Ships
- USS Hopewell (DD-681) Captain, 30 September 1943 – 25 September 1944
Commander Corbin Clark Schute was the first commanding officer of the destroyer Hopewell. He took her on 30 September 1943, the day she was commissioned at Terminal Island, California. Bethlehem Steel had launched the Fletcher-class ship at San Pedro on 2 May 1943, with Mrs. R. A. Spruance, wife of Admiral Spruance, as sponsor. Schute had been promoted to temporary commander in October 1942, and the new destroyer was his command for the year that followed.
The autumn of 1943 went to shakedown training off San Diego. In January 1944 Schute sailed Hopewell to Hawaii, and on 23 January she left for the invasion of the Marshall Islands. She reached Kwajalein on 31 January as a forward picket and fired in support of the opening assault. That night her guns were turned on Roi and Namur. On 1 February she shifted to screening and patrol among the other islands of the group. Once the landings were secure, she returned to Pearl Harbor, arriving on 24 February.
In March he took Hopewell south into the Solomons. She entered Purvis Bay, in the Florida Islands, on 14 March and joined the forces gathering for the offensive along the northern coast of New Guinea. Through the spring and summer of 1944 the destroyer covered landings on that coast, shelled Japanese positions on New Ireland, and served with an antisubmarine task group. The work was the ordinary hard duty of a fleet destroyer: gunfire for troops ashore, a screen for the transports, and a watch on waters the Japanese still held.
September brought the last operation of his tour. Hopewell assisted the amphibious assault on Morotai in mid-September 1944, screening the attack force and firing on the beach area as the landing went in. On 25 September 1944 Schute was relieved by Warner S. Rodimon. He had held command from the commissioning ceremony through Kwajalein and the long New Guinea campaign.
He left a ship that had gone from a new hull at Terminal Island to a veteran of the Central Pacific and New Guinea offensives. Rodimon carried Hopewell on into the Philippines. Richard Michael Hayes commanded her later in the war, after the fighting had moved still closer to Japan. Schute’s year had been the ship’s first, and it was the year that made her ready for that later work.