she was decommissioned in November 1945, stricken soon after, and sold for scrap in January 1948. If the November end-dates on the officer lists are right, he was her commanding officer in the month she went out of commission. The lists disagree with each other by five days, 18 November against 23 November, and neither has been checked here against a log.
Cost
The cost that can be counted is in the citations and the ship histories, not in a memoir he did not leave in the sources used here.
On Drayton the cost was fire among ammunition, and it was on his body. The citation records severe burns. It does not record a Purple Heart by name. A cemetery compilation and a later memorial profile both attach a Purple Heart to him; the award paper for it has not been found, so the burns stand, and the medal does not, until a better source appears. Six men died at the 5-inch mount that morning, two more from the earlier near miss, and nineteen were wounded across the two attacks, on DANFS's numbers. He was the executive officer in the fire, not the man who chose the convoy route. The choice the citation describes is the one he made after the plane had already hit: stay with the fire and the ammunition, burned, until the ship was no longer going to burn down.
On Thatcher the arithmetic is his in a different way, because he was the commanding officer when the Oscar hit. Fourteen killed or missing, fifty-three wounded, a hole under the bottom, a bridge that could not steer. The costly choice, as the citation frames it, was to leave that bridge through the fire and run the ship from aft, and to take her out rather than wait, dead in the water, for the next plane. DANFS adds that other ships came alongside and took the wounded. Nothing in the citation says he refused help. It says he kept the ship moving under her own power. The men who died did not get the benefit of that sentence. The men who lived long enough to be moved to Boyd and Pavlic did.
There is no letter, no oral history, and no deck-log extract in the material gathered here in which he says what he thought the trade was worth. The yearbook's line about short circuits that burn is not evidence of how he took the burns on Drayton. It is only the earliest sentence, written by classmates in 1939, that happens to use the same verb the war later made literal.
After
He was still a lieutenant commander on 1 January 1952, in the Navy Register of that date, carried as Charles Richardson Chandler in the company of his Academy classmates. By 1 January 1956 the same register style lists him as a commander, designator 1100, a line officer of the regular Navy, file number 082319. That file number is the Navy service number printed on the wartime citations as 0-82319, which is how the commander of 1956 is the lieutenant commander of Thatcher and not another Charles Chandler. The register of 1 January 1957 still has him a commander. The register of 1 January 1958 has Charles R. Chandler, file number 082319, as a captain, designator 1100. A date of rank of 1 October 1949 is sometimes printed for the promotion to commander. The 1 January 1952 register still shows lieutenant commander, so that October 1949 date is not used here as the date he became a commander. The registers that were read support the ranks on the dates they carry, and not a finer promotion chronology.
Between those registers he had a destroyer command again, this time off Korea. The Bronze Star with Combat "V," serial 1218 of 5 June 1953, names Commander Charles Richardson Chandler, 0-82319, as commanding officer of McDermut (DD-677) in combat operations against North Korean and Chinese Communist forces from 5 August 1952 to 28 February 1953. The citation is specific enough to be a cruise narrative of its own, and it is quoted here as the citation, not as a deck log. McDermut operated in Task Element 95.22 and Task Element 95.21. In the Songjin–Chongjin area he located and destroyed five Russian type MK 26 mines, then went to the vicinity of Yang-do to help Thompson, which shore batteries had damaged. From 21 to 23 August 1952 he patrolled the east coast of Korea, blocking rail and road traffic and interfering with the repair of damage already done. He gave gunfire support to the minesweepers Competent and Zeal. When shore batteries fired on the sweepers, he put McDermut between them and the beach and, by the citation's account, silenced three batteries with counter-battery fire. The 1 January 1952 register's lieutenant commander and the June 1953 citation's commander can both be right if the promotion fell during or before the tour and the citation uses the rank he held when the medal was signed. The citation does not say on which day the rank changed.
In the same years his name is on a book. Copyright registrations of 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1957 credit The Watch Officer's Guide, a handbook for deck watch officers, to John V. Noel, Jr., and Charles R. Chandler, with the United States Naval Institute as claimant on the earlier registrations. The new matter claimed in 1954 is updated material and a new chapter 16; in 1957, material on watch organization and a new chapter on the deck log. The registrations do not print the middle name Richardson or the service number. He is the Charles R. Chandler of the line in the registers of those years, and a later profile says the book was his and that he taught seamanship and navigation at the Academy from 1950 to 1952. The teaching tour is not in the registers consulted here. The copyrights are.
Hall of Valor records that he retired as a captain and gives 14 June 2005 as the date of death. A TogetherWeServed profile, written in the manner of an obituary, gives the same day and adds that he died of cancer at The Fairfax, a military retirement home at Fort Belvoir, Virginia; that his wife, Ann Yates Chandler, had died in 1986; that he retired in 1969 after duty with the Board of Inspection and Survey; and that in retirement he stayed with the reunion organizations of the Drayton and Thatcher crews and patented a water-purification device. None of that postwar personal detail has been confirmed here in a newspaper, a register after 1958, or a patent record. The death date is the one fact on which the awards compilation and the profile agree. What he left that can be pointed to without that profile is the book that still carries Charles R. Chandler's name, the two Silver Stars and the Bronze Star citations, and a destroyer that was scrapped in 1948 because the kamikaze damage of 20 May 1945 was no longer worth repairing once the war had stopped.