Ships
- USS Cleveland (CL-55) Captain, 15 June 1942 – June 1943
Origins
Edmund Weidmann Burrough was born on 28 October 1890 in New Jersey. The Navy Register of 1 January 1919 records that date and that state, and records that he was appointed from New York on 20 June 1910. It does not name a town. Later compilations that put the birth in Camden are not the register, and this account does not follow them.
The place he claimed when he left the Naval Academy was Oswego, New York. The 1914 Lucky Bag gives his graduation-leave address as 40 West Cayuga Street and prints the nicknames "Ed" and "Ned." A transcription of the mayor of Oswego's report for 1907 lists an Edmund Weidmann Burrough among the high-school graduates of June that year. In the same transcription the class-honors table spells the class president Edmund Weidmann Burroughs, with a final s. The middle name is distinctive enough that the two lines are almost certainly one boy, and the spelling without the s is the one the Navy kept. He would have been sixteen that June.
Nothing opened here fills the three years between that graduation and the Academy appointment of 20 June 1910. No parent, wife, or child is named in the registers, the yearbook, or the ship's history used below.
Formation
He entered the Naval Academy with the class that produced the Lucky Bag of 1914. His classmates wrote that when "Ed's principal passed the entrance examinations, the class of 1912 lost a good, congenial classmate, and we gained one." The official date of entry remains 20 June 1910, the ordinary entrance date for the class of 1914, so the sentence is not explained by the register. They also wrote that he was not sensational, not an athlete, and not brilliant in any one academic line, and that he would be missed anyway. The yearbook lists him as a hinder in the 7th Company, with soccer numerals, and in hospital in each of the four years. It names mumps, typhoid, and scarlet fever, and says he came back after each and finished one of those years inside the first fifty in class standing. His printed "object" was "to protect Sam Peck," his roommate in the old First Company. The epigraph the editors chose for him was not his own sentence: "A gentleman and a true friend."
By the register of 1 January 1915 he was an ensign, and the cruiser-squadron station list of that book places Ensign Edmund W. Burrough on the armored cruiser Washington, flagship of the squadron commanded by Rear Admiral William B. Caperton, with Commander Edward L. Beach in command of the ship. The register of 1 January 1916 still lists him there, Beach by then a captain. The date of his ensign's commission is not cleanly printed on the pages read here. A repeating "8 July 14" sits in a column of the 1919 register beside many officers of his class, including the row that is his, but the same column still reads 10 July 1914 for Albert H. Rooks while Rooks's station has already changed, so that figure is not treated here as the day Burrough took any particular command.
The registers opened for 1917 and 1918 were not these volumes. The next firm station is the register of 1 January 1919. In the lieutenant list his temporary rank, under the Act of 22 May 1917, is a ditto running back without an intervening date to William John Larson's printed 31 August 1917, and his permanent rank as lieutenant (junior grade) dittos back to Larson's 6 June 1917. On the birth-and-station page of the same register, the row with his birth date, New Jersey, and New York appointment of 20 June 1910, immediately before Rooks, gives his present duty as commanding the submarine B-1.
He stayed in submarines long enough to be marked, in later registers, qualified for their command. The register of 1 January 1924 lists him as a lieutenant whose date of rank dittos, again without a break, to a printed 6 June 1920. The register of 1 January 1925 has moved him into the lieutenant commanders and gives his duty as commanding S-26, the cruise dated as begun on 15 October 1923, the previous cruise expired in August 1922. His date of rank as lieutenant commander, printed in the register of 1 January 1930 and again in 1933, is 17 December 1924. What ship, if any, he had between August 1922 and October 1923 is not in the pages read here, nor is the day he left S-26.
