Ships
- USS Longshaw (DD-559) Captain from 4 December 1943 · Relieved on 8 December 1943
The history of Longshaw (DD-559) says she was commissioned at Seattle on 4 December 1943, Commander Daniel T. Birtwell in command. The same history's table of commanding officers prints Commander Daniel T. Birtwell, Jr., and runs his tour from 4 December to 8 December 1943. He was not the captain who took Longshaw to war.
The name, and the year the Academy has twice
The list's "D. T." is the short form. The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps for 1 January 1934 prints Daniel Thomas Birtwell, jr., a lieutenant (junior grade) of the line. The registers of 1935, 1936, 1938, 1940, 1 July 1941, 1 July 1942, 1 July 1943, and 1 July 1944 print the same man, Daniel Thomas Birtwell, Jr. The Lucky Bag of 1926 heads his sketch Daniel Thomas Birtwell, of Washington, District of Columbia, and the index gives Birtwell, D. T., Jr. The Annual Register of the United States Naval Academy for 1922–23 uses Daniel Thomas Birtwell, jr., both as a fourth-class midshipman and, earlier in the same volume, as a midshipman who had already resigned. Nothing read here uses a different middle name. The junior is in the books from the start. The list does not print it. The man is Daniel Thomas Birtwell, Jr.
The junior is all the registers say about his father. No source in hand names the elder Daniel Thomas Birtwell's work, or a mother, or a house beyond the yearbook's line. That line is the hometown the class put under the photograph: Washington, District of Columbia. The fourth-class roster in the 1922–23 Annual Register has an "appointed from" column, and the optical character recognition does not keep that column on the names. The District of Columbia that can be used is the Lucky Bag's, not a congressional district read off a scrambled table.
He did not come to the class of 1926 on the first try. The same Annual Register, in the table of appointments, deaths, and resignations covering 1 October 1921 to 3 November 1922, lists him under resignations: Daniel Thomas Birtwell, jr., class of 1925, date resigned 7 April 1922. The register does not say why. It does not say whether he asked to go or was told to go, or whether the trouble was studies, conduct, health, or money. Later in the volume he is back, on the list of midshipmen of the fourth class, with the letter b after his name. The key printed with the fourth-class notes says b means readmitted. The mark next to it in the key, tb, means turned back from the class of 1925. He does not carry tb. A classmate on the same page, Valmor Granville Bird, carries tb and r. Birtwell's mark is the readmission, not the turnback. A note under the list of men turned back into the class of 1926, who went on the summer practice cruise in 1922 and were to be credited with sea service, says that midshipmen readmitted in 1922 did not go on the practice cruise. He missed that cruise. The boys who would graduate with him in 1926 had a summer at sea behind them that he did not share.
The yearbook, written four years later by the class that kept him, does not mention April. The comfortable sketch is the one that went to press. The resignation is the sentence the Academy printed and the classmates left out.
Math, steam, and the squad that could not swim
The Lucky Bag calls him Tom and Danny. The sketch is a roommate's prose, not a service record, and it should be read as one. It says he spent his time at the Academy in close communion with math and steam. "In making sure of always being topside, he missed out on many of the other activities." Topside, in that sentence, is the class's word for staying safely above failure. The sketch's own contrast comes two lines later. He was never found without a broad grin, "whether he had hit the tree or knocked out a cold forty." The tree was the posted list of unsatisfactory marks. A cold forty was the high mark on the Academy's four-point scale. The yearbook is not giving his grades. It is saying the grin was the same either way.
