Ships
- USS Howorth (DD-592) Captain, 3 April 1944 – 5 June 1945
“Captain” on that card is the billet. The rank printed beside the navy is Commander, and that is the rank the wartime record supports for the years he had the ship.
He is the Edward Stitt Burns of the Naval Academy class of 1931, the lieutenant commander the Navy’s own Aleutians narrative puts in command of USS Morris (DD-417) in May 1943, and the commander who commissioned Howorth and was still in her when a kamikaze hit the bridge off Okinawa. The Navy Registers from 1939 through 1960 carry Edward S. Burns and then, once the printing is full enough, Edward Stitt Burns, and the dates of rank move in one line from lieutenant (junior grade) to captain. He is not Edward M. Burns, a lieutenant in the same 1 July 1944 register; not Edward Joseph Burns, the enlisted radioman whose 2015 obituary is a different life; not Rear Admiral Edward Rhodes Stitt, the Navy surgeon; and not Martin Charles Burns, another midshipman in the 1930–31 Academy register who was a lieutenant commander when this Burns was. The attack transport Renville is sometimes given to him in a compiled list. That claim is not used below as a cruise. Neither is the later life of Howorth after he left her.
Origins
The class book is the earliest voice that is actually about him, and it is a classmate’s voice, fond of a joke. The 1931 Lucky Bag heads his sketch “Edward Stitt Burns,” nicknames “Bob,” “Ouema,” and “Pepper,” and the place under the name is Pittsview, Alabama. The sketch says he was born one year after the Jamestown Exposition, in Marbury, Alabama. The exposition was 1907, so the joke is a birth in 1908. It does not give the day. High school is waved off as an “obscure and painful period.” The next solid place is Auburn. Someone, the sketch says, let a copy of Robinson Crusoe fall into his hands, and he left “the loveliest village of the plain” — Auburn’s old name for itself — for the class of 1931, “another rebel.” The Crusoe business is yearbook humor. The Auburn attendance is the fact inside the joke. The book does not say he took a degree there, or how long he stayed, or who sent him.
The day comes from the Navy Register, read against that joke. In the register of 1 January 1960 his entry sits with the other 1931 officers, designator 1100, the unrestricted line, date of rank as captain 1 January 1951, and in the birth-date column the figures 8, 05, 08 — 5 August 1908, in the same place where the men above and below him have ordinary birth dates. The register of 1 January 1958 prints the same birth figures and the same date of rank. A secondary award site, the Hall of Valor, gives 5 August 1908 and 20 March 2001. The birth day is the register’s. The death day is not, and no obituary turned up to confirm it.
Who the parents were is not in the Academy register in any alignment clean enough to use, and it is not in the Lucky Bag beyond the two Alabama towns. A 2015 obituary for Joe Gay Burns of Auburn, born at Pittsview on 2 November 1916, names the parents as Edward R. Burns and Ethyl Stitt Burns and says four brothers died before him. It does not name the brothers. The middle name, the town, and the dates fit. They do not prove the household. It is left in the gaps.
Formation
What the classmates chose to say about him, once the geography is done, is temperament. “In his four years here his unfailing good humor and steadiness have won him as many friends as he has acquaintances. Try to get him ‘riled’ — just try! After you have worn yourself down to a grease spot you will find you have not even dented his affability.” He would wrestle anyone in the crowd for a small sum, they wrote, and throw him unless the other man was well above the average. “When the roll is called, Bob will be there — but if he isn’t, there will be many present who will be glad to answer up for him.” That is not a fitness report. It is twenty-two-year-olds writing a man they liked. It is also the only portrait of him before the war that is not a line in a register, and the traits they picked — hard to anger, willing to grapple, reliably present — are the ones his own later sentences, such as they are, do not contradict.
