Ships
- USS Young (DD-580) Captain, 26 August 1944 – 15 November 1945
Donald Granville Dockum (14 October 1913 – date of death uncertain; a secondary compilation gives 27 November 1969) was a United States Navy officer whose Academy yearbook placed him in Ogden, Utah, and whose service carried him from the battleship Pennsylvania to the China coast, then through the Philippine campaign as commanding officer of the destroyer Young, and later to the commissioning of the postwar destroyer leader Wilkinson and to work on undersea warfare. He graduated with the Naval Academy class of 1936. In March 1941, months before Pearl Harbor and almost a year before the gunboat Asheville was overwhelmed south of Java, he was detached from that ship to the Twelfth Naval District. What he did between that transfer and the day he took Young in August 1944 is only partly illuminated by the sources examined here. What is clear is the work of the ship he then commanded: screening resupply under kamikaze attack off Mindoro, reporting a beach already in guerrilla hands at Zambales so that a planned bombardment could be cancelled, and closing to within half a mile of Corregidor to smash at Malinta Hill while minesweepers worked under fire.
The Navy Register gives his date of birth as 14 October 1913 and his date of entry into the Naval Academy as 16 June 1932. Midshipman and early officer lists place his appointment as from Utah. The 1936 Lucky Bag, in the brief hometown line printed above each senior’s sketch, names Ogden, Utah. A secondary ship-commander compilation states that he was born in Salem, Massachusetts; that place does not appear in the Register entries or the yearbook page examined here, and it has not been confirmed from a vital record in this research.
Nothing in the Academy yearbook or the Registers names his parents or siblings. Contemporary Army and Navy notices do mention other men named Dockum—among them an Army field-artillery officer, Wilbur G. Dockum, who in 1930 was ordered from Fort Sill to Organized Reserve duty with a battery at Ogden, and a Coast Artillery lieutenant, Norman Leslie Dockum, of Utah, whose wedding was reported in 1941—but the sources examined here do not establish any family relationship between those men and Donald Granville Dockum. The question of his parents’ names and occupations remains open.
He reached Annapolis by way of the Naval Academy Preparatory School. In February 1932 the Army and Navy Journal listed “Donald G. Dockum, S. Naval Academy Preparatory School, Annapolis,” among candidates designated for the March entrance examination to the Military Academy at West Point. Whether that listing reflected a serious Army candidacy, a clerical mix of lists, or a young man keeping more than one door open is not explained in the notice. What followed is clear from the Register: on 16 June 1932 he entered the Naval Academy as a midshipman from Utah.
The class that graduated in June 1936 left a plain picture of him under the nickname “Dock.” The Lucky Bag sketch on page 259 is the only contemporary character study that survives. It describes a midshipman who got out of bed with “profound misgiving,” elbowed his roommate from the washbasin, and eased to breakfast with a nonchalance that classmates took as characteristic—yet who, once awake, turned a “practical mind” to steam and ordnance problems that others could not unravel. “While Dago and Bull find small consideration,” the entry says—Academy slang for the languages and for English and history—“many are the knotty Steam and Ordnance probs which Dock has unravelled for lesser gifted classmates during these lean years.” The same practical bent produced a small craft they called Small Fry, “a monument to this practical side of his nature.” The sketch closes with the judgment of men who expected to see him again: “A pleasant comrade, and capable, we’ve a deep rooted conviction that no get-together is complete if Dock is not among those present.”
His extracurricular record matches that picture of hand and eye rather than of the lecture room. He managed the gymnasium as a plebe, played class lacrosse and class football, and belonged to the Art Club all four years, ending as its president first-class year. The yearbook’s Art Club page names “D. G. Dockum” as president. He graduated with two stripes. In the Academic Board’s final standing for the class he stood 231—solidly in the middle of a class of several hundred, stronger in the technical subjects the yearbook already credited him with teaching his roommates than his overall number alone would suggest.
He was commissioned an ensign with the class on 4 June 1936 (the date used in later rank tables). The Navy Directory for late 1936 already lists him in the battleship Pennsylvania, and the directories of 1937 and 1938 keep him there. Battleship duty was the ordinary first cruise for a line ensign of that generation: watches, division work, and the slow learning of a big-ship routine. On 19 August 1938, according to an order notice in the Army and Navy Journal, he was detached from Pennsylvania and ordered to the Asiatic Station. A subsequent notice that autumn assigned him to the yacht Isabel.
Isabel was no ordinary yacht. Built as a private steam yacht, taken into the Navy in the First World War, and retained afterward, she had become the familiar small flagship and dispatch vessel of the Commander in Chief, Asiatic Fleet—a ship that carried admirals up the Yangtze and along the China coast while Japanese forces pressed the Sino-Japanese War. The official history of Isabel for 1938–1940 is a catalogue of Shanghai, Tsingtao, Nanking, Amoy and Manila, of flag shifts when the heavy cruiser Augusta went into overhaul, and of inspection trips with Admirals Harry E. Yarnell and Thomas C. Hart embarked. Dockum’s own name does not appear in that history, but the Navy Directory of 1939 places Ensign D. G. Dockum in Isabel, and the order notice of April 1940 records his detachment from her to the gunboat Asheville. He had spent roughly a year and a half in the admiral’s yacht on a coast already at war.