He came back from September and Christmas leave with what the sketch calls a sublime smile, so that "it was sometimes wondered if he really had missed out on all the other activities after all." He is described as a quiet boy, and the writer reaches for the proverb that still waters run deep. His hobby, the sketch says, was music in all its forms, "be it harp, victrola, or even the organ in the Chapel." He is "credited with first saying, 'On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!'" That line is Byron's, from Childe Harold, and the yearbook's joke is that Danny was supposed to have said it first. The next clause takes the joke back: few had the pleasure of seeing him show anyone how it was really done. The sketch ends by calling him a man of mystery, whose friends would not be surprised by a meteoric rise. Under the activity line the page prints one more sentence before the next man's sketch begins: "Has anybody worked the Skinny probs?" It is the tag the yearbook gives him, the way other sketches end on a catchphrase. It is not a sentence copied from a letter or a log. Elsewhere in the same book a sketch lists the Math, Skinny, Steam, and Juice departments as four separate things, and another man is quoted as having hit the tree in Skinny. The line under Danny's name is about that department's problem set. His own sketch does not say he was good at it, and it does not say what the department taught.
Under the sketch the activity line is one entry: Sub-Squad (4, 3, 2). The index, which puts him at page 514, adds no club, no team, and no numeral. The meaning of the squad is in the same book, in another man's sketch. That midshipman is called a charter member of the Sub-Squad, and the dialogue the yearbook gives him is about swimming: "How's swimmin'?" and the answer that he works and works and still submerges. Birtwell's line is the fourth-class year, the third-class year, and the second-class year, and not the first-class year. For three of his four years the class book has him with the men who had not yet passed the swim. It does not say when he passed, or whether the first-class omission means he had qualified or only that the line stopped. It is the only organized activity the yearbook gives him. The man who grinned at a cold forty spent his afternoons, for a long time, in the pool with the men who could not stay up.
No wife is named. No engagement is named. The yearbook is the only picture of him before the commission that turned up, and it is a picture drawn by boys who had already decided he was hard to know.
The number, and the day they made him an ensign
He finished. The merit roll in the Annual Register for 1926–27 is the order of the graduating class of June 1926. The optical character recognition of the class-size line on the continued page is damaged. It prints something that looks like 457 members, of whom 456 graduated, and those digits are not clean enough to use as a count. What is clean is a number printed beside another man. W. Turek is 360. The names that follow him, on that continued page and again in a later reprint of the same order, run Hufty, Reynolds, LeHardy, Gunther, Shofner, Schade, Whiting, Helmick, Zemlicka, Benjamin, De Wolfe, and then Birtwell, D. T., jr. That is twelve names after 360. If the page break dropped no one, his place is 372. The 372 is not printed on his own line. It is a count. He was not near the top. He was not last. The yearbook's joke about math and steam, and about staying topside, sits next to a standing in the lower half of a large class. The aggregate multiple that would say how close he was to the line for a diploma "with credit" did not stay in the name column of the text that could be read. It is not given here.
The Navy took him. The Register of 1 January 1934, at the head of the lieutenants (junior grade), prints the note "Commissioned ensign June 3, 1926." The same note, "Commissioned ensign June 3, 1926," stands at the head of the lieutenants in the Register of 1 January 1938, in the list where his name is. The optical character recognition does not show a dagger on his individual line. The note is the class note, printed where his class is listed, and it is the date the Navy used for the ensigns of 1926. In the 1934 junior-grade list the first signal number of the block, 3946, carries the date of rank 3 June 1929, and the lines under it, including his, say "do." Read that way, he became a lieutenant (junior grade) on 3 June 1929, with the rest of the block. His signal number that year was 3952. None of this is a judgment added later. It is the Register's arithmetic, and it is the ordinary pace of a line officer who had graduated in the middle of the lower half and then been promoted with his class.
What he did in the seven years between the ensign's stripe and the torpedo station is not in any directory or register read for this essay. The cruise reports, the first ships, the first watches, the letters home: none of them turned up. The gap is the whole of his twenties after graduation except the rank and the date.
The cruiser, and the torpedo
On 1 January 1935 the Navy Directory places him, still a lieutenant (junior grade), at the Naval Torpedo Station, Newport, Rhode Island. His signal number is still 3952. The station's roster that day runs from the inspector of ordnance down through lieutenants and warrant officers. He is one name in it, with no additional title. Nine months later the Directory of 1 October 1935 has moved him. He is a lieutenant (junior grade) on the cruiser Marblehead, and also division torpedo repair officer of Cruiser Division 2. The Register of 1 January 1936 still has him on Marblehead, still a lieutenant (junior grade), with the course numbers 21 and 31 in the special-courses column. The key to those numbers was not in the pages of notes that could be read. They are not interpreted here. The duty is. The Navy had sent the quiet midshipman who had struggled in the pool to the place where the torpedoes were made, and then to a cruiser as the division's man for them.