On 1 January 1930 the same register shows the submarine qualification and a completed postgraduate course in mechanical engineering, and gives his duty as "Staff commander, Control Force," the line ending at the margin of the scan. On 1 January 1933 he was still a lieutenant commander, dated 17 December 1924, and his station was the battleship Arizona. By 1 January 1936 he was a commander. The register of 1 July 1940 dates that rank 12 December 1934, by ditto from the officer immediately above him, and by then two further qualifications had been added: the Naval War College senior course, and the War College correspondence course in strategy and tactics. The 1936 station is the staff of the Naval War College at Newport.
On 1 July 1940 he was still borne as a commander, marked on the promotion list, in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. The register of 1 July 1941 lists him as a captain with date of rank 1 July 1940, and records shore duty begun on 29 February 1940. It does not repeat the name of the office. The register of 1 July 1942 confirms the captaincy of 1 July 1940 and does not print a ship.
War years as lived
The ship was new. Cleveland (CL-55), name ship of her class, had been laid down at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden and launched on 1 November 1941. The Naval History and Heritage Command's history of the ship, in the text archived from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships page, states that she was commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 15 June 1942 with Captain Edmund W. Burrough in command. The encyclopedia stub that starts this file says the same commissioning date and then only "until June 1943." The ship's history is more precise, and it is the one followed here. A date of 15 September 1942 that sometimes appears as the start of his command is the end of shakedown in that history, not a second assumption of command.
She fitted out and shook down in the Chesapeake through 15 September 1942. Admiral Ernest J. King made her available to test prototype Mk. 32 five-inch projectiles with radar proximity fuses, work then secret at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Commander William S. Parsons ran the tests for the Bureau of Ordnance. On 12 August, the history says, fewer than ten of the rounds splashed two radio-controlled drones flown as torpedo attacks; the next morning she shot down another drone on a mock high-altitude run. Production of the ammunition followed in September. Propulsion trouble then put her into the Norfolk Navy Yard from 28 September to 2 October for what the history calls urgent post-shakedown repairs.
Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll assigned her to Operation Torch, in Task Group 34.2, the Center Air Group under Rear Admiral Ernest D. McWhorter, to cover the landing at Fedhala in French Morocco. She sailed from Norfolk on 10 October 1942 with McWhorter and his staff embarked, escorted by the destroyer Hobson, zigzagging in clear weather against submarines, and anchored in Great Sound, Bermuda, on 12 October. McWhorter shifted his flag to Ranger. The ship's company stripped linoleum, furniture, and paint. On 21 October the group rehearsed while Cleveland went out for anti-aircraft practice. The group sailed on 25 October, met Rear Admiral H. Kent Hewitt's Western Attack Force at sea on 28 October, and took station five to ten miles astern of the main body. Her cruiser-scouting seaplanes flew daylight anti-submarine patrols. At night her radiomen heard what the history describes as repeated homing transmissions from suspected German submarines, and found enemy stations taking bearings on the force; that report went to McWhorter.
On 8 November, off Casablanca, she screened Ranger and Suwanee as they launched. Her floatplanes stayed on anti-submarine patrol. The war diary, as the history quotes the sense of it, called the 8th and the 9th uneventful. She had sighted no enemy. The next morning the history's sentence says "10 October," which cannot sit beside a D-day of 8 November; the sequence itself is the morning after those two days. Lookouts saw two torpedoes broad on the port bow. The history attributes them to the French submarine Le Tonnant, which had left Casablanca on 8 November. Cleveland was already swinging to starboard after Ranger. Burrough, the history says, chose to parallel the torpedoes rather than comb them head-on. He ordered hard right rudder and all engines ahead emergency, then backed the starboard engine full. Two more torpedoes appeared to the left of the first pair. One missed ahead by 500 yards, one cleared the bow, one passed astern. As the fourth came on, the executive officer, Commander Charles B. McVay III, said, in the words the history records, "That one can't possibly miss us, Captain." It ran under the ship aft of the seaplane hangar and did not explode. Corry depth-charged Le Tonnant; the submarine got away. The history adds that the sailors took the miss as a sign the ship was charmed. That is their conclusion, as reported, not a fact about the torpedo.