He is in the Annual Register of the Naval Academy for 1930–31 under the name Edward Stitt Burns, a midshipman of the first class, the class that would graduate in 1931. The appointing state and the day he entered sit in columns the scan has torn apart. A commander database gives 15 June 1927 for his entry as a midshipman. Many men in that register did enter on 15 June 1927. The date is not pinned to his name in a column that can be trusted, so it is not used as his. The registers that can be trusted begin after he was an officer.
On 1 July 1939 the Navy Register lists Edward S. Burns as a lieutenant (junior grade). On 1 July 1941 he is a lieutenant. On 1 July 1942 he is a lieutenant commander. On 1 July 1943 he is still a lieutenant commander. On 1 July 1944 he is a commander. The 1 July 1947 register, which for this block of 1931 men prints the permanent grade, lists Edward Stitt Burns as a lieutenant with 1 July 1939 in the date column — the permanent lieutenancy, not a demotion — and a following date that for the classmates next to him reads 18 November 1942 and is smashed on his own line. By the wartime register of 1944 the grade the Navy was using for him was commander. The 1947 book is remembering the permanent rank underneath the temporary one. None of these registers says what ship he was in. From his commissioning in 1931 until the spring of 1943, the sea duty is a blank. No Navy Directory entry, no deck log, no cruise book, and no letter of his from those years was found.
War, as he lived it
The first time an official narrative puts him on a bridge is not in the Philippines. It is in the fog of the Aleutians. The Navy’s combat narrative of that campaign, written up from the reports while the war was still on, prints the task organization for the Attu assault as the attack force prepared to sail in the first days of May 1943. Under the Northern Covering Group, Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen, three heavy cruisers — Louisville, San Francisco, Wichita — and four destroyers. One of the destroyers is Morris, and the officer named in command of her is Lt. Comdr. Edward S. Burns. That is this man. The July 1942 and July 1943 registers both have him as a lieutenant commander, and the initial and the surname match the Academy name.
What the narrative then does with Morris is almost nothing. The pages that follow are the landing: fog, D-day postponed, boats lost in the murk, soldiers drowning when a ramp dropped, a fight up the passes that the ships could only sometimes see. Giffen’s cruisers and their destroyers were there to meet a Japanese surface force if one came. The narrative does not describe Morris firing, rescuing, or being hit. Burns’s name does not appear again. A compiled list of commanding officers, the sort kept by NavSource and repeated by uboat.net, gives him Morris from 28 February 1943 to 3 August 1943. Those dates were not checked against a deck log. The ship’s Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships entry says that in May 1943 Morris went north to support the capture of Attu and Kiska and that after the Kiska operation she went to San Francisco for overhaul. It does not name Burns. Kiska was occupied on 15 August 1943. If the compiled end date of 3 August is right, he had already left before that landing. The summer is not narrated here as his cruise. What can be said is narrower, and it is enough to matter. In May 1943 he was a destroyer captain in a covering group off Attu, in the weather that made the whole campaign a matter of not being able to see the beach, with a job that was to be present if the Japanese fleet arrived. The fleet, in the event the narrative records, did not.
Then another blank, from the late summer of 1943 until the spring of 1944. No ship is named for him in that interval in any source used here.
On 3 April 1944 Puget Sound Navy Yard commissioned the new Fletcher-class destroyer Howorth. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships says she was launched there on 10 January 1943, sponsored by Mrs. R. P. Bromley, and commissioned with Comdr. E. S. Burns in command. He was her first captain. He had her for the whole of her war until she came home broken.
The Dictionary history of the ship under him is a string of amphibious roads, and it is the skeleton, not the man. After shakedown she sailed on 22 July 1944, screening a Marine convoy, and reached Pearl Harbor a week later. She trained in Hawaiian waters, left on 25 August, joined the Seventh Fleet at Hollandia, and on 30 September was at Morotai, newly taken. On 16 October she left Humboldt Bay for Leyte and arrived on 22 October, three days after the landings. Other ships fought the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Howorth guarded the transport anchorages. Convoys to Kossol Roads, Guam, and Manus followed. She was back for the Ormoc landings on 7 December. On 12 December she left with the cruiser Nashville for Mindoro and came under kamikaze attack. Off Mindoro she bombarded Mangarin Bay. Three suicide planes came at her. Two were shot down close aboard. The third damaged her mast and splashed. She was back at Hollandia, by way of Leyte, on 28 December.