Asheville (PG-21) was a different kind of China ship: a gunboat of the South China Patrol and, after Admiral Hart drew his weaker vessels back upon Manila, of the Inshore Patrol in the Philippines. The directories of 1940 and 1941 list Lieutenant (junior grade) Donald G. Dockum in Asheville and, in the ship’s officer column, mark him “comm”—communications officer. He was still a junior officer in a small wardroom, responsible for the radios and the signal work that tied a slow gunboat to the fleet. In the spring of 1938, before he joined her, Asheville had lain off Amoy while Japanese landing forces entered the city and had sent Marines ashore to the American hospital; by the time Dockum reported, the gunboat’s China service was ending. She left Chinese waters for the last time on 5 July 1941, broke a shaft in a typhoon, and was towed home by Marblehead. Dockum was not aboard for that last China passage. An Asiatic Fleet order notice published on 26 April 1941 states that Lieutenant (jg) Donald G. Dockum was detached from Asheville about 13 March 1941 and ordered to the Twelfth Naval District—San Francisco and the Pacific coast establishments under that command.
The timing mattered. On 8 December 1941 (7 December east of the date line) war reached Manila Bay. Asheville fled south, reached Java, and on 3 March 1942, steaming alone toward Fremantle under Lieutenant Jacob W. Britt, was caught by Japanese destroyers of Vice Admiral Kondō’s force and sunk. Of her crew, only one man is known to have been taken from the water, and he died in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1945. Dockum had left the ship nearly a year earlier. The sources examined here do not record what he thought when the news of her loss reached the Twelfth Naval District, and they do not give the date on which he learned it. They do establish that the communications officer who had served in her in 1940 and early 1941 was not among the dead.
Between March 1941 and August 1944 the documentary trail thins. No Navy Directory for the early war years has been examined here that places him in a named ship. Temporary promotion dates in later compilations run through lieutenant and lieutenant commander in 1942–1943 and to temporary commander on 15 March 1944, consistent with the wartime acceleration of his class, but they do not name his duty stations. Walter Lord’s Incredible Victory (1967), a narrative of Midway built from interviews and correspondence, lists “Capt. Donald G. Dockum, USN (Ret.)—Ellet” among its contributors. Other Ellet officers appear in the same list. That is evidence that Dockum later identified himself with the destroyer Ellet (DD-398), which screened the carriers at Midway in June 1942, but it is not a contemporaneous order or deck log, and the dates of any tour in Ellet have not been found in the Registers or order notices used for this essay. Until such a record appears, his movements from the Twelfth Naval District to the bridge of Young remain incompletely documented.
What is documented is the command that followed. On 26 August 1944, according to ship-commander compilations that agree with one another and with later narrative sources naming him in command, Commander Donald G. Dockum relieved Lieutenant Commander George B. Madden as commanding officer of Young (DD-580), a Fletcher-class destroyer then ending her Aleutians and Kurils tour and preparing for overhaul and transfer to the western Pacific. Young’s official history describes the next year without naming every captain, but the chronology of her operations after the late-1944 overhaul coincides with Dockum’s tenure, and independent narratives name him in the ship for the Philippine actions of that winter and spring.
After repairs she sailed from San Francisco on 6 October 1944, reported at Manus late in the month, and was near enough to the catastrophic explosion of the ammunition ship Mount Hood to be damaged. She reached Leyte on 18 November amid an air attack and helped splash attacking aircraft. On 19 December she left Leyte in the screen of the first Mindoro resupply echelon—twenty-five ships, among them fourteen LSTs and chartered freighters, under Captain T. B. Dugan. Samuel Eliot Morison’s history of the Philippine campaign describes that convoy’s ordeal on the afternoon of 21 December, when kamikazes broke through and crashed LST-460, LST-749, and the Liberty ship Juan de Fuca. Both LSTs were lost; more than a hundred soldiers and sailors died. Young’s own history states that during the approach to and retirement from Mindoro she claimed five unassisted aircraft destroyed and two assists. The sources examined here do not preserve Dockum’s own words from that day. They place his ship in a screen that watched two landing ships burn and explode while the rest of the convoy “plugged stolidly along,” in Morison’s phrase, toward a beachhead that still had to be fed.
In January 1945 Young screened Attack Group “Baker” at the Lingayen landings. Later that month, at Zambales, the work changed from steel to judgment. Morison records that Admiral Arthur D. Struble ordered his fire-support destroyers to close the beaches at first light and report what they saw before opening bombardment. “Destroyer Young (Commander D. G. Dockum) reported the presence of many natives with their boats,” while Isherwood saw a wrecked Japanese tanker. A banca of Filipinos closed another destroyer crying “Liberty!” Lieutenant A. F. Tadena of the Philippine Resistance Army boarded Young and reported that the area was already in friendly hands, American and Philippine flags flying ashore, the nearest Japanese concentrated at Olongapo. The planned bombardment was cancelled. The landing went off without a shot. For once the costly choice was not to fire. The man who made the report from Young’s bridge was Dockum.