Hewitt then sent her with New York and Augusta to support an assault on Casablanca set for the morning of 11 November. She reached the center attack group that afternoon and patrolled off Fedhala. As the bombardment force steamed into position, Hewitt ordered cease-fire: Vichy forces were negotiating. She went back to the anchorage. At dawn on the 12th she rejoined the carriers. The history's sentence is blunt: she had not yet fired a shot in combat. Hewitt released the task group on 14 November. She anchored in Bermuda on the night of 21–22 November and reached Norfolk on the 24th, went into drydock for Pacific alterations, and gave the crew seventy-two hours' liberty. On 5 December she sailed with a task force under Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen, through the Panama Canal, anchored at Nouméa on 4 January 1943, and on 15 January entered Havannah Harbor at Efate.
There she joined Columbia and Montpelier in the new Cruiser Division 12 under Captain Aaron S. Merrill, inside Giffen's Task Force 18, with Wichita, Chicago, Louisville, the auxiliary carriers Suwanee and Chenango, and eight destroyers. The Guadalcanal campaign was ending. The ship's history describes Admiral Yamamoto's Operation Ke, the evacuation, and Admiral William F. Halsey's reading of the Japanese movement as reinforcement. On 27 January Task Force 18 left Efate to cover a troop convoy into Guadalcanal and to sweep the lower Solomons. An Office of Naval Intelligence combat narrative of the evacuation, which names Cleveland with Captain Edmund W. Burrough under Merrill, calls that cruiser-carrier force Task Force GEORGE and lists the same ships. A patrol plane sighted the force on 29 January. Japanese submarines were sent toward Rennell Island, and two groups trained in night torpedo attack were launched from Rabaul. The carriers were detached in the afternoon. Their planes covered the cruisers until dark.
About half an hour after sunset, the history says, the force was zigzagging at 24 knots, about fifty miles north of Rennell, under a 2,000-foot ceiling. Gunfire from Waller and the heavy cruisers to starboard told Cleveland, at 1925, that fifteen Mitsubishi G4M attack planes were coming in. The force had tracked aircraft all day and had not been sure what they were. Her lookouts saw one bomber at 1,500 yards on the port quarter. Already at general quarters, she opened with radar-directed five-inch guns and then the 40-millimeter and 20-millimeter batteries. Other ships saw torpedoes and maneuvered. None was hit in that short first run. Giffen kept on and stopped the zigzag as sixteen Mitsubishi G3M bombers came in from the east. Flares, burning planes, and the flash of the heavy guns lit the ships. Cleveland's gunners, the history says, marked three more aircraft and claimed no kills. The bombers put two torpedoes into Chicago at 1940 and left her dead in the water. Giffen reversed the rest of the force and slowed to 15 knots. At 2029 he detached Merrill's cruisers, with Chevalier and Taylor, to screen the northwest flank. Three of the thirty-one attacking planes were shot down. It was the first successful Japanese night aerial torpedo attack of the war, in that history's words.
On 30 January combat air patrol arrived. Giffen formed to take Chicago, by then under tow of the tug Navajo, toward Espiritu Santo. Halsey then ordered the undamaged cruisers back to Efate. At 1500 they turned east. Two hours later Merrill's unit intercepted a dispatch that Chicago had been sunk and a destroyer damaged. Burrough's report, the history says, "briefly recounted factual details." McVay added only, "The conduct of the officers and crew left nothing to be desired." The Legion of Merit citation later published for Burrough places this night in Task Force 68 on 28 January and says many enemy planes were destroyed. The combat narrative and the ship's history put the attack on the evening of 29 January, in Giffen's Task Force 18, and they do not give Cleveland a claim of many kills. Task Force 68 is the number Merrill's cruisers carried the next month. The citation's date and force number are recorded in the Gaps section; the night itself is told here from the ship's history and the combat narrative.
