Ships
- USS Dashiell (DD-659) Captain, 24 July 1944 – 29 September 1945
Commander Douglas Lee Lipscomb Cordiner had Dashiell (DD-659) from 24 July 1944 to 29 September 1945. That pair of dates is a compiled commanding-officer list, the same list that puts Eugene Alexander Barham in the chair until 24 July. It is not a deck log. It is still the only command window that attaches this name to a fighting ship in the sources read here.
He is one man in the Navy’s own books. The Register of 1 January 1934 lists him as a midshipman. The Register of 1936 gives him the ensign’s date of rank, 31 May 1934, and the ship Philip. The Register of 1945 prints the birth date 11 February 1912 beside Douglas Lee Lipscomb Cordiner and, in the index, styles him a commander under file number 73639. Hall of Valor uses the service number 0-73639 for the same commander, the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, both for Dashiell off Okinawa. The 1960 Register still has him, a line captain, Naval Academy source code, designator 1310, year group 34. The 1961 index still says captain. No second Douglas Lee Lipscomb Cordiner appears in the registers searched from 1933 through 1961.
He is not Howard G. Corey, the next name on Sean’s list, who sits on the next line of those same registers and spent the middle 1930s on Panay and Peary. He is not Ralph Jarron Cordiner of General Electric, born in 1900 in Walla Walla, whose daughter Nancy Lee Cordiner was engaged in Ann Arbor in 1955. No other officer named Cordiner turned up in the Navy Directory and Register volumes read for this essay. A ship named Cordiner was not found.
Origins
The birth date is the Register’s, not a certificate. In the 1945 volume the date column beside his name reads 11 February 1912. The 1 July 1947 volume, in the commanders’ block, repeats the same day in the date-of-birth columns: month 2, day 11, year 12. Hall of Valor prints the same day and adds a death date, 11 April 1986, with the cemetery left blank. No obituary, no grave, and no parents’ names were found.
What the classmates put in the 1934 Lucky Bag is the only account of where he came from. The sketch is headed “At Large,” the appointment used for sons of service families who were not charged to a state’s quota. The paragraph calls him a Navy junior, born in Virginia. It gives him three names the regiment used: Spectre, Doug, and Casanova. It says he was blond, that he could play games and preferred bridge, that his mind could take a 1.5 without the book the section was using, and that the joke they wanted remembered was “Love, Doug and trouble.” The last lines ask him not to forget the fourth deck. The activities line under the sketch did not survive the optical reading; a stray “P.O.” may be a petty-officer mark and may be garbage. None of that is a birth record. A boy can be born in Virginia, live wherever his father’s orders sent the household, and enter the Academy at large. The father was not found in the officer lists read here. If the father was Navy, he was gone from those lists before 1933, or he was not a commissioned officer in them.
The class book’s index sends “Cordiner, D. L.” to page 214. That figure is a page, not a class standing. The Annual Registers of the Academy for 1932 through 1935 carry his full name in the class roll, but the state and order-of-merit columns are broken across the page by the optical reading and were not used.
Formation
He was a midshipman on the 1 January 1934 Register. The ensign’s date of rank in the 1936 Register is 31 May 1934, the graduation day of the class whose Lucky Bag printed him. The first sea duty that the Directory will support is the battleship West Virginia. The Directory of 1 October 1934 and the Directory of 1 January 1935 both list Ensign Douglas L. L. Cordiner, U.S.S. West Virginia. Nothing in those lines says what watch he stood. A new ensign on a battleship in the middle of the 1930s was learning a ship that was still a peacetime flagship, not the ship that would burn at Pearl Harbor seven years after he had left her. He was off her before the year 1935 was out.
The Directory of 1 October 1935 places him on Philip, the old flush-deck destroyer, not the later ship of the same name. The ship’s roster that day is short: Lieutenant Commander P. S. Slawson in command, Lieutenant E. B. Taylor as executive, three lieutenants (junior grade), and two ensigns, Cordiner and T. C. Edrington, 3d. The Register of 1936 still has him on Philip, date of rank 31 May 1934. The Directories of 1 April 1936 and 1 July 1936 still have him there. By the Directory of 1 April 1937 the billet is written out: ensign, U.S.S. Philip, gunnery, and on the ship’s roster “gun and 1st lt.”
