Ships
- USS Abbot (DD-629) Commanding officer from 23 April 1943 · Relieved on 13 August 1943
Chester Edward Carroll was born in Seattle in 1900. In the last months of the First World War he served in the Army and the Washington National Guard. He then went to the Naval Academy with the class of 1924. The Lucky Bag calls him Blackie. The face is that midshipman.
He commanded the destroyer Helm (DD-388) at Pearl Harbor. On 7 December 1941 his son, Chester Todd Carroll, age thirteen, was aboard on a visit. Helm was already underway. She sortied after near-misses. Two days later the boy left by boatswain's chair. Carroll and Helm were at the Coral Sea, in the Solomons, off Savo Island, and at Guadalcanal. Helm took four survivors from the oiler Neosho.
He commissioned Abbot at Boston on 23 April 1943. The shakedown ran to Casco Bay and the Caribbean, and included a search for survivors of a German submarine. The search found none. On 13 August 1943, in Boston, he turned Abbot over to Marshall Edgar Dornin and went to command Destroyer Division 96.
Near the end of the war he commanded Task Unit 94.3.9, the Bonin Islands Anchorage Occupation Unit, from the destroyer Wilson (DD-408). He later had Destroyer Squadron 6, then the attack transport Saint Croix. He served as a military advisor in Taiwan and retired as a rear admiral in 1954, after thirty years. He died near San Diego on 6 June 1987, at eighty-six, and is buried with his wife, Ruth Harriette Carroll, at Fort Rosecrans. The awards named for him include the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and the World War I Victory Medal.