The Directory of 1 April 1936, as transcribed, does not contain his name at all. That is treated as a failure of the transcription, not as evidence that he had left, because the register of that New Year still has him on Marblehead and the directory of the next spring has him there again. On 1 April 1937 he is a lieutenant. The promotion to lieutenant falls between the register of 1 January 1936, which still calls him a lieutenant (junior grade), and this directory. The day itself is not printed in a line that could be trusted. On Marblehead his signal number is 3630. The ship is commanded by Commander W. R. Carter. Birtwell is not the executive officer and not the gunnery officer. The line reads: Lieutenant D. T. Birtwell, jr., also division torpedo officer, Cruiser Division 2. The "also" is the Navy's way of saying the division duty was added to whatever watch and department he already stood on the ship. The directory does not name the department.
On 1 January 1938 the same ship, the same additional duty. Carter is now a captain and still in command. Birtwell's signal number is 3293. The Register of that date lists him among the lieutenants. On 1 January 1939 the directory's optical character recognition has torn the signal numbers away from the names, so the ship heading and the names have to be read together rather than as a clean roster. The heading is Marblehead. The names that follow the break include Lieutenant D. T. Birtwell, junior, again as division torpedo officer of Cruiser Division 2, and then officers who were on the 1938 Marblehead roster with him: Habecker, Sisko, Powell. The fit is good. It is not a photograph of the page. By 1 June 1940 he is gone from the cruiser. The years that can be seen, from the autumn of 1935 into the start of 1939, are one ship and one extra job. He learned the division's torpedoes under the same captain who had been a commander when he arrived and a captain when the decade turned. Nothing in the directories says whether he was good at it. The Navy kept him at it.
Marblehead had a war later, in the Dutch East Indies, and a famous wound. That cruise is not his. He had left her before the Directory of 1 June 1940. Counting her battle stars as his would be counting another officer's war.
Seattle, while the fleet went to sea
The Directory of 1 June 1940 puts Lieutenant Daniel T. Birtwell, jr., at the University of Washington, Seattle, connected with the Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps. The unit roster gives him signal number 3023, under the professor of naval science and tactics. In that directory the professor's line, on the unit page, reads Commander E. L. Barr. On 1 April 1941 he is still there. The alphabetical entry says lieutenant, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, connected with the NROTC. The unit page that day lists Captain E. L. Barr, retired, as professor of naval science and tactics, then a lieutenant commander, then "3022 Lt. D. T. Birtwell, jr.," then two retired lieutenants. The signal number has slipped by one, from 3023 to 3022, which is what signal numbers do. The rank has not slipped. Eight months before Pearl Harbor the Navy Directory still calls him a lieutenant, and it still has him in a classroom in Seattle.
He had been a deck officer and a torpedo officer on a cruiser of the Pacific fleet. The fleet was at Pearl Harbor. He was not with it, at least not on the day the April directory was issued. Where he was on 7 December 1941 is not in any directory read here. The next fixed point is a rank, not a city. The Register of 1 July 1941 lists him among the lieutenant commanders, signal number 2766, with the course numbers 21 and 31 again beside the name. On the same optical-character line as the name sit the dates 24 June 1941 and May 1939. The columns in that register do not always stay on the man, and a date that rides on one line is not a second document. What can be said without the shaky column is narrower. On 1 April 1941 the Directory calls him a lieutenant. On 1 July 1941 the Register calls him a lieutenant commander. A compilation, uboat.net, prints 1 April 1941 as the date of the promotion. That date collides with a directory issued on the day itself that still uses the lower rank, and it is not used here. If the 24 June 1941 on his line is his date of rank, it fits the two books. It is not confirmed by a clean column head read off the page.
