Ships
- USS Metcalf (DD-595) Captain from 18 November 1944
David Louis Martineau was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on 4 December 1910. He attended high school in Chicago, where he commanded the ROTC unit, and during those years he also served in the Illinois National Guard. A senatorial appointment from Illinois took him to the United States Naval Academy in 1929. He graduated with the Class of 1933 and was commissioned ensign on 1 June 1933. While still a midshipman he made a summer cruise to Europe in the battleship Utah. Before the war he served in battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, rising to lieutenant (junior grade) in June 1936 and to lieutenant in January 1941.
Through the opening years of the war he remained at Annapolis as midshipman duty officer and aide to the superintendent. He was made a temporary lieutenant commander on 1 October 1942. In December 1943 he returned to the fleet and, on the 14th, took command of the destroyer Phelps in the Pacific. His own record of that cruise covers the spring and early summer of 1944, through the later stages of the Marshall Islands campaign and the landings on Saipan in June. His temporary rank of commander dated from 1 January 1944. He was detached from Phelps on 26 August 1944.
On 18 November 1944 Martineau placed the new Fletcher-class destroyer Metcalf in commission at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington, and became her first commanding officer. The yard had laid the ship down on 10 August 1943 and launched her on 25 September 1944. She worked up off San Diego, then left Bremerton on 19 February 1945, called at Pearl Harbor, and anchored at Ulithi in the Carolines on 16 March, as the fleet gathered for the Okinawa operation.
Metcalf operated with an escort-carrier group. From 27 March the carriers under her screen supported the seizure of Kerama Retto and, on 1 April, the main landing on Okinawa, and they struck Japanese-held islands nearby until 20 April. During those weeks the destroyer took aboard about half a dozen pilots and aircrew from carrier planes that had come down at sea. In early August she shifted to the Philippine Sea Frontier and began escorting convoys between the Philippines and Okinawa. She was a day out of Okinawa, in an antisubmarine screen around a convoy, when Japan surrendered. On 4 September she sailed with the North China Force and helped put Army occupation troops ashore in Korea. Martineau stayed in command until 5 February 1946. Metcalf left active service the next month. The ship earned three battle stars for her war service.
For his own wartime service Martineau received the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and a commendation ribbon. After the fighting he went to the Bureau of Naval Personnel and worked on the legislation that became the Officer Personnel Act of 1947, the statute that reset how the Navy selected, promoted, and retired its commissioned officers and that remained in force for about forty years. In the August 1947 issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings he wrote on the tangle of temporary and permanent rank then facing the officer corps. Personnel and administrative shore duty occupied him from 1946 to 1949 and again from 1952 to 1957, including work in the mid-1950s on career-incentive legislation before the House Armed Services Committee.
Sea duty returned with command of the destroyer Charles H. Roan from 1949 to 1951 and with leadership of Destroyer Division 282. He completed the National War College in 1957, commanded the destroyer tender Everglades in 1957 and 1958, and served as chief of staff of Carrier Division 18. In August 1958 he assumed command of the heavy cruiser Los Angeles and remained aboard until relieved on 9 July 1959. A tour with the Strategic Plans Division of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations followed. He retired on 1 November 1959 with the rank of rear admiral.
In civilian life he held executive posts with American Machine and Foundry in Switzerland and with Gulf and Western, and he advised the House Armed Services Committee on military questions arising from the war in Vietnam. On Memorial Day 1976, speaking in Farmington, Connecticut, he said that the men who had fought in Korea and Vietnam had been shown too little honor and respect. Service ran deep in the family: a great-great-grandfather had been a general under Napoleon, and his grandfather had been a naval officer in the Civil War. Martineau died on 1 November 1994 in Avon, Connecticut, at the age of 83. He was survived by his wife, the New England radio commentator Jean Colbert-Martineau, by a son and a daughter, and by stepchildren.