Ships
- USS Richard P. Leary (DD-664) Captain, November 1944 – 31 August 1945
Duncan Patterson Dixon, Jr. (1911–1997) was a regular officer of the United States Navy. He came from Talladega, Alabama, graduated from the Naval Academy with the class of 1934, and retired as a captain after about thirty years of commissioned service. As a junior officer he served in the battleship Maryland, in the Asiatic Fleet flagship Augusta during the opening of the Sino-Japanese War at Shanghai, in the new destroyer Ellet, and in the destroyer Blue at Pearl Harbor. His family later understood him to have been stationed at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941; he was not among the four ensigns who took Blue to sea that day. In November 1944 he took command of the Fletcher-class destroyer Richard P. Leary (DD-664). He commanded her through kamikaze attack at Lingayen Gulf, through fire support at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and through the night of 6–7 April 1945, when he held his ship alongside the burning destroyer Morris, fought her fires in smoke and high seas, and took her wounded aboard. For what he did in that command he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V,” and the Legion of Merit with Combat “V.” After the war he commanded the new Gearing-class destroyer Southerland, taught in the Naval Academy’s Department of Ordnance and Gunnery, and, as a captain, commanded the Naval Station at Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October–November 1962, for which he received a second Bronze Star. He was a private man, serious and austere, who rarely spoke of the war even to his wife and daughters. He died on 15 December 1997. He is a different man from the Army first lieutenant Duncan P. Dixon ordered to active duty in 1919 and from the several other Dixons who held naval commissions in his generation.
The Navy’s registers and his award citations give his service number as 73377. Compiled records that cite that number, together with the Hall of Valor compilation of his citations, give his birth date as 7 August 1911. The Naval Academy yearbook of 1934 names Talladega, Alabama, as his home. The Navy’s Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers for 1931 records that Duncan Patterson Dixon, Jr., was appointed from Alabama and admitted to the Academy on 30 June 1930. He was then eighteen. No contemporary census entry, birth certificate or local newspaper announcement was seen for this article, and nothing found names his parents or says what his father did for a living. The “Jr.” in his name implies a father of the same name, but that identification has not been traced in the sources used here. An Army first lieutenant named Duncan P. Dixon appears in an Army and Navy Journal notice of 1919, ordered to active duty under the commanding general of the Southern Department; that officer, already commissioned when the future midshipman was a boy of eight, cannot be the same man, and whether the two were related is not known.
What Talladega gave him is visible only in outline. It was a small county seat in the foothills of the Appalachians, east of Birmingham, and it sent him to Annapolis with a nickname already waiting. His classmates called him “Dixie” and “Dunc.” Beyond that the early record is thin. No high-school yearbook, no local appointment story and no family recollection of his childhood was found.
The Lucky Bag of 1934 gives the only sustained portrait of him as a young man. “HERE’S a man for you,” the sketch begins. “To know Duncan is to realize that and to instill a desire to cultivate his friendship. You can’t help but like him and to admire his character.” It credits him with “perseverance, ability and tact along with good common sense,” and with a liking for hard work that he tackled “with all he’s got.” “Although he’ll tell you he loves to be lazy it’s only after work and play are over.” His classmates put his loyalty, “strong personality and courage” high in their esteem, and predicted “a pleasant and profitable career for him marked with the never ending addition of true friends.”
Swimming was his sport. “Every winter you’ll find Dixie in the Natatorium keeping up with the best of them,” the yearbook says. “He’s a great asset to a good swimming team.” The summary under the sketch credits him with swimming all four years, with work on the Lucky Bag staff, and with the midshipman rank of M.P.O. He claimed to be a “Red Mike”—Academy slang for a man who avoided the social season—but his classmates did not believe it; he was “far from a snake and somewhat backward about attending hops.” Academics “present no obstacles to him as he stands well above the middle of the class.” The Naval Academy’s annual register for 1933–34 places him at about one hundred forty-sixth in a class of more than four hundred, which fits that judgment. “Living a day both cheerful and serious, always doing his best to help others, makes him a real companion and pal,” the sketch concludes. “His perpetual smile and genuine laugh are contagious. He’s a roommate without equal.”