That is the job the later story is about. John Giles Burrow, class of 1921, had Philip from 10 July 1936. A biography assembled for the Naval Academy’s Virtual Memorial Hall, quoting the San Diego Union, has Burrow saying that the ship had not gone out hunting a gunnery record, that the engineers and the deck and the communications people had been drilled into one team, and that the gunnery end of the record belonged to the gunnery officer and his men. The same account names Ensign D. L. L. Cordiner, class of 1934, as that gunnery officer, and says that when the prize came he was put over the side, the “quaint old naval custom” of a dunking, while the crew drew extra prize money. The newspaper page itself was not opened for this essay. What the quotation supports, if the paper said it, is a young officer whose first real responsibility was the battery of a tired four-piper that the squadron had just called its best, and a wardroom that marked the win by throwing him in. The Memorial Hall page also quotes the Pensacola News Journal on the day the ship was decommissioned. Burrow’s farewell named the Bath keel of 1917 and the admiral the ship was named for. Only three officers were still aboard: the captain, Lieutenant (junior grade) F. E. Wilson, and Ensign D. L. Cordiner. The dog went to Borie. The Directory of 1 April 1937 still shows Cordiner on Philip, so the decommissioning fell at the edge of that issue or just after it. By 1 October 1937 he is a lieutenant (junior grade) on Mugford.
Mugford is a different kind of ship, a new destroyer, and the Directory does not give him a billet on her, only the ship. He is still on her in the Directory of 1 January 1938 and in the 1938 Register. The next shore line is the Directory of 1 January 1939: lieutenant (junior grade), Sixteenth Naval District, Cavite, Philippine Islands. No office inside the district is named. Cavite in 1939 was the Navy’s old Asian yard, two years from the war that would take it. The registers do not say what he did there.
The Directory of 1 June 1940 moves him again: lieutenant (junior grade), under instruction, Naval Air Station, Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Directory of 1 April 1941 has the same duty. Lakehurst was the lighter-than-air station. The Register of 1941, in the administrative notes, uses (V) to mean “on the promotion list,” not aviator, and it prints that mark after his name in the list of lieutenants (junior grade) on the promotion list. He was still a lieutenant (junior grade) on 1 April 1941. The 1 July 1947 Register, read against its own column heads, gives him a permanent lieutenant’s date of rank of 1 July 1941. The wings come into the record later, and they come as a code, not as a story. The 1945 Register, whose distinctions run through 1 May 1945, prints “2-a” on his line. In that volume, 2-a means designated naval aviator, lighter than air. The 1947 volume’s qualification key uses 2 for naval aviator, heavier than air, and 3 for naval aviator, lighter than air. His line in that volume ends with those two codes; the second digit sits in a column the optical reading has scrambled for some of his classmates, so the heavier-than-air mark is the one that repeats cleanly down the page, and the lighter-than-air mark is the one the 1945 volume states in so many words. By the Register of 1 January 1960 his designator is 1310, which that volume defines as a line officer qualified to fly heavier-than-air aircraft, or both heavier- and lighter-than-air, as a pilot, and whose fourth digit 0 means a regular officer. The gap between Lakehurst in April 1941 and Dashiell in the summer of 1944 is where the heavier-than-air training, if it was separate, would have to sit. No squadron, no Pensacola class, and no date of designation were found.
War years as lived
The ranks through the war are plainer than the ships. The 1942 Register’s index calls him a lieutenant. The 1943 index calls him a lieutenant commander. The 1944 index calls him a commander and gives the file number 73639. The 1947 Register’s temporary-rank date, in the commanders’ block, reads 1 January 1944. The 1945 index calls him a commander. Where he was while those ranks were arriving is not in the directories. The Navy Directory stops, for the volumes in hand, at 1 April 1941. The wartime registers drop the ship column. From the spring of 1941 until the summer of 1944 there is a name, a rising rank, and a lighter-than-air designation, and no command.
Dashiell is a Fletcher-class destroyer, commissioned 20 March 1943 under John Boyd McLean. The compiled list gives her to Barham on 9 January 1944 and to Cordiner on 24 July 1944. The ship’s own war, as the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships tells it in the text carried on the Wikipedia page for DD-659 (the Naval History and Heritage Command page did not load), had already included the Gilberts, a west-coast overhaul, Kavieng, the New Guinea landings, and the Marianas. Guam fire support in that account runs 20 to 26 July 1944. Those dates straddle the compiled relief. They cannot be divided between Barham and Cordiner on the evidence in hand. What can be said of Cordiner’s command, if the list is right, starts when the ship is already in the Marianas operation and runs through the rest of the war.