The force refueled at Efate on 31 January, joined Vice Admiral Herbert F. Leary's battleships north and east of the Santa Cruz Islands on 4 February, and was sent back to base on 10 February after Guadalcanal was secured. Merrill kept the division at sea for exercises and anchored in Havannah Harbor on the afternoon of 14 February. That evening he learned of his promotion to rear admiral and broke his flag in Montpelier.
Halsey then made the cruisers Task Force 68 for Operation Cleanslate, the occupation of the Russell Islands on 21 February. With Denver now in the division, they left Havannah Harbor on 19 February, met the landing force at Port Purvis, and patrolled between the Russells and Guadalcanal while Merrill drilled radar, night fighting, and anti-aircraft fire. On 26 February they rejoined Giffen's Task Force 18 for distant cover. Parsons was aboard Cleveland again to watch the proximity-fuse ammunition fired in burst tests. The citation's phrase is that the ship "operated with the Covering Force during the occupation of Russell Island." The ship's history is the patrol and the distant cover just described. It does not describe a landing under her guns.
On the night of 5–6 March Merrill took Task Force 68 up the Slot to bombard the Vila airfield on Kolombangara. Before midnight a search-plane report from Guadalcanal said two Japanese light cruisers or destroyers were moving south from Shortland at high speed. Merrill kept on. At 0010 on 6 March Cleveland entered Kula Gulf at 20 knots, in column between Montpelier and Denver, with Waller and Conway ahead and Cony on the flank. At 0055 her radar operators reported a surface contact to the southwest at 16,100 yards. Two minutes later it was two pips, heading north. They were the destroyers Murasame and Minegumo, returning from a supply run to Kolombangara. At 10,000 yards Merrill ordered fire. Montpelier opened at 0101 and Waller fired five torpedoes. Cleveland's starboard five-inch guns and then her main battery joined, all three cruisers shooting at Murasame. In seven minutes, the history says, Cleveland alone fired 120 six-inch and 60 five-inch rounds. The sixth salvo made the first hit. The Japanese return fire was slow and ragged. The history continues through the sinking of both destroyers and a check of the gulf with starshells. No other ship was there. The formation turned north, slowed to 15 knots, and at 0127 began the bombardment. Cleveland fired a two-round ranging salvo and then her main battery and port five-inch guns onto preset targets at the airfield and the bivouacs. Japanese coast guns straddled her three or four times before the five-inch batteries silenced them. Burrough thought the barrage "not spectacular." A Black Cat spotter saw an ammunition dump burning and guns knocked out; another observer called it highly devastating. She ceased fire after eleven minutes, having fired 628 five-inch and 618 six-inch shells. The force was not hit. It retired north at 30 knots, saw flares of the kind that had preceded the Rennell attack, found no aircraft on radar, picked up the destroyers that had shelled Munda, and anchored at Point Purvis during the forenoon of 6 March.
Merrill, still thinking he had sunk two light cruisers, signaled Halsey: "Sank two light cruisers. What is the 1943 bag limit on those bastards? Bombardment completed." The history notes that the fight had no official name and came to be called, informally, the Battle of Blackett Strait, though the shooting was in Kula Gulf. Of his own ship Burrough wrote: "This initial night surface engagement provided a needed test of unseasoned personnel and material. It was gratifying to have each officer, man and instrument function more effectively than during exercises and target practices." The ship's history says he received the Legion of Merit with Combat "V" for that night and for Rennell Island. The fuller citation, as printed by the Hall of Valor, also names the Russell covering duty and the January torpedo-plane attack, speaks of continual threat from submarines and from bombing and torpedo planes, and credits "courage, determination and good seamanship" and the efficiency of the ship's organization. It gives his file number as 0-8591, the same number the 1944 Navy Register index prints beside his name. McVay received a Silver Star for the cruise. This account does not have McVay's citation.
