Ships
- USS Paul Hamilton (DD-590) Captain, 17 November 1944 – 1 September 1945
Origins
The Navy Register never gives Daniel Carlson a birthplace. It gives a date. In the lineal list of the 1943, 1944, and 1945 Registers he was born on 3 October 1905, and the later machine registers repeat it as 10/03/05. He entered the Naval Academy on 15 June 1925. The 1947 Register’s pay-entry base date, set beside that birth date, is 6 June 1929. No middle name appears on any of those lines. File number 062569, once the Navy started printing one, stays with him from the 1944 index through the retired list of 1960.
What the Academy printed, in the 1929 Lucky Bag, is a home, not a birthplace. The page is headed Daniel Carlson, Seattle, Washington, and the nicknames under the photograph are “Dan” and “Danny.” The classmates who wrote the sketch put the sea down as something that found him in the West, or that had been in him already. He came to Bancroft Hall determined to stay. The evidence they offer is unromantic and specific: long hours on Skinny, the electrical course, after his first “letter of much concern” from the Superintendent. That letter, they say, was only a stepping stone. After it he sailed smoothly.
He gave up the football stands for soccer, and the sketch says the coach was right to keep him. He was still kicking on the defense for the varsity as a first classman. In the winter he managed basketball and, the class wrote, brought the team through a successful season. The activity line is plain: basketball manager all four years, class basketball, soccer all four years, a Black N**, and M.P.O. The yearbook also lets him tell one story in his own quoted words, about second-class cruise: they were pinched for making sixty-five on the San Francisco highway, getting back the last night. To his friends, the sketch says, a real pal; to the women, a man who could never see more than one at a time, which always made it look a little serious; to his seniors, a promising young man. That is the whole portrait the class left. It is not a service record.
In 1929 he married Natalie Savage. She had been born on 3 October 1906, a day and a year after him, and had spent 1927 to 1929 as a reporter on the Long Beach Morning Sun. The de Grummond Collection’s finding aid, drawn from the published sketches of her life, says she met and married Daniel Carlson, a naval officer, in 1929, and that the Carlsons were afterward stationed in Hawaii, Mexico, Canada, and France. The Navy Registers consulted for this essay do not itemize Mexico, Canada, or France. They do put a young officer on Pacific ships in the years when the family was having children. Their daughter Stephanie Natalie was born on 27 July 1931 in San Pedro, California. Their daughter Julie Ann was born on 20 July 1935 in Honolulu. Those two birthplaces are the family’s own record of where his early sea duty took them. They are not, by themselves, a list of his ships.
Formation
The Navy Directory for 1930 places Ensign Daniel Carlson on the battleship New Mexico. The Register of 1 January 1933, still carrying him as a lieutenant (junior grade), places him on Nevada. The 1934 Directory and the 1934 Register agree again: lieutenant (junior grade), Wright. These are big-ship and tender billets, the ordinary finishing of a line officer, and none of the entries calls him commanding officer. A lieutenant (junior grade) on Nevada or New Mexico was one watch-stander among many.
By the 1936 Register he was still a lieutenant (junior grade), and the symbol beside his name in that year’s lineal list is (V). The Register’s own key says (V) means on the promotion list. It is not an aviation designator. He never carries the naval-aviator number 2. Almost the whole class around him is marked the same way. The promotion the list was holding him for came between that book and the 1939 Directory, which calls him lieutenant.
The submarine mark arrives first. The 1937 Register prints “1, 30” on his line. In the key used by the wartime Registers, and already in force in the same wording, 1 is “Qualified for command of submarines” and 30 is “Completed course in submarine instruction.” The 1937 Directory puts the same lieutenant (junior grade) on S-28. The Directory says “u s s S-28.” It does not say “commanding.” Qualification for command and command of that boat are different facts, and only the first is in the record. A junior-grade lieutenant on an S-boat was learning a closed, dirty, exacting trade: trim, battery, the long dive, the short crew. The Register says he finished the course and was qualified to command. It does not say the Navy ever gave him a submarine of his own.