After that July the DANFS narrative, still the ship’s and not a report signed by him, sends Dashiell to Morotai for the landings of 18 and 19 September 1944 and the reinforcement of 1 October, then to San Pedro Bay for the Leyte landing of 20 October, then back to New Guinea for reinforcement convoys in the middle of November and again from 24 November to 9 December. On the passage toward Mindoro a kamikaze hit the flagship and the flag came aboard Dashiell for the landing of 15 December. Back at Leyte she was in the air attack of 20 December. DANFS says six of her men were wounded. It does not give their names, and it does not say the captain was one of them. In Lingayen Gulf from 9 January to 10 February 1945 the same account credits the ship with at least three suicide planes shot down, small craft sunk, and positions ashore destroyed. She reached Ulithi on 28 February and went out with the fast carrier groups against Japan and Okinawa in March.
The citations take over from the cruise narrative there, and they are about him by name. Commander, First Carrier Task Force, Pacific, serial 0459 of 26 April 1945, is the Silver Star. It covers 17 March to 10 April 1945, Commander Douglas Lee L. Cordiner, commanding officer of Dashiell. It says he commanded an important unit of an advanced picket group, engaged enemy aircraft, and assisted in destroying twenty planes. It says that later, on the radar picket line of Task Force 58, he shot down one suicide plane before it could damage the ship and assisted in destroying another. Citation language of that kind means the ship under his direction. It does not mean he stood in the director and fired the gun. What it does mean is that for those three weeks the picket line was his problem, and the Navy’s measure of the work was planes that did not reach the carriers.
Four days after the period in that citation, the harder day came. Serial 0554 of 20 May 1945 is the Navy Cross, for 14 April 1945, Dashiell as a unit of a radar picket group near Okinawa. The citation says the group was attacked by about twenty planes. It says he carried out defensive maneuvers and directed the antiaircraft battery, and that the fire destroyed four of them. It says three of the planes crashed close aboard, and that a bomb near-miss took the ship’s power. It says he got repairs made, got the power back, and fought the ship until the attack scattered. The verbs are cool, carried out, directed, accomplished, regained, fought. That is the Navy’s way of describing a captain who did not have a main plant and still had a ship in a raid. It is also the only close description of him under fire that this essay has. No action report, no deck-log page, and no letter home was found.
A Navy chronology of damaged ships, the one printed in the April 1945 section of the wartime day-by-day record on ibiblio, does not use the citation’s words. For Saturday, 14 April, it lists Dashiell damaged by a suicide plane at 27°15' N., 130°25' E., the same position it gives for Sigsbee and Hunt, also by suicide plane. “Crashed close aboard” and “damaged by a suicide plane” can be the same event described twice, or they can be a real disagreement about whether a plane hit the ship. The citation is the award. The chronology is the damage list. Both are official. They were not reconciled here. DANFS, in the Wikipedia text, follows the citation’s shape: four shot down, the rest outmaneuvered, damage from the near-miss of a bomb, then Ulithi on 23 April for repairs. It has her back off Okinawa on 17 May, with the Third Fleet’s attacks on Japan into August, in Tokyo Bay at the end of the war, and there until 6 September, when she sailed for Pearl Harbor and Charleston, arriving 21 October. She was decommissioned in reserve at Charleston on 30 March 1946. That last date is the ship’s. The compiled list takes Cordiner off her on 29 September 1945, after Tokyo Bay and before Charleston, and puts Lieutenant Commander John Edward Wicks, Jr., in command. If that date is right, he did not bring her home to the yard. No change-of-command report was found to prove it.
The 1945 Register, distinctions recorded through 1 May 1945, prints after his name the symbol that the volume’s key gives as (G-l), the Bronze Star. The optical reading has (G-I). The hyphenated form matches (G-l) better than a split between the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and a letter of commendation, but the letter is not clean. No Bronze Star citation was found. Hall of Valor’s page for him lists the Silver Star and the Navy Cross and does not list a Bronze Star. The Silver Star serial is 26 April 1945, inside the Register’s cutoff and still possibly too late to have been entered. The Navy Cross serial is 20 May 1945, after the cutoff, so its absence from that Register is what the Register’s own note predicts. The Bronze Star, if the symbol is read right, is a third decoration whose action is not in any text found here.
After
The war rank stuck for a while and then moved. On 1 July 1947 he is in the commanders’ block: permanent lieutenant from 1 July 1941, temporary commander from 1 January 1944, birth 11 February 1912, pay-entry base date reading, on the damaged digit, as the class’s 31 May 1934. The qualification codes are the aviator marks already described. The 1 January 1955 Register puts his name in a stretch whose running head is “Captains, Line,” while the rank word on his own line reads commander. That is an optical conflict inside one volume, not two careers. The 1956 Register’s index is plainer: file 073639, Douglas Cordiner, captain, designator 1310. Chief Journalist Joseph E. Oglesby, who was with Task Force 43 from 1955 to 1957, calls him captain in the Proceedings of November 1957.