He was commissioned an ensign on 31 May 1934. The quarterly Navy Directory of 1 October 1934 and of 1 January 1935 place him in the battleship Maryland. She was then a mainstay of the Battle Force in the Pacific, in the long peacetime cycle of fleet problems and training that filled the mid-1930s. The directories do not state his duties. By 1 July 1936 the directory lists him in the heavy cruiser Augusta, the flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. He appears there still as an ensign in the directories of April 1937, and as a lieutenant (junior grade) in those of late 1937 and of 1 January 1938. Those were the years when the undeclared war between China and Japan came to Shanghai. From mid-August 1937 into early January 1938 Augusta lay off the Bund while Chinese and Japanese forces fought for the city. A Chinese antiaircraft shell killed one of her sailors and wounded others during an evening movie on 20 August. Japanese aircraft sank the gunboat Panay on the Yangtze on 12 December, and the survivors spent Christmas aboard Augusta. The directories show only that Dixon was assigned to her during that period. They do not say when he reported or what his division was, so it cannot be said from the sources found whether he was on board for the shell of 20 August or for the Panay Christmas. It is clear only that his first years as a commissioned officer included the Asiatic Station at the moment when the Pacific war that would later take him to Lingayen and Okinawa was already under way in China.
By 1 January 1939 the directory lists him as a lieutenant (junior grade) in Ellet, a new Benham-class destroyer then fitting out. She was commissioned on 17 February 1939. His time in her is bracketed only by that January directory and by the next clear assignment. By 1 June 1940, and again on 1 November 1940 and 1 April 1941, the directories place him in the Gridley-class destroyer Blue, based at Pearl Harbor with Destroyer Division 7. He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 July 1941, according to a compiled list that is consistent with the registers. Where he spent the months between the April 1941 directory and the winter of 1944–45 is not recorded in the sources found.
On the morning of 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Blue was in port at Berth X-7. According to her action report and to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, she got underway with only four officers aboard, all ensigns: N. F. Asher, who took command from the wardroom; M. I. Moldafsky; J. P. Wolfe; and R. S. Scott. Dixon’s name does not appear in that report. His daughter Sue Meredith later said that he was “stationed at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.” That is as far as the available evidence goes. He was a lieutenant assigned, as of the spring, to a ship that was in the harbor that morning, and his family understood him to have been at Pearl Harbor when the attack came; he was not one of the four ensigns who fought Blue out of the channel. What he did that day, and where he was when the first bombs fell, is not recorded in the sources found. He did not like to talk about it. Decades later, when children asked him for a school project on the fiftieth anniversary of the attack why the Japanese had not destroyed the fuel tanks, he answered shortly and only under pressure from his oldest daughter: they thought replacing the ships would be harder than replacing the fuel. “Boy, you’re worse than a newspaper reporter,” he told her.
The intervening years are a blank in the record assembled here. Blue herself went on to the Marshalls raids, to Guadalcanal and to a Japanese torpedo in Ironbottom Sound in August 1942; whether he was still in her after December 1941 is unknown. No Navy Directory for the wartime years was consulted that places him, and no award citation or action report in his name was found before his destroyer command. He was promoted to lieutenant commander (temporary) on 1 March 1943 and to commander (temporary) on 1 February 1944, according to the same compiled list. By the autumn of 1944 he was ready for a ship of his own.
The ship was Richard P. Leary, DD-664, a Fletcher-class destroyer commissioned at Boston on 23 February 1944 under Commander Frederic S. Habecker. She had already fought through Saipan and Tinian, Peleliu, Leyte and the Battle of Surigao Strait, where Habecker won the Navy Cross for a torpedo attack on the Japanese battle line and for going alongside the wrecked Albert W. Grant. She had rescued survivors of Abner Read. On or about 20 November 1944, according to a compiled command list, and as recorded in the ship’s own printed wartime log, Commander Duncan P. Dixon, Jr., relieved Habecker as commanding officer while the ship was under way from Manus to Kossol Roads with Task Group 77.2. He inherited a veteran crew and a veteran ship, and he took them into the Luzon campaign.
