Ships
- USS Welles (DD-628) Captain from 16 August 1943 · Relieved on 24 August 1944
Doyle Murray Coffee was born in Gordon County, Georgia, on 28 September 1908. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1930 and was a lieutenant by the end of June 1938. Early in the American part of the Second World War he moved into destroyer command.
His first wartime ship was the destroyer converted to a seaplane tender, Belknap (AVD-8), which he commanded from 21 September 1942 until 16 June 1943. On 12 March 1943 Belknap took aboard eighteen survivors of the American merchant ship Jonathan Sturges and three men from the Dutch merchant Madoera. German submarines had torpedoed both ships in the North Atlantic on 24 February. Madoera stayed afloat and later reached St. John's under her own power. The men Coffee's ship recovered had already spent days in open boats.
On 16 August 1943 he commissioned Welles (DD-628) at Seattle and became her first commanding officer, then a lieutenant commander. The Gleaves-class destroyer had been built by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation, laid down on 27 September 1941 and launched on 7 September 1942. Suzanne Dudley Welles Brainard, a great-granddaughter of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, sponsored the ship. Welles carried 5-inch guns, lighter antiaircraft weapons, torpedoes, and depth charges, and on trials she made more than 37 knots.
Her first cruise under Coffee was a delivery voyage. Shakedown on the West Coast brought her back to Puget Sound on 26 October 1943. After a short yard period she sailed on 15 November with two British escort carriers, left them at San Diego, passed the Panama Canal on 28 November, and crossed to New York. A ship built in Seattle thus entered the Atlantic before she joined the Pacific fighting.
In 1944 Coffee took Welles into the Southwest Pacific. During his year in command she worked with the amphibious forces in the Admiralty Islands and along the New Guinea coast, including the Hollandia assault in April and the landings farther west through the summer. He was relieved on 24 August 1944.
He assumed command of the destroyer Beale (DD-471) on 10 September 1944. On the night of 24–25 October, in the Battle of Surigao Strait, a Japanese force of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers tried to enter Leyte Gulf from the south. Coffee handled Beale in that crowded water and fought with guns and torpedoes. Hits from his ship shared in the destruction of the Japanese column under the fire of the American battle line. For that action he received the Navy Cross. The award was recorded in his name as a commander, and he later retired as a captain.
He was still commanding Beale off Okinawa on 6 April 1945, the day for which he received the Silver Star. His tour in the ship ended on 19 June 1945. Coffee died in Muscogee County, Georgia, on 5 July 1984, at the age of seventy-five.