Two other qualifications stay with him once they appear. By the 1940 Register his line reads, through the usual OCR breakage, as 1, 5-h, 18, 30, and the 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 Registers print the same cluster cleanly. Number 5 is interpreter or translator, and the letter h is Swedish. Number 18, in the key whose descriptions and numbers line up once the missing 13 is allowed for, is the Naval War College correspondence course in strategy and tactics. Swedish and a correspondence course in strategy are the odd notes in a record that is otherwise battleship, tender, S-boat, and destroyer. The Registers do not say where the Swedish came from. They only say the Navy was willing to have him used as an interpreter or translator in it.
On the eve of the war in Europe he was back ashore in the city the Lucky Bag had called home. The 1939 Directory lists Lieutenant Daniel Carlson at 13th Naval District headquarters, Seattle, Washington. The 1940 Register has moved him to the destroyer Phelps, still a lieutenant, in the same column that puts his classmates on Flusser, Dewey, and Luzon. Again the column is duty, not command. A lieutenant on a destroyer leader was a department head or a senior watch officer, not the captain.
The 1942 Register lists him among the lieutenant commanders, the rank marked (Y), “subject to examination, and/or confirmation.” The 1944 Register, which prints the columns the wartime books had grown, is more exact. His permanent status is lieutenant commander from 30 June 1942. His temporary rank as commander dates from 1 October 1942, the “do” that carries the page’s temporary date of 1 October 1942 down to the line whose birth date is 3 October 1905 and whose entry is 15 June 1925. He was a temporary commander for two years before he was given a ship of his own in the shooting war. The Registers of those two years do not name the duty.
War years as lived
The orders that finally put him in command were written in August and executed in November, at a lagoon. The war diary of Paul Hamilton (DD-590) for 17 November 1944, anchored in Ulithi, records that at 1510, pursuant to orders of the Commandant of the Twelfth Naval District, serial 60-pn of 7 August 1944, Commander D. Carlson, U.S. Navy, relieved Commander L. G. May of command. He signed the November diary “D. Carlson.” The ship’s later compiled history, prepared in the Ships’ Histories Section and dated 24 February 1954, picks him up at the same moment and in the same rank: “Now under command of Commander D. Carlson, USN.”
The diary’s next entry, headed 18–19 November, is not a settling-in. At 0602 an enemy submarine was reported, and Mississinewa (AO-59) was torpedoed and set afire. At 0658 Paul Hamilton got underway and reported to the commander of Destroyer Squadron One in Dewey for harbor patrol, circling the heavy ships at anchor. Other patrol ships dropped depth charges on contacts, with undetermined results. At 1830 she was ordered to secure. His first full day in command was a burning oiler in the anchorage and a patrol that found nothing it could claim. The diary then has the ship anchored through 20–25 November, at sea on the 26th and 27th for drills with Hall, Maury, Gridley, and Helm, and on 29 November underway from Seeadler Harbor, Manus, with Hall, under a Seventh Fleet dispatch, for Hollandia. They entered Humboldt Bay at 1230 on 30 November.
The 1954 history, which is a narrative compressed from the diaries and not a substitute for them, sends that new Seventh Fleet destroyer into the Philippine amphibious war at once. Her first assignment under him was to escort landing craft to Leyte Gulf and then to patrol the gulf against surface attack. On 12 December she sailed with Task Group 78.3 as a screening ship of the Mindoro assault force, south through Surigao Strait in the twilight. The history says the formation went through the Mindanao Sea the next day, a wording that fights the operation’s name, and that the first enemy contact came at 1450, when a suicide plane crashed into the flagship Nashville. On the 15th, off the landing beaches, a sixteen-plane raid came in low out of the sun over Ilin Island. Paul Hamilton, closest, opened fire and knocked down three. The Japanese hit two LSTs and a destroyer. The history says that after a day of patrolling off the beaches the ship herself was attacked, with temporary damage to the radar and the torpedo director. Retiring with the LSTs, she was attacked again on the morning of the 17th; one plane jettisoned its bombs and crashed a few minutes after being taken under fire. She was back in San Pedro Bay, Leyte, on 18 December.