From early March through late June the history has Cleveland and the division alternating drills and upkeep in Havannah Harbor with short patrols and exercises. The register of 1 July 1945, in the rear-admiral list, dates Burrough's temporary rank 11 April 1943 by ditto from Vincent R. Murphy's printed date, and the register of 1 July 1947 prints that temporary-rank date on his own line as 11 April 1943 while his permanent rank remains captain from 1 July 1940. He was still Cleveland's commanding officer. On 19 June 1943 Captain Andrew G. Shepard relieved him. The ship's history says Shepard had only a few days to learn the ship before the next operation. On 25 June, the second Legion of Merit citation says, Burrough became senior naval member of the Joint War Plans Committee. The bombardment of the Shortlands on 30 June, and everything Cleveland did after that, belongs to other captains.
Cost
The fight he actually had was mostly other men's decisions and his own ship's work. At Fedhala the cease-fire arrived before the bombardment he had been sent to fire. The torpedo he did meet was avoided by a turn he ordered, and by a weapon that failed to explode. At Rennell his cruiser shot and was not hit, while Chicago was lost on the next day under tow, and the report he signed was, in the history's description, a brief recital of facts. He did not claim the planes his gunners had only marked. In Kula Gulf the radar contact was his ship's, the order to fire was Merrill's, and the ammunition expenditure was his battery's: nearly two hundred rounds in the seven minutes against Murasame, then more than twelve hundred in eleven minutes against Vila. He called the shore bombardment not spectacular and called the night a test that his unseasoned crew and instruments had passed. That is the whole of his own voice in the sources read here, besides McVay's one sentence that the conduct of officers and crew left nothing to be desired.
The citation turns those nights into courage and seamanship. The ship's history does not record a wound, a court, or a relief for cause. It records a captain who left on 19 June, six days before the planning job dated in the second citation, and about two months after the register's date of his temporary flag rank, with the division about to go out again. The cost that can be stated is the one the papers state: a new cruiser taken from fitting-out to the Atlantic and then into the Slot, a heavy cruiser lost alongside, two destroyers sunk in a gulf at night, a shore target smothered, and then the captain himself taken off the ship.
After
The second Legion of Merit, a gold star in lieu of another award, is printed by the Hall of Valor for Rear Admiral Edmund Weidmann Burrough. It dates him as senior naval member of the Joint War Plans Committee from 25 June 1943 to 28 March 1945, as Director of Post War Planning from 30 April 1945, and, in addition, as Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Logistics Plans from 24 July 1945 to 31 August 1945. The language is the language of citations: foresight, judgment, a part in the strategic plans by which the war was won, and then the plans for the Navy after the fighting stopped. No order, memorandum, or memoir opened here shows how he argued any of those plans, or what he refused.
On 1 July 1947 the Navy Register still lists him among rear admirals. The permanent rank on that line is captain, dated 1 July 1940; the temporary rank is dated 11 April 1943; birth is 28 October 1890; the pay-entry base date is 20 June 1910. The line does not name a duty. Compilations drawn from later registers, including a list of tombstone promotions that cites the Navy Register, give 1 November 1952 as the day he retired and was advanced to vice admiral on the strength of a combat commendation, rank without the pay of the higher grade. The Hall of Valor states flatly that he retired as a vice admiral. A broken reading of the 1957 register shows "RADM" beside his name and date fragments that match 11 April 1943, 1 November 1952, and 28 October 1890. It is not a clean printing of "vice admiral." An unofficial roll of Navy burials at Arlington calls him a vice admiral and an early submarine commander, which matches B-1 and S-26, and does not transcribe a grave number.
A New York Times headline indexed for 10 May 1962 reads "Admiral Edmund Burrough Dies; Honored for Cruiser Command." The article itself was not opened. A secondary officer list gives 8 May 1962 and cites an Arlington record under the misspelled middle name Weidemann. No death certificate, obituary text, widow, or child was in the sources actually read. The ship's history stops being his on 19 June 1943. What he left that can be tied to him, rather than to the cruiser's later thirteen battle stars, is the commissioning and the first year, the two Legion of Merit citations, and the reports quoted above.