A later summary of her action reports, published by the Destroyer History Foundation, is more particular about 15 December and puts words in his mouth. Three “Zekes,” it says, came in with unmistakable suicide intent. One, believed hit, overshot, and pieces of the plane and the pilot’s body fell on board. Within twenty or thirty seconds the second hit the air-search radar and the forecastle and crashed off the port bow. “Lady luck smiled and smiled,” the Foundation says Capt. Burns wrote. The rank in that sentence is his later one. In December 1944 he was a commander. The sentence, if it is his, is the first time we hear him after the Lucky Bag, and what he reaches for is not a tally. It is luck. Yeoman James Orvill Raines, whose letters from the ship were published long after as Good Night Officially, described the same day to his wife in a letter of 16 December, as a reviewer of that book retells it: the first plane barely missed the after stack, the second glanced off the port forecastle, the third was hit by the gunners and crashed into a smaller ship. The three accounts — the Dictionary, the Foundation’s report summary, and the yeoman’s letter — are the same hour and not the same details. None of them is the deck log. They agree that the ship was struck at and not killed, and that Burns was the man who had to say what had happened.
Lingayen came next. Howorth arrived with the first reinforcement group on 13 January 1945, after more suicide attacks on the way in, and stayed until 1 February on fire support, air defense, and patrol. The Foundation’s summary of the 14 January shore-bombardment report says that, on an antisubmarine screen under the tactical command of Destroyer Squadron 54, she fired fifteen five-gun salvos at shore targets as the shore fire-control party called them. From Luzon she went to Saipan on 15 February for rehearsals, and on 19 February she was off Iwo Jima. She stayed nearly a month, air action and shore bombardment, and left on 14 March. A short rest at Ulithi, and then Okinawa.
She screened a transport group up from Ulithi and arrived with the invasion fleet on 1 April 1945. Shore fire and screening again, and aircraft. The Dictionary, on the page the Naval History and Heritage Command has up, then makes a mess of the date. It says that while she was proceeding with the cruiser St. Louis “to station 1 April,” the two ships were attacked by no less than eight kamikazes, that she was crashed in the superstructure, and that nine men were “billed.” “Billed” is a mistype of killed. “1 April” is the day she arrived, not the day she was hit. The same history as printed by the Destroyer History Foundation says 6 April. The Navy Cross citation is for 1 to 6 April and puts the heavy assault, and the crash, on 6 April. Samuel J. Cox, writing in 2020 as Director of Naval History, puts Howorth with St. Louis about 1600 on the day of the first mass suicide attack and has the plane hit the main-battery director. The 6th is the day.
Cox’s sequence, which he marks as depending largely on Morison’s casualty appendix and on later corrections, is this. A two-plane attack came in about 1600. Howorth and St. Louis shot the first down together. The second barely missed Howorth, passed between the stacks, and crashed on the far side. She started toward the damaged destroyer Hyman. Two groups of four Zekes came at her. Of the first group, one was shot down, two missed, and the fourth grazed the fantail and hit the water. A fifth was shot down. The sixth hit the main-battery director, killing nine and wounding fourteen. While the fires were being knocked down, the 40 mm guns shot down another Zeke from astern. She made Kerama Retto under her own power, and then the United States for repair. Cox does not name the captain. The ship was Burns’s.