The resupply work was the same kind of danger with less of the landing’s logic. On 21 December, with Hall and Edwards, she escorted twelve LSMs to Ormoc Bay and back without incident. On the 27th she was ordered to Task Unit 78.3.15, a large resupply echelon for Mindoro. The history says the weather would not allow a combat air patrol, and that the enemy came through Surigao Strait unopposed. On the morning of the 28th the IX-126 and the merchantman John Burke were hit by suicide planes. The merchantman exploded and disappeared. The IX was abandoned and left to drift. The convoy reached Mindoro at daybreak on 30 December and unloaded without opposition until 1500, when four dive bombers attacked. One dropped a bomb at a merchantman and then flew at Paul Hamilton. Her guns took him under fire. Hugging the water, the history says, he missed the ship by about twenty feet and escaped. In the same attack Pringle was hit by a suicide plane and Gansevoort by a bomb. The LSTs finished unloading an hour and a half later. The group anchored in Leyte Gulf on 1 January 1945.
Three days later she sortied with Task Unit 77.2.1 for Lingayen Gulf, through Surigao, the Mindanao Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the South China Sea. The history’s account of that approach is a list of other ships being hit: Ommaney Bay sunk after a kamikaze on the 4th; Arunta, Savo Island, Stafford, and Manila Bay hit on the 5th, Stafford badly damaged. Off the objective on 6 January, Paul Hamilton was put on the carrier screen to the west. On 14 January she rescued three airmen from Shamrock Bay, uninjured. On the 18th she retired to Mangarin Bay, Mindoro, for replenishment, and on the 21st she headed for San Pedro Bay and then Ulithi.
A Bureau of Naval Personnel information bulletin later summarized, and Hall of Valor repeats only as a synopsis, a Legion of Merit for escort duty at Leyte Gulf and Mangarin Bay, Mindoro, from 27 December 1944 to 2 January 1945, as commanding officer of Paul Hamilton. The synopsis styles him captain. The diary of November still styled him commander, and the temporary-rank date of 30 March 1945, discussed below, falls after this escort. The full citation was not in the bulletin text located for this essay. The ship’s history, not the medal, is what says a plane missed her by twenty feet.
At Ulithi he trained with underwater demolition teams. The ship’s action report for the capture of Iwo Jima, file DD-590/A16-3 serial 021, dated 15 March 1945, covers 16 February to 9 March and was written from the commanding officer. On 16 February she was in Task Unit 54.9.1, screening station 1, then station 3, then screening sector A-11 to seaward of the heavy ships of Fire Support Unit Three. Rear Admiral P. K. Fischler in Texas was officer in tactical command; Rear Admiral W. H. P. Blandy was in Estes. The weather, the report says, did not look suitable for bombardment or boating: poor visibility, low ceiling, moderate winds, rain squalls. She patrolled while the heavy ships shelled the island. At 1835 she left for the night harassing station off the east coast. From 2030 she patrolled 7,000 to 9,000 yards offshore. No enemy contacts.
Just after midnight on 17 February, relieved by R. P. Leary, she shifted to the western side. From 0100 her assignment was illumination from the west. At 0202 she began illumination fire with Stembel, which was doing the harassing fire. The report says she expended twenty-one rounds of starshell during the morning darkness, lighting the western beaches, air strips 1 and 2, and a bivouac area. At 0650, the illumination mission done, she went to screening sector C-14. At 0930 she left that station for the eastern, preferred beaches, for duty with Task Group 52.4, the Underwater Demolition Group under Captain B. H. Hanlon in Gilmer.
At 1030 she was on the right flank of the destroyer fire-support line, about 3,000 yards off those beaches, lying to except when the engines were needed to keep the battery unmasked. She was assigned the fire support of LCI(G) 441, an LCPR from Blessman, and the swimmers off Blue 1. At 1050 she opened with 5-inch and 40-millimeter batteries on Blue 1 and kept it up as scheduled and as called. Roger Easy hour was 1100. The LCI(G)s moved in to about 1,000 yards. The personnel boats dropped swimmers and retired, then came back in to pick them up. One swimmer was reported missing. At 1110 LCI(G) 441 reported herself hit. Enemy small-arms and mortar fire was hitting the gunboats, and the destroyer Leutze was reported damaged. LCI(G) 457, supporting Blue 2, was hit seriously, retired, was abandoned, capsized, and was sunk by Capps. An endorsement by Commander Amphibious Group One later corrected the report on that point: LCI(G) 474, not 457, was the boat sunk on the task force commander’s orders. Bombardment ceased at 1255. The morning expenditure, as the report adds it up, was 133 rounds of 5-inch antiaircraft common, 40 of white phosphorus, 2,900 rounds of 40-millimeter, and 173 powder charges.