What followed is recorded in the ship’s log, in Morison, in the official DANFS history and in the citations that later named him. On 6 January 1945, in Lingayen Gulf, during a series of heavy enemy air attacks, a Japanese plane—called an “Irving” in the ship’s log—came in on Leary. Dixon “skillfully maneuvered his ship to avert an enemy plane and destroy it by his accurate gunfire,” the Silver Star citation says. The ship’s log is more blunt: she was hit by the Irving at mounts No. 1 and No. 2, with minor damage and one man injured, and she assisted in shooting down four planes that day. Morison records that one kamikaze, already damaged, splashed close aboard Leary after a wing had brushed the shields of two 5-inch guns. Dixon’s citation for that day, signed out by Commander Seventh Fleet as serial 001128 on 30 April 1945, is for conspicuous gallantry as her commanding officer. The ship went on to shore bombardment and fire support for the Lingayen landings, then to Ulithi for upkeep, then to Iwo Jima in February for seaward screen, night illumination and call fire close under Mount Suribachi. The crew later remembered watching the flag go up on the mountain from fire-support station. On 22 February, while on radar picket duty, Leary rescued seven Marines adrift in an LVT about thirty miles off the island.
Then came Okinawa. From late March into the summer of 1945 Leary screened the heavy ships of Task Force 54, delivered prearranged and call fire on the beaches and inland, stood radar picket and patrol stations, and lived under the long air assault that Morison and the ship’s log both describe as daily and nightly. Samuel Eliot Morison’s Victory in the Pacific lists her, under “Cdr. D. P. Dixon,” in Rear Admiral Allan E. Smith’s Unit Five of the fire-support force, with Newcomb, Heywood L. Edwards, Leutze and Bennion. His earlier volume on the liberation of the Philippines places her in the Lingayen fire-support organization under the same name. The work was grinding. By late May Leary and Hall, which had fired some 4,270 rounds per gun, were ordered to shoot an offset practice so that the fleet could learn whether the barrels were worn out. Leary’s pattern was normal. The guns had held.
The day that defined his command came on 6 April 1945, the first great massed kamikaze attack of the Okinawa campaign, Easter week, in wind and whitecaps under an overcast sky. Late that afternoon the old Sims-class destroyer Morris, on a picket and patrol station, was struck between her forward mounts by a Japanese “Kate” carrying a bomb or torpedo. Fires fed by gasoline and by exploding powder raced through her forward spaces. Leary and the high-speed transport Daniel T. Griffin closed her. Dixon’s Bronze Star citation, signed out by Commander Destroyers Pacific as serial 04125 on 20 November 1945, states the essential facts without embroidery: “When an accompanying destroyer was damaged by an enemy torpedo plane, Commander Dixon took his ship alongside the stricken vessel and, despite heavy smoke and high seas, remained alongside during periods of darkness and expected enemy attacks in order to fight fires and take aboard a large number of wounded for medical attention. By his prompt action, he contributed materially to preventing the loss of the damaged ship.” The ship’s log records that Leary went alongside Morris, assisted in extinguishing fires, and received twenty-three casualties for medical treatment, then screened Morris in retirement to Kerama Retto. Morison, drawing on action reports, says Griffin and Leary closed with fire hoses ready and had the fire under control by 2030, and that Morris lost thirteen killed and forty-five wounded, many with ghastly burns. The numbers of dead and wounded vary slightly among accounts; what does not vary is that Dixon held Leary alongside a burning ship in the dark, with more attacks expected, long enough to fight the fire and lift the wounded off.
That same day Newcomb, flagship of Destroyer Squadron 56, was severely damaged, and Leary became the squadron flagship under Captain Roland N. Smoot. She stayed in the fight—shore bombardment, night illumination, radar picket, the sinking of two small Japanese boats with searchlights and star shell and 40- and 20-millimeter fire in May, the shooting of caves and gun positions, the rescue of a Marine pilot. On 6 May, Commander Destroyer Squadron 56 came aboard to present awards. By the end of her Okinawa tour she had fired more than twenty-one thousand rounds from her 5-inch battery, an average of more than four thousand rounds per gun, and she went to Leyte to be re-gunned. For the Okinawa period as a whole—shore bombardment, fire support, screening and radar picket from 12 March to 20 July 1945—Dixon received the Legion of Merit with Combat “V,” signed out by Commander Destroyers Pacific as serial 03892 on 2 November 1945. The citation credits him with directing the ship “in carrying out hazardous missions of shore bombardment and fire support of troops, the screening of valuable units of our Fleet, and radar picket patrol under difficult conditions.”
In August the ship was ordered north to the Aleutians to stand by for operations against the northern islands of Japan. She dropped anchor in Kuluk Bay, Adak, as the Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam surrender terms was announced. On 31 August 1945 Captain Herald F. Stout, then commanding Destroyer Squadron 56, relieved Dixon as commanding officer. The war in that ship was over for him. He had held her through Lingayen, Iwo and Okinawa, through one Silver Star afternoon and one Bronze Star night, and he left her as the shooting stopped.