February brought him back under fire. During the Mariveles and Corregidor operations Young, with Nicholas, destroyed Japanese suicide boats sent out from Corregidor. On 16 February, according to a postwar All Hands narrative of the Corregidor assault that names him in command, Picking, Wickes, and Young (Commander Donald G. Dockum) “moved to within half a mile of the shore smashing at the beaches and at Malinta’s caves” while minesweepers worked under the guns. When a shore battery hit YMS-46, “counterpunches came quickly from the three destroyers.” Young’s official history adds that she bombarded “the Rock,” helped silence batteries on Caballo Island when they opened on the landing craft, and later threaded mine-studded water to give gunfire support to the troops ashore. It was close, deliberate destroyer work of the kind that left little margin if a battery found the range.
She supported an Army landing on Mindanao in April, patrolled in the Philippines into late May, and then was ordered home for repairs, arriving at San Francisco on 12 June 1945 for a Mare Island overhaul. By the time she returned to Pearl Harbor, hostilities had ceased. She plane-guarded for Saratoga, steamed east with Third Fleet units for the Navy Day review, and on 27 October 1945 lay in New York while President Truman reviewed the ships. Dockum’s relief came soon afterward. Compilations date the end of his command to 15 November 1945. An order notice in the Army and Navy Journal of 17 November 1945 lists Commander Donald G. Dockum as ordered to Naval Operations in the Navy Department—shore duty in Washington after fifteen months in a fighting destroyer.
Young received five battle stars for her war service. No personal decoration citation for Dockum—Silver Star, Bronze Star, or Legion of Merit—has been located in the sources examined here. The record of his war, as it stands, is the record of the ship he took through Mindoro, Lingayen, Zambales, and Corregidor, and of the moments when other men’s histories paused long enough to write his name into the screen.
From Washington in late 1945 the trail again becomes a sequence of assignments rather than of actions. He remained a commander in the postwar Registers. In April 1949 the Army and Navy Journal reported him detached from the Naval War College at Newport to the staff of the Commander, Operational Development Force, United States Atlantic Fleet—the organization that tested new tactics and equipment for the postwar Navy. On 3 August 1954, as a commander, he placed in commission the destroyer leader Wilkinson (DL-5), one of the large Mitscher-class leaders built from wartime destroyer studies, at Quincy, Massachusetts. The ship’s official history names “Cmdr. Donald G. Dockum in command.” After shakedown out of Guantanamo she sailed from Newport in February 1955 with Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke, then Commander, Destroyer Force, Atlantic Fleet, embarked on an inspection tour of Caribbean ports; she became flagship for Destroyer Flotilla Two and spent the spring in antisubmarine exercises. A ship-commander compilation dates Dockum’s relief to June 1955. The DANFS narrative of Wilkinson’s later midshipman cruise to Europe and her subsequent career does not again name him.
He was still carried as a commander in the mid-1950s Registers and appears as a captain, designator 1100 (unrestricted line), in the Registers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the same date of birth and Academy class year. In October 1964 Electronics magazine, reporting on Navy antisubmarine research for fiscal 1965, identified “Capt. Donald G. Dockum, director of the Navy’s Undersea Development division,” as listing areas of stepped-up emphasis: underwater acoustic warfare, underwater surveillance systems, the Seahawk surface ASW ship program, and acoustic intercept techniques against torpedoes. It is the clearest postwar glimpse of his mind at work—the same practical interest in machinery and problem-solving that the yearbook had noticed in a midshipman who preferred steam and ordnance to “Dago and Bull,” now applied to the Cold War problem of finding submarines.
He left the active list about that time. He appears in the Register of 1 January 1964 and does not appear among his classmates in the Register of 1 January 1965. Missiles and Rockets for 4 January 1965 reported that “Donald G. Dockum” had “Joined General Dynamics/Electronics as programs manager for anti-submarine warfare,” to administer plans, task teams, schedules, budgets and controls for ASW product development. Walter Lord’s Midway book, published in 1967, already styles him “USN (Ret.).” A secondary compilation gives his date of death as 27 November 1969, at the age of fifty-six. No obituary, death certificate, or burial record has been found in the sources examined here to confirm that date or to say where he died or was buried. Whether he was married, and whether he had children, likewise does not appear in the Navy biographies, yearbook, Registers, or order notices used for this essay.
What survives with certainty is a career that ran from Ogden and Annapolis through the Asiatic gunboats, past the loss of Asheville by a margin of months, through a destroyer command in the Philippines that included both the refusal to bombard a friendly beach and the close gun action off Corregidor, to the commissioning of a new kind of destroyer leader and to the direction of undersea warfare development at the end of his active service. The midshipman who built Small Fry and untangled other men’s steam problems ended as a captain whose public remarks concerned acoustic war against submarines. Between those poles the record is firm where ships’ histories and order notices name him, and openly incomplete where they do not.