Ships
- USS Picking (DD-685) Captain, 1945 – 20 December 1945
Charles Thomas Mauro, Jr., was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 12 November 1906. In the mid-1920s he was a standout at the College of Charleston, which later associated him with the class of 1927. He captained the basketball team and was an all-state guard in 1925 and 1926, lettered in baseball, played football, and ran cross country. In 1926 the student body named him the college's best athlete. He was commissioned in the United States Navy in 1930 with that year's Naval Academy class.
He reached the rank of lieutenant on 8 June 1938. After the United States entered the Second World War he was promoted to lieutenant commander on 15 June 1942 and to commander on 15 October 1942. He was serving in that wartime rank when he received command of a destroyer in the Pacific.
The ship was USS Picking (DD-685), a Fletcher-class destroyer built by Bethlehem Steel at Staten Island. She was launched on 1 June 1943 and commissioned on 21 September 1943 under Raymond Starr Lamb. Benedict Joseph Semmes relieved Lamb on 12 August 1944 and stayed in command into August 1945. In those two tours USS Picking bombarded targets in the Kuril Islands while based in the Aleutians, then screened and supported landings in the Philippines at Leyte, Lingayen Gulf, and the assaults around Manila Bay and Corregidor, and closed her combat service off Okinawa. The destroyer received five battle stars for the Second World War. On 25 June 1945 she was ordered home for overhaul, and the end of hostilities found her in American waters.
Mauro assumed command on 15 August 1945 and remained captain through 20 December 1945. His months aboard covered the postwar overhaul and the work of laying the ship up. On Navy Day, 27 October 1945, USS Picking issued a summary of her war service with Commander C. T. Mauro as commanding officer and Lieutenant Commander M. L. Coon as executive officer. That account ran from the Aleutian campaign through the Philippines and Okinawa, the record of the ship he had taken over at the close of the fighting.
His tour and the ship's first commission ended on the same day. USS Picking was decommissioned on 20 December 1945 and placed in reserve. She returned to service on 26 January 1951, earned a further battle star in the Korean War, and was decommissioned again on 4 December 1969.
Mauro remained in the Navy after he left the destroyer. He had entered the service on 5 June 1930 and left active duty on 30 June 1960. In 1988 the College of Charleston inducted him into its athletic hall of fame, recalling the athlete of the 1920s and a naval career of more than thirty years, and remembered him as a captain. He died in Charleston on 23 April 1991.