What the war did to him is harder to document than what he did in it. He did not tell his daughters. Sue Meredith, looking back as a woman in her seventies, remembered a father who was calm and loving and handsome in his uniform, “serious and austere, but certainly not un-warm,” who would not answer questions about combat from his wife or from his girls. The closest she ever came to a war story from him was the rebuke about the smell of burnt hair, after she had set her own hair on fire leaning over a stove to light a cigarette in secret. “There’s nothing funny about that smell,” he said, and she realized, years later, that his destroyer had helped save men from a ship that took a kamikaze. He did not have, in her judgment, the demons of post-traumatic stress; he simply would not talk. That refusal is itself a kind of evidence about the cost of the choices he made when he held Leary alongside Morris in the smoke.
On 18 October 1945, according to a compiled list of commanding officers, he took command of the new Gearing-class destroyer Southerland (DD-743). She had screened the fast carriers in the final strikes on the Japanese home islands and had covered the landings at Yokosuka. Under his command, as the ship’s DANFS history records the months without naming him, she continued occupation duty and in January 1946 sailed for the United States, where she was immobilized for a time at San Diego. He turned her over on 4 October 1946. The command dates rest on NavSource and crew compilations and were not checked against the ship’s logs; the movements themselves are from DANFS.
By the academic year 1949–50 he was back at Annapolis. The Naval Academy’s annual register for that year lists Commander Duncan P. Dixon, Jr., among the officers of the Department of Ordnance and Gunnery, under Captain Leonard F. Freiburghouse as head of department. His classmate Walter H. Baumberger, who had stood near him in the registers since midshipman days, was in the same department. Teaching gunnery to midshipmen after Okinawa was a fitting billet for a man whose last wartime ship had fired her barrels nearly smooth in fire support and still shot a normal pattern.
The registers show him as a commander in 1950, with a commander’s date of rank in early 1944, and as a captain by the turn of the 1960s. A 1959 register entry, though badly scrambled by optical character recognition, places him among the captains with a date of rank in 1953, which agrees with a compiled date of 1 July 1953. His assignments through the 1950s are otherwise largely untraced in the sources found.
In October and November 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was commanding officer of the Naval Station at Key West, Florida. The citation for a Gold Star in lieu of a second Bronze Star Medal states that he was responsible “for the coordination and control of all logistic support of the greatly increased sea forces,” and that his direction of the station’s facilities produced “prompt and effective loading out, replenishment and repairs,” so that the maximum number of ships stayed on patrol station. It was not combat. It was the unglamorous work of keeping a reinforced fleet fed, fueled and repaired at the tip of Florida while the world waited to see whether the missiles would fly. The citation is for meritorious service, not for valor, and it reads like the professional competence his yearbook had predicted thirty years before.
He appears as a captain on the active list in the registers of 1961, 1962 and 1963 and is gone from those of 1966. A compiled list gives his retirement date as 1 July 1964, after thirty years from his commissioning. No retirement order was seen.
He had married; the sources found do not give his wife’s maiden name or the date of the wedding. They had two daughters, Sue (later Meredith) and Maggie (later Blum). In old age the girls still called him “Daddy.” He spoke to them about the war almost not at all. In 1997 Ken Samuelson, a volunteer interviewer for the Veterans Oral History Program of the State Archives of North Carolina, sat down with him. The archives’ finding aid lists the interview as “Duncan P. Dixon Jr. Interview, August 7, 1997”—his eighty-sixth birthday. The transcript was not obtained for this article. Samuelson later gave the eulogy at Dixon’s funeral. Dixon’s daughters, who had never heard the war from him, believed it was Samuelson who finally opened that door. “I’m sure it was Ken,” Maggie Blum said.
Duncan Patterson Dixon, Jr., died on 15 December 1997, at the age of eighty-six. The place of death was not found in the sources consulted. The Hall of Valor compilation still lists Talladega as home. What survived of him in public is the paper trail of a destroyer captain’s war—the Silver Star for the plane at Lingayen, the Bronze Star for the night alongside Morris, the Legion of Merit for the long grind at Okinawa—and the private memory of two daughters who adored a man who would not tell them what those ribbons cost.