The afternoon of the same day she closed the western beach near Mount Suribachi to about 1,000 yards while covering minesweepers, received no fire from the island, and fired none. At 1550 she was again on a fire-support line, this time about 2,000 yards off the western, alternate beaches, for the underwater demolition teams off Purple 1, supporting an LCPR from Barr. No LCI(G)s were present for that pass. The report’s own discussion of whether destroyers or gunboats should do this work was sharp enough that the endorsements argue with it. Commander Amphibious Group Eleven, formerly the commander of Task Force 54, did not concur in the opinion that gunboats were the wrong craft for the close support. Eleven of twelve LCI(G)s had been hit that forenoon, he wrote, even though they were supported by everything up to and including battleships. Had destroyers been used exclusively, he thought the surprise fire might have damaged the destroyers instead. Leutze had in fact been hit. He added that the destroyers of the force had done their screening and fire-support duty in an excellent manner. That is as close as the official paper comes to a judgment of Carlson’s ship on the day Hall of Valor later ties to his Silver Star.
The Silver Star synopsis, citing Bureau of Naval Personnel Information Bulletin No. 352 of July 1946, says Commander Daniel Carlson received it for conspicuous gallantry as commanding officer during destroyer reconnaissance of the beaches off Iwo Jima on 17 February 1945. The synopsis is not the citation. The action report is the ship’s own account of that day, and it is a day of illumination, of lying stopped on a measured line, of firing on a schedule for swimmers, and of watching gunboats get hit. It does not record a hit on Paul Hamilton.
The March war diary, forwarded by the commanding officer on 5 April 1945, still has her in the screen of escort carriers off Iwo, leaving that screen to load rockets from Lakewood Victory in the shadow of Suribachi and stowing what would not fit in the magazines in the living spaces. The 1954 history says that in ten days after the return from Iwo she was repaired, rearmed, and trained again, and that on 21 March she sailed for Okinawa. The approach was on the 24th. The history’s sentence on the duty there is worth keeping as written: routine escort, but with kamikazes attacking continuously, nothing was routine. On 30 March she fired night harassing and illumination rounds at the landing beaches and started fires. On the 31st she did it again. On the morning of 1 April she provided fire support for the initial landings. At 1300, after eighteen consecutive hours at general quarters, the crew was allowed to rest. She stayed at fire support and escort until 6 April, when she was sent to Kerama Retto for fuel and could not get alongside. Suicide planes hit an LST, an ammunition ship, and a Victory ship in the anchorage. She fueled the next morning.
More patrol and bombardment followed. On 15 May she was given seventy-two hours of tender availability alongside Hamul at Kerama Retto, which the history calls the first break in that routine. On 31 May she sailed with Converse, Twiggs, Beale, and Daly to support the landing on Iheya Shima. Bad visibility brought the ships back. On 3 June the landing went in against practically no opposition, after what the history calls a vigorous shore bombardment, and she took radar-picket duty until she anchored at Kerama Retto on 7 June. On 9 June a similar attack on Aguni Shima ran, from the opening of fire to the island’s being secure, one hour and five minutes. On 17 June she left Okinawa with Vincennes for Pearl Harbor by way of Guam and Eniwetok, and from Pearl Harbor she was routed to San Diego, arriving 8 July 1945 for overhaul. When the fighting stopped on 14 August, the history says, the ship was in drydock.
The ship’s seven battle stars, as that history lists them, cover operations before Carlson as well as after. The dates that fall inside his command are the Mindoro landings of 12–18 December 1944, the Lingayen Gulf landings of 4–18 January 1945, the assault and occupation of Iwo Jima of 16 February–10 March 1945, and the assault and occupation of Okinawa Gunto of 25 March–17 June 1945. The history gives those stars to the ship. It does not say they were engraved on his record as personal decorations. The two decorations the personnel bulletins attach to his name are the Legion of Merit for the late-December escort and the Silver Star for 17 February.