The Register of 1 July 1942 still has him a lieutenant commander. The Register of 1 July 1943 has him among the commanders. In that commanders' list the columns are headed, among other things, for the date of temporary rank. At signal number 2386 the temporary-rank date is printed once: 15 August 1942. The lines after it, through his own line at signal number 2420, say "do," and in the stretch of text between that date and his name no other date in 1942 appears to break the chain. Read that way, the Navy made him a temporary commander on 15 August 1942, and the ditto carried the day down the page to him. The reading depends on the ditto meaning what dittos usually mean. It is the best reading of the page, and it is how the date is used below. The permanent-rank dittos in the same columns are not used. They run together too easily with birth dates and dates of entry that have already slipped onto the wrong men.
He was a commander, then, by the summer of 1943, and he had been a lieutenant commander when the war was a year old. The registers of those two Julys do not say on what ship. The directories that would say it were not in hand. This is the hole in the middle of his war.
The command the official history does not give him
Two compilations put a destroyer in the hole. uboat.net lists him, as a temporary commander, in command of Case (DD-370) from 19 August 1942 to 27 July 1943, and then in command of Longshaw for the four days the Dictionary also gives him. NavSource's photograph page for Longshaw gives the same four days and, for the days after, an acting lieutenant. NavSource's page for Case is the usual companion of the uboat.net command list. Both sites are compilations. They do not show the logs. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships history of Case, the older short entry still posted by the Naval History and Heritage Command, names her commissioning captain in 1936, Commander J. S. Roberts, and then follows the ship for the whole war without naming Birtwell once. Where a cruise below would rest only on the compilations, it is not told as his.
What the Case history does tell, for the months the compilation would make his, is the ship's life and not the man's. She had been in a nest of destroyers at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard on 7 December 1941, and the nest had fired on the attacking planes. Through 23 May 1942 she escorted convoys between the west coast and Pearl Harbor. From 31 May to 7 August she was in Alaskan weather, off Kodiak. On 7 August she bombarded Kiska. She patrolled off Adak until mid-October, escorted shipping to Pearl Harbor, and went to the United States for overhaul. She was back at Pearl Harbor on 21 November 1942, took a convoy to the Fiji Islands, screened a convoy into Guadalcanal, and from 1 January 1943 used Espiritu Santo as a base for escort, patrol, and training through 23 September. Then an overhaul at San Francisco, and Pearl Harbor again in December.
If the compilation's dates were right, he would have missed the Kiska bombardment by twelve days, taken her in the Aleutians after it, ridden the overhaul, and had her through the Guadalcanal convoy and the first seven months at Espiritu Santo, and he would have given her up at the end of July 1943, before the San Francisco yard. That is a coherent cruise. It is also a cruise the official history does not attach to any captain's name. It is not used. The point of reciting it is the limit, and the shape of the temptation. A man who had spent several years as a cruiser's torpedo officer, and then a stretch in an NROTC classroom, is exactly the sort of lieutenant commander the Navy would send to a destroyer in 1942. The paper that would prove they did send this one was not found.
The other thing the dates would mean, if they were his, is that he left Case in late July 1943 and did not take Longshaw until December. Those four months are empty even in the compilation. They stay empty here.
Four days in December
Longshaw was a Fletcher-class destroyer, built by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Company at Seattle. The 2019 Dictionary, fuller than the short text long circulated from the Naval History Division and transcribed on HyperWar, gives the dates. Laid down 16 June 1942. Launched 4 June 1943, sponsored by Mrs. Ella Mae Richards, whom the history describes as a local mother of five sons in the war. Commissioned 4 December 1943, Commander Daniel T. Birtwell in command. The older published entry says the same thing in one clause, and it uses the initials: commissioned 4 December 1943, Commander D. T. Birtwell in command. The compiled list's "Captain from 4 December 1943" is that commissioning. The older history then goes on with the ship and never says he left. The newer table does.