The Foundation’s operations page tells it with different clock times and with his name. She was steaming independently toward an antisubmarine station off the Hagushi beaches. She paused to shoot at a plane diving on St. Louis. Word came that Hyman had been hit, and she worked up to 25 knots. A “Val” banked between the stacks, cut the radio antenna, and crashed close aboard. At 1700 she shot down a Zeke. At 1703 another brushed the fantail, took lifelines, and went into the water. She riddled a third that was diving on a minesweeper. Ammunition passers could hardly keep up. Then a Zeke, in a long glide, flew into the main-battery director. Burning gasoline drenched the bridge. Steering went out. Repair parties put the fire out. Steering was taken aft. The ship was conned from the secondary station. Another Zeke was killed by 40 mm fire. The guns and the engines, the account says, never stopped. A destroyer escort sent to help her could not catch her. She was going somewhere faster than the escort’s best speed.
The same page attributes three sentences to him. The ship had gone quickly “back to battery.” “Once again, Lady Luck was on board ship. The plane that crashed could have caused considerably more damage.” And: “The contributing factors in stopping these suiciders proved to be high speed, a large volume of accurate fire, and radical maneuvers.” Another paragraph on the same page, apparently from a different report or a different telling, says seven men were killed, that she was boxed in by minesweepers and could not finish a turn, and that the last words heard from the gunnery officer were “target angle zero.” Nearby, it says, Newcomb and Leutze took five suicide hits between them and were not so lucky. Those sentences are the Foundation’s, drawn, it says, from the action reports, the deck log, and the casualty list. The reports themselves were not read for this essay. The clock in Cox is about 1600. The clock on the Foundation’s page is 1700 and after. Both can be roughly the same afternoon if one of them is loose. They are not the same narrative.
The citation that followed is the government’s version, and it counts airplanes differently again. The text printed by the Hall of Valor and by Home of Heroes says the President takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Commander Edward Stitt Burns for service as commanding officer of Howorth in transport screening off Okinawa from 1 to 6 April 1945. It says he held the ship at combat readiness and drove off attacking aircraft. On 6 April, under a heavy assault, he splashed one suicide plane and shot down a second close aboard. Then eight planes came in together. He maneuvered at high speed, destroyed four, and a fifth crashed the ship. He started damage control, “quickly minimized the damage,” and “returned her safe to port.” The authority line is Commander, Fifth Task Fleet, Serial 01553, 13 September 1945. The serial was not pulled from the National Archives for this essay. The citation is an award text. It does not name the dead. Its airplane count does not match Cox, and it does not match the letter he wrote the next day.
That letter is the closest thing to his own voice on the day, and it was not written for a citation. James Orvill Raines, yeoman, had been a reporter at the Dallas Morning News. His battle station was bridge telephone talker. He stood near the captain with a headset and passed the word. On 6 April he was burned and went into the water, and he died in the arms of a shipmate, Russell Bramble, who was picked up later. A summary of the published letters says the captain wrote to Raines’s wife, Ray Ellen, the day after the attack: “After the ship shot down five dive bombers which fell flaming into the sea nearby, the sixth crashed out of control onto the ship in the vicinity of Orvill’s battle station. Several men, including Orvill, were observed to jump or were blown overboard and were seen in the water. It is possible that one of the several ships close by picked him up. We have no information as to whether he was injured or has been recovered as yet.” She did not get confirmation of the death until 1 June, their fifth anniversary, in a letter from Bramble. The original of Burns’s letter was not seen. The wording is the summary’s quotation from the book. Five shot down and a sixth that crashed is yet another count, and “dive bombers” is not Cox’s Zekes. A letter written the next day, to a woman who did not yet know she was a widow, is allowed to be simpler than an action report. What it is, as a document of the man, is careful. He does not tell her Orvill is all right. He does not tell her Orvill is dead. He says they saw him in the water and they do not know.
The Dictionary says the ship was sent home for repairs and arrived at Mare Island on 2 May 1945. She did not go back out until after a July shakedown, sailing for Pearl Harbor on 15 July, and she was on her way to Adak on 15 August when the surrender was announced. Those later passages are the ship’s, under another captain if the relief date holds. The deck log of the relief was not seen. The date is consistent across those lists and consistent with a man who brought her into the yard and left before she was whole again. It is used here as that, not as a log entry.
