Ships
- USS Alabama (BB-60) Captain from 12 August 1946 · Relieved on 20 August 1946
Claude Fenn Bailey was born in Texas on 28 November 1910. He served as an officer in the United States Navy during the Second World War and retired from the service as a captain. The command that attaches his name to a capital ship came in August 1946, when he was a commander of thirty-five and the fighting had been finished for a year. His last home was Coronado, on the San Diego waterfront, and he lived to the age of ninety-two.
The ship was the battleship Alabama (BB-60), a South Dakota-class vessel commissioned in August 1942. Her combat service was in the Pacific. She kept station in the screen of the fast carriers and used her main battery against shore defenses, and that duty carried her through the Gilberts and the Marshalls, the Marianas, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In September 1945 she was among the Allied ships gathered in Tokyo Bay for the surrender of Japan. After the war she returned to the West Coast. By the summer of 1946 her crew was preparing her to leave active service.
Commander Bailey assumed command of Alabama on 12 August 1946. The battleship was then well along in the ordinary work of inactivation: upkeep of hull and machinery, the daily routine of a crew still living on board, and the steady reduction of a ship the fleet was sending toward reserve. He held her as commanding officer in the rank of commander. The tour did not take her back to sea for a campaign. On 20 August 1946 he was relieved, eight days after he had taken command.
On 9 January 1947, a little less than five months after that relief, Alabama was decommissioned at Bremerton. She stayed in reserve for a long stretch afterward and was later brought to Mobile and preserved there as a public memorial to the crew that had taken her through the Pacific. Bailey's naval service went on after the battleship. He completed his career with the retirement rank of captain and lived in Coronado.
Claude Fenn Bailey died in Coronado on 22 April 2003. He was buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery on Point Loma. He was survived by his daughters, Mary Clare Gill of Lincoln and Althea Morrissey of Walnut Creek, and by his son, Max, of Escalon, together with five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Gifts in his memory were directed to the United States Naval Academy Foundation.