He had four days. The command table prints Commander Daniel T. Birtwell, Jr., 4–8 December 1943. The next line is Commander Robert H. Speck, from 13 December 1943 to 28 January 1945. The table does not name an officer for 9, 10, 11, or 12 December. NavSource, crediting Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, fills those days with Lieutenant Neal Almgren, acting, from 8 December to 13 December, and spells the December captain Daniel Thomas Birtwell Jr. NavSource is a compiled photograph archive, not a log. Almgren is not in the Dictionary's table. The gap is left as a gap. What the Dictionary is willing to say is that Birtwell had her for four days at the start, and that Speck had her from the 13th.
The history's next sentence about the ship is not about him. She completed her post-shakedown availability on 14 February 1944. At 1247 that day she got underway from Seattle for San Francisco, arrived at 1321 on 16 February, fueled, reported to the cruiser Birmingham for duty, and two days later sailed for Pearl Harbor. If he left on 8 December, he did not make that voyage, and he did not finish the shakedown. The captain who reads his orders on a commissioning day in a Seattle yard, and is gone before the workmen are done with her, has not yet taken her to sea in any sense the later history records. The Dictionary does not say why he was relieved in the first week, rather than kept for the shakedown or sent out with her in February. It does not say whether the relief was planned before the commissioning, or whether a medical board, or another set of orders, or a failure on the ship, had anything to do with it. Inventing a reason would be a guess about a man the yearbook had already called a mystery.
What he did not do is the rest of Longshaw's war. Speck had her for the Marshalls, the Palaus, Hollandia, the Formosa air battle, Cape Engaño, the South China Sea, and the start of the Okinawa gunfire. On 28 January 1945 Commander Theodore R. Vogeley relieved Speck. The command table runs Vogeley through 10 May and gives Lieutenant Commander Clarence W. Becker the ship from that day; the narrative of the same history says Vogeley was relieved by Becker on 12 May. On the morning of 18 May 1945 she grounded on a reef south of Naha. A Japanese shore battery hit her. Becker was mortally wounded on the bridge, and the history's count of the dead is his ship's, not Birtwell's. Later that afternoon American ships destroyed what was left of her. She received nine battle stars. The stars are the ship's. His tour, on the table the Dictionary prints, is four days in a yard in Seattle, six months before she sailed for Pearl Harbor and seventeen months before she was lost. Counting nine stars as his would be counting three other captains' war.
The commissioning line and the command table do not quite agree about his name. The sentence says Daniel T. Birtwell. The table says Daniel T. Birtwell, Jr. The registers and the yearbook index are with the table. The older Dictionary is with the initials only, which is also the compiled list, and the list. They are the same officer. The junior is the part the short forms drop.
He had been in Seattle before. From the middle of 1940 until at least April 1941 he had been the NROTC lieutenant at the University of Washington, a few miles from the yard where Longshaw was built. By December 1943 he was a commander, back in the same city, reading himself in as captain of a destroyer launched there the previous June. The Dictionary does not say he had stayed in Seattle the whole time, or that the NROTC duty had anything to do with the commissioning assignment. The geography is a fact about two dates. It is not a story about why the Navy picked him, or why it took her away from him on the eighth.
The list that calls him retired
He was still a commander on the active list in the Register of 1 July 1944. Signal number 2362. The course numbers 21 and 31 are still beside the name. The Register of 1 July 1945 is a different book. In the section headed "Retirements, resignations, deaths, etc.," under "Retired," his name appears in the two-column list of name, rank, and date. The columns are read here the way they run at the top of that section, where each officer is followed by his own date: Daniel T. Birtwell, Jr., commander, 1 December 1944. The parenthetical note on the section says the count of retirements includes Naval Reserve officers retired for physical disability with retired pay. That note is about the count. It is not a sentence about him. The list does not say he was retired for disability, or at his own request, or for the good of the service. It says he was retired, as a commander, on 1 December 1944.
That day is a year after the four days on Longshaw, less five. The Register does not say what he did in the year. No directory, no ship history, no citation in hand puts him on another bridge, or in a hospital, or at a desk. The promotion to temporary commander, if the ditto of 15 August 1942 is right, had come more than two years before the retirement. He left the active list at the rank he held when he commissioned a destroyer he did not keep.
