Ships
- USS Saratoga (CV-3) Captain from 6 August 1946 · Paper command after she sank, until 15 August 1946
Commander Daniel McElroy Entler, Jr., of the United States Navy, was carried as commanding officer of the aircraft carrier Saratoga from 6 August 1946 until 15 August 1946. His rank was commander. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy, class of 1936. The duty was a paper command, entered after the ship had already sunk.
Saratoga (CV-3) had been built at Camden, New Jersey. Laid down in 1920 as a battle cruiser, she was finished as a carrier under the Washington naval treaty, launched in 1925, and commissioned on 16 November 1927. Harry Ervin Yarnell was her first commanding officer. In the years before the Pacific war the bridge passed to John Halligan, Jr., Frederick Joseph Horne, Frank Robert McCrary, Archibald Hugh Douglas, George Washington Steele, Jr., Rufus Fairchild Zogbaum, Jr., Kenneth Whiting, William Frederick Halsey, Jr., John Henry Towers, Albert Cushing Read, and Robert Potter Molten, Jr. Under those officers she spent long stretches at sea, and the fleet used her to learn how carriers fought.
Saratoga served through the Pacific war. Bombs and a kamikaze hit her off Iwo Jima in February 1945, and she finished the fighting as a training carrier. After the surrender she brought servicemen home. In the summer of 1946 the Navy sent her to Bikini Atoll as a target ship for Operation Crossroads. Captain Donald Swain MacMahan was commanding officer through both shots. The crew left the ship before each blast. She stayed afloat after the air burst on 1 July. The underwater burst on 25 July sank her in the lagoon that same day.
Entler’s paper command began on 6 August 1946, with Saratoga already on the bottom. He held it until 15 August 1946, the day the Navy struck her from its register of ships. Lieutenant Commander John Lewis Landreth relieved him that day and made the last entry in the deck log. Those nine days closed the commissioned career of a carrier that had been in service since 1927, and they closed it on paper alone.