Ships
- USS Charrette (DD-581) Captain from 18 May 1943
Commander E. S. Karpe, Eugene Simon Karpe, was born in Delhi, Louisiana, on 21 August 1904 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1926. He spent the Pacific war in destroyers. On 18 May 1943 he became the first commanding officer of the Fletcher-class destroyer Charrette (DD-581) and took her into commission at the Boston Navy Yard.
When the war began he was a lieutenant commander in Whipple (DD-217), an older destroyer of the Asiatic Fleet operating from Manila. In late February 1942 Whipple was screening the seaplane tender Langley when Japanese aircraft sank the tender south of Java. The tender's commanding officer afterward praised Karpe for the way Whipple was handled through the attack and for the rescue of survivors. Karpe left Whipple at the end of June 1942. From mid-August 1942 until early February 1943 he commanded the newer destroyer Boyle (DD-600). He received the temporary rank of commander in August 1942.
Charrette had been launched at Boston on 3 June 1942 and named for Lieutenant George Charrette, who earned the Medal of Honor in the Spanish-American War. Under Karpe she worked up in the Atlantic, with time at Guantanamo Bay and at Portland, Maine, a yard period back at Boston, and a cruise to Trinidad in company with the new battleship New Jersey. After further work at the New York Navy Yard she sailed from New York on 20 September 1943, escorting the light carrier Monterey toward the Pacific. She reached Pearl Harbor on 9 October.
The ship trained in Hawaiian waters until 10 November 1943, then sortied with Task Force 50 for carrier raids on Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands. Those strikes reduced enemy air strength ahead of the landings on Makin and Tarawa. From 26 November Charrette screened the carriers covering the assault, guarding the shipping offshore and supporting the Marines on the beaches. She afterward screened battleships in a bombardment of Nauru and continued with the carriers toward Efate.
Following an overhaul of her engineering plant at Pearl Harbor, Charrette left Hawaii on 15 March 1944 for the fast carrier force. Through the spring she operated with groups of Task Force 58 in strikes on Palau, attacks around Humboldt Bay in New Guinea, and bombardments of Wakde, Sawar airfield, Satawan, and Ponape. On 5 June 1944, at Majuro, Lieutenant Commander G. J. Joyce relieved Commander Karpe. The task group sailed the next day toward the Marianas. Karpe had thus commanded Charrette from the builder's yard through the Gilberts operation and the early 1944 Central Pacific raids.
After the war he served as United States naval attaché in Bucharest, an assignment of about eighteen months. He was reported to have a wide knowledge of Soviet naval affairs, especially the Black Sea Fleet and the Danube. On 23 February 1950, at the age of 45, he died aboard the Orient Express in a tunnel near Salzburg, Austria, while traveling from Vienna toward Paris. The death was treated as suspicious, and police accounts included a confession that he had been pushed from the train and that documents he carried had been taken. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His father, also named Eugene, worked in a general store in Delhi. His mother was Clara, and he grew up with two brothers and two sisters.