The later registers still carry him, and they carry him as retired. The Register of 1 January 1950 prints BIRTWELL DANIEL THO, commander, RET. The Register of 1 January 1957 prints BIRTWELL DANIEL T, commander, RET. The Register of 1 January 1959 prints BIRTWELL DANIEL TH, commander, RET. The columns for date of rank, date of birth, and file number on those lines do not stay aligned in the transcription. A cluster of digits on the 1950 line, 6, 03, 26, sits where a date would sit, and it is the same day as the ensign's commissioning noted in the 1934 and 1938 books. It is not read here as a birth date. No file number is taken from those lines. What the three books do say, without the shaky columns, is that fifteen years after the retirement the Navy still listed Daniel Thomas Birtwell as a retired commander. They do not say where he lived, or whether he worked, or who met him at the door.
No decoration turned up. The ship histories do not mention a medal. The registers read here do not print one next to his name. The Defense Department's wartime citation lists were not found to contain him in any search that resolved to a page. Absence from a search is not proof he received nothing. It is the state of the paper in hand.
No wife is named in the yearbook, the registers, the directories, or the ship histories. No child is named. The junior remains the only evidence that a father existed, and it says nothing about a son of his own. If he left anyone a letter, it was not found.
What the compilations add, and where the books disagree
The gaps are not small, and they sit in the years that would have made the war his. From the ensign's commission on 3 June 1926 to the Naval Torpedo Station on 1 January 1935, no ship and no city turned up. From 1 April 1941, when he was still a lieutenant at the University of Washington, to 4 December 1943, when he commissioned Longshaw, the registers give ranks and, for the commander's stripe, a dittoed date, and they do not give a duty station. uboat.net fills most of that interval with Case, from 19 August 1942 to 27 July 1943, and calls him a temporary commander for it. The Case history does not name him. The cruise is not his until a log or a register does. NavSource's acting lieutenant on Longshaw from 8 to 13 December 1943 is the same kind of list. The Dictionary leaves those four days blank and is followed.
The birth date is the other place a compilation has stepped into a scrambled column. uboat.net prints 29 October 1903, Washington, D.C., and 1 August 1971, San Mateo, California, and it prints the retirement as 1 December 1944, which the 1945 Register supports, and the Naval Academy class of 1926, which the yearbook and the Annual Register support. In the commanders' pages of the registers of 1 July 1943 and 1 July 1944, the digits 29 October 1903 sit on the optical-character line of the man above him, Robert Rathbun De Wolfe, while the dates on Birtwell's own line are dates in 1921 and 1922, which look like entrance dates that have drifted. The 29 October 1903 is not used. Washington, D.C., as a hometown, stands on the Lucky Bag and does not need the compilation. The death, the city of San Mateo, and the age of sixty-seven are not in a register, an obituary, or a grave record read here. The retired lists of 1950, 1957, and 1959 still have him. They do not say when he died.
The lieutenant commander's date is a smaller disagreement of the same kind. uboat.net says 1 April 1941. The Directory of 1 April 1941 still says lieutenant. The Register of 1 July 1941 says lieutenant commander, and a date on his line reads 24 June 1941. The April date is the one that does not fit the directory. It is left out. The June date is left as the figure on the line, not as a fact nailed to a column head.
Nothing in the paper says what the four days cost him, or what the retirement cost the people who are not named because they were not found. The yearbook, which is the only place anyone tried to say what he was like, said he was quiet, that he grinned when he failed and when he did not, that he stayed with math and steam so he would not go under, and that he spent three years in the squad for men who could not swim. The Navy, which is the only place that says what he did, kept him on one cruiser as the division's torpedo officer, sent him to teach reservists in Seattle, made him a commander, gave him a new destroyer for four days, and retired him a year later. Between the classroom and the commissioning, a destroyer called Case may have been his, and the official history will not say so. That silence is the center of the life as the documents leave it. The man of mystery the class expected to rise is, on the page that counts, a commander who took a ship and did not keep her, and then disappeared into a retired list that still knew his name and rank in 1959 and knew nothing else the books were willing to print.