Cost
The record does not give him a speech, a letter home, or a count of his own dead. Paul Hamilton’s compiled history opens with the ship’s whole-war totals, more than 19,000 rounds of five-inch ammunition, four planes shot down unassisted and five shared, eighty-three men rescued from other ships, and it does not divide those figures at 17 November 1944. Some of them belong to Commander May. What can be kept inside Carlson’s dates is narrower and, in its way, harder.
He took the ship in a lagoon where, within hours, an oiler was burning and the patrol he was sent on could not tell him what it had depth-charged. At Mindoro a plane came at the ship and missed by about twenty feet, after the flagship and then a merchantman had already been hit in the same series of trips. At Iwo he lay stopped a few thousand yards off the beach, firing so that swimmers could go in, while gunboats closer than he was were being hit and sunk and one swimmer did not come back. The endorsement that praised the destroyers also refused his report’s view of how that close work ought to be done. At Okinawa the measurable strain is eighteen hours at general quarters on the day of the landing, and a fuel stop that could not be made because the anchorage itself was being crashed into. The seventy-two hours alongside Hamul in the middle of May are the only rest the history bothers to name.
Then the war ended for him, if he was still in the ship, in a drydock at San Diego. The history never names a relief between Ulithi and that drydock. It also never says, in so many words, that the man who had relieved May was still aboard when the dockyard horns blew on 14 August. The last dated fact it gives him by name is the command itself, at the end of November 1944. Everything after that is “the ship.”
After
The rank the war had given him took years to settle on paper. The 1947 Register still shows his permanent status as lieutenant commander from 30 June 1942, and a temporary-rank date of 30 March 1945. The 1950 Register lists him as a commander with that same 30 March 1945 date. From the 1954 Register through the 1959 Register he is a captain, designator 1100, the unrestricted line, date of rank 30 March 1945, birth 3 October 1905, pay-entry base 6 June 1929, year group 1929. The 1958 Register still carries him as captain, not retired. The 1960 Register’s index, file 062569, is the change: Daniel Carlson, rear admiral, retired. The date 1 May 1959, often repeated for that retirement, is not in these registers.
One shore billet in the retired wait is documented outside the Register. Pacific Stars and Stripes of 18 January 1954, as transcribed by the Korean War Children’s Memorial, reported from Yokosuka that Destroyer Squadron 34 had arrived with 172 barrels of clothing, blankets, soap, toys, and $3,000 in medicines for the Maryknoll clinic in Pusan. The goods had been collected by the Newport chapter of the Knights of Columbus after a letter from Captain Daniel Carlson, Newport, chief of staff of Task Force 95. The drive was called “Carlson’s Campaign for Korea.” The paper lists sulfathiazole ointment and four hundred rubber balls in the same sentence. It is the only glimpse of how he used a captain’s signature after the shooting stopped: a letter from a staff job, and a New England town that answered it.
The de Grummond finding aid’s undated list, Hawaii, Mexico, Canada, and France, may belong to these later years or to the years before the war. The Registers checked here do not confirm the foreign stations. What the family record does confirm is that the household lasted. Stephanie’s obituary in 2005 and Julie’s in 2018 both call him the late Rear Admiral Daniel Carlson, retired, of the Navy, and both name Natalie Savage Carlson as their mother. Stephanie, wife of a retired Army lieutenant colonel, died in Newport on 27 May 2005. Julie, who took a doctorate and taught, died in Middletown, Rhode Island, on 23 September 2018. Natalie herself had died in Middletown on 23 September 1997. The finding aid and the encyclopedia of her work remember her as the author of The Family Under the Bridge and the Orpheline books, a Newbery Honor writer, the American nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1966. None of that writing is his. It is what the marriage produced in the years after the destroyer, and it is the public life the sources actually describe. His own public life, after the Silver Star synopsis and the Korea letter, goes quiet. The 1960 Register says rear admiral, retired. It does not say when he died, or where.