The Antarctic work is the second time the record shows him deciding, under conditions that could kill the people with him, whether to go on. It is not a destroyer story. On 13 January 1956, during Operation Deep Freeze I, a Navy P2V-2N Neptune flew from McMurdo Sound to the Weddell Sea and back without landing. The United States Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names, in the entry carried by the Australian Antarctic Data Centre gazetteer and approved, on that record, 1 January 1957, named the Cordiner Peaks for Captain Douglas L. Cordiner, an observer on that aircraft. The peaks are a group about six miles across, about eight miles southwest of the Dufek Massif, in the northern Pensacola Mountains. The gazetteer calls him an observer. It does not call him the pilot, and it does not call him the squadron commander. That flight is Deep Freeze I. The South Pole landing is Deep Freeze II, the next spring.
Oglesby’s article, “First Landing at the Pole,” is a journalist who was there, writing a year later. On 31 October 1956 an R4D, Bureau Number 12418, the old transport the squadron had already wanted to retire, took off from the bay ice at McMurdo at 12:55 p.m. without jet assist, so the JATO bottles could be saved for the Pole. She was about seven thousand pounds over the recommended weight. Aboard, Oglesby writes, were Rear Admiral George J. Dufek, the task-force commander; Captain Douglas Cordiner, commanding officer of Air Development Squadron Six; Captain William M. Hawkes, the staff air officer, as copilot; Lieutenant Commander Conrad S. Shinn, the pilot; Lieutenant John Swadener, the navigator; and two enlisted men, plane captain John P. Strider and radioman William Cumbie. Shinn had already called the airplane, in his Deep Freeze I report, a very old and weary craft that flew in a perpetual skid. Somebody had painted Que Sera Sera on the nose.
Oglesby’s reason for Cordiner’s being on a flight that hazardous is professional, not ceremonial. Dufek wanted to see the conditions his Seabees would meet. Hawkes had done the Greenland tests that made the ski planes believable. Cordiner, Oglesby writes, “was bent on learning as much as possible about the landings and take-offs at the Pole before launching subsequent flights there with men and non-droppable equipment.” They landed at 8:34 p.m. The thermometer at two thousand feet had read minus 35. On the snow it was minus 58. Dufek stepped out first. Cordiner stood with him trying to plant the ensign. The staff carried a brass capsule certifying that this was the first American party at the Pole. The snow was hard enough that they had to use an alpine axe. Within three minutes, Oglesby writes, Cordiner’s nose and cheeks began to go white with frostbite. They had agreed to work in pairs and watch each other’s faces. They were on the ice about forty-nine minutes. Swadener’s sun lines put the landing within about four miles of the Pole, toward South America. The takeoff needed every JATO bottle. The windshield froze inside and out. Shinn flew instruments. Every warning light on the panel came on, and Strider pulled the breaker so he would not have to look at them. They got back to McMurdo about 3 a.m. on 1 November. Dufek postponed the landing of the construction party. A handful of men met the plane. The test had been the point. Later flights built the station. Oglesby does not say Cordiner flew them.
A Wikipedia list of VX-6 commanding officers gives Commander Edward M. Ward the years 1955–57 and does not give Cordiner the squadron. Oglesby, writing as a member of the task force, calls Cordiner the commanding officer of Air Development Squadron Six on the day of the landing. The squadron history posted by former members repeats that title for him on 31 October 1956. The conflict is noted below. What does not depend on the title is the gazetteer’s observer flight in January and Oglesby’s account of the man on the snow in October, frostbitten in the first three minutes and there to learn whether the next airplanes could land.
The 1 January 1960 Register still has him on the active list, under the heading “Line Captains,” lineal number 690, source code 01 (Naval Academy), service-date year 34, designator 1310, and a date-of-rank field the optical reading gives as 1 July 1953. That July 1953 date does not sit easily with a 1955 line that still looks like “commander,” and it is not used here as a firm promotion date. The 1 January 1961 index still styles him captain, designator 1310, lineal number 890. A text of the 1 January 1962 Register, searched for the name, did not contain it. The 1960 volume’s own preface says retired officers appear in the index only. Absence from a later OCR is not a retirement date. Hall of Valor says he retired as a captain. No retirement order was opened.
No wife, no child, and no address after the Navy were found. The death date 11 April 1986 is Hall of Valor’s, with no place and no cemetery. The peaks are what the map kept.