What it cost
The cost that can be named is other people’s. Seven dead, or nine, and fourteen wounded, or sixteen, depending on which account is opened. Cox, following the line of Morison’s appendix and saying he uses a higher figure when a later one exists, has nine killed and fourteen wounded. The published-letters summary has seven killed and sixteen wounded, and says the book’s account is seven. The Dictionary’s “nine” is the same number as Cox, under a mistyped verb. The Foundation’s page says seven in one paragraph and does not settle the other. No muster of the names was retrieved except Raines, and he is known because his wife kept the letters. The men who died stood, some of them, on the bridge with the captain. The gunnery officer’s last reported words, if that paragraph is right, were a target angle. Burns’s ship handling is what the citation praises. The dead are what the handling did not prevent, and he knew the arithmetic well enough to call it luck both times — at Mindoro, when the plane glanced off, and at Okinawa, when it did not.
What it cost him is not in the record. There is no letter of his to his own house. There is no report of a wound. He brought the ship to Kerama Retto under power, and then to Mare Island, and the citation says he returned her safe to port. “Safe” is the Navy’s word for a ship that could steam, with a burned bridge and men missing. He was relieved, on the compiled date, a month after she reached the yard, and he did not take her back to the surrender. The Navy Cross was in the papers in September, after the war was over, for six days in April. Between the permanent lieutenancy of 1939 and the captain’s rank of 1951, the thing he is known for is those six days and the year of convoy and bombardment that led to them.
After
He stayed in the Navy. The 1 July 1947 register still has Edward Stitt Burns on the active list, in the permanent grade of lieutenant with the 1 July 1939 date, among his classmates. The registers of 1 January 1958 and 1 January 1960 list him as a captain, designator 1100, date of rank 1 January 1951, birth 5 August 1908, year-group 1931. He was still on the active-duty register at the start of 1960. A commander database says he retired on 1 July 1960. That day was not found in a retired list read for this essay. It is possible. It is not proved. The same database, and the Hall of Valor, say he retired a captain. The 1960 register supports the rank. It does not say the day he left.
A compiled commanding-officer list for the attack transport Renville (APA-227) names Captain Edward Stitt Burns, Naval Academy 1931, from August 1955 to 7 July 1956, between Arthur Finn Spring and Robert Stewart Burdick. That is the kind of list the project has been told not to treat as a cruise unless it is traced. No change-of-command program, no deck log, and no Dictionary sentence naming him in Renville was found. The rank and the dates are possible for a captain who was on the active list in 1958. They are not narrated.
No postwar billet, no wife, no child, and no place of retirement was found in the registers or in the newspapers searched. The Hall of Valor and uboat.net give 20 March 2001 as the day he died, which would make him ninety-two. No obituary, no cemetery, and no death notice was found to say where, or who was there, or what he had been in the forty years after the 1960 register. If the Pittsview family is his, he died before Joe Gay Burns and would be one of the four unnamed brothers in that 2015 notice. That is a conjecture, and it is marked as one.
The man who can be seen is smaller than a career and more particular than a citation. An Alabama boy from Marbury and Pittsview, briefly at Auburn, four years at Annapolis as Bob, hard to rile, a wrestler for a small sum. A blank decade of junior officer’s duty, visible only as rising rank. A lieutenant commander’s name on a covering destroyer in the Aleutian fog, and then a new ship of his own from the day she commissioned. A year of other people’s landings, with suicide planes at Mindoro that he credited to luck, and one afternoon off Okinawa when the luck, by his own later phrase, was that the crash was not worse. He wrote a careful letter to a yeoman’s wife and did not pretend to know whether her husband was alive. Nine men, or seven, were not. He got the ship home, left her in the yard, and remained a captain in the peacetime register. What he was to a family of his own, and how he died, the sources used here do not say.