Ships
- USS Porterfield (DD-682) Captain, 13 May 1944 – 4 July 1945
Donald Wesley Wulzen commanded the Fletcher-class destroyer Porterfield in the Pacific during the last year of the Second World War. He took the ship as captain on 13 May 1944 and remained in command until 4 July 1945, the stretch of service for which he is identified in the public record of the ship. The rank given with that command is commander.
By the time he came aboard, Porterfield was already in the war. The destroyer had been built on the West Coast and commissioned in the autumn of 1943, then worked up and moved into the Central Pacific with the fast carrier forces. Wulzen’s tour therefore began with a ship that had a crew, a routine, and a place in the screen, and it ran through the hardest months of the advance toward Japan.
Under his command Porterfield screened carriers and other heavy ships during the summer and autumn of 1944. That season took the Fast Carrier Task Force through the Marianas campaign’s aftermath and into the Philippine operations: strikes in support of the landings on Leyte, the great air and surface actions of late October, and the continuing raids that kept Japanese air power under pressure. A destroyer in that screen lived by station-keeping, night watches, and the sudden shift from routine steaming to anti-aircraft fire when raids came in.
Porterfield stayed with the carriers into 1945. Wulzen’s ship took part in the covering and bombardment work around Iwo Jima in February and then moved on to Okinawa, where destroyers were pushed out on radar-picket stations as well as kept in the screen. Those picket lines drew the heaviest kamikaze attacks of the war. Ships on them fought air raids at close range, picked survivors out of the water, and returned to station when the raid was over. The record of the ship places Wulzen in command through that Okinawa period.
He left Porterfield on 4 July 1945, while the ship was still in the western Pacific and before Japan’s surrender the following month. Later captains of the same destroyer included John Carl Woelfel, Arthur Frederick Fischer, and Neil Bruce MacIntosh. Wulzen’s own later assignments are outside the span of this command. What the wartime record fixes is the fourteen months in which he was captain of Porterfield, from the Philippine campaign through the Okinawa picket line.