Ships
- USS Colahan (DD-658) Captain from 23 August 1944
Donald Taylor Wilber was born in Van Buren County, Michigan, on 13 June 1909. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1931 and served in the United States Navy through the Second World War. He died in Annapolis, Maryland, on 19 October 1984.
Lieutenant Commander D. T. Wilber was captain of Colahan from 23 August 1944. She was a Fletcher-class destroyer built by Bethlehem Steel at Staten Island, New York, and named for Commander Charles Ellwood Colahan, whose career had run from the years after the Civil War into the early twentieth century.
In the weeks after he took her, Colahan screened carrier strikes that covered the landings in the southern Palau Islands, from the end of August through September 1944. In October she steamed with the fast carriers into strikes on the Ryukyus and Formosa, then on to the Philippines in the days before troops went ashore at Leyte on 20 October.
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf the carriers she helped guard struck Japanese ships retiring from the fight in Surigao Strait. On 25 October the battleship Iowa fueled Colahan while heavy ships of the task group formed for a high-speed move toward San Bernardino Strait. Wilber kept the destroyer on the Philippine air campaign until late December, when Colahan put into Ulithi for repairs.
Colahan sailed again on 30 December 1944 as an advanced radar picket for Third Fleet raids on Formosa, Luzon, Cam Ranh Bay, Hong Kong, and Hainan, timed with the Lingayen Gulf landings. Destroyers on that far picket duty came to be called tomcats, and Colahan was the ship that first wore the snarling-cat mark later taken up by the rest of Destroyer Squadron 53. Wilber was relieved on 30 January 1945.