Pacific ships

USN · Lieutenant Commander

McDowell, Ellis Hole

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Ellis Hole McDowell was born on 29 May 1914 and served as a line officer in the United States Navy through the Second World War. He was a lieutenant (junior grade) in June 1940, a lieutenant in January 1942, and a lieutenant commander from 1 July 1943. On 20 July 1945, while he was commanding a destroyer in the Pacific, he was advanced to the temporary rank of commander. He died on 8 March 1993.

His wartime sea duty centered on the Fletcher-class destroyer Converse (DD-509), built at Bath Iron Works in Maine and commissioned in November 1942. McDowell was her executive officer under DeWitt Clinton Ellis Hamberger. In the summer of 1943 the ship worked the South Pacific escort routes, carrying men and supplies for the New Georgia campaign and moving between Espiritu Santo and Guadalcanal. That September she joined Destroyer Squadron 23 in the Solomon Islands, the squadron later remembered as the Little Beavers.

Hamberger was still captain for the hard fighting of November 1943, including the night action off Cape St. George on 25 November, when ships of the squadron caught a Japanese destroyer force. McDowell took command of Converse on 1 December 1943 as a lieutenant commander. For the next seven weeks she stayed with Squadron 23 in the northern Solomons, on bombardment and close-support work along coasts the Japanese still held, in waters threatened by aircraft and submarines. The squadron's Presidential Unit Citation covers operations from the opening of November 1943 into February 1944, so the cited period runs across the end of Hamberger's tour, the whole of McDowell's first command, and the opening of the next captain's tour.

On 20 January 1944 McDowell turned Converse over to John Barr Colwell, who later became a vice admiral. Colwell kept the ship through the Central Pacific campaign of 1944, including the Marianas, and brought her back to the California coast for overhaul. McDowell returned as commanding officer on 27 September 1944, near the end of that yard period. Early in October Converse was in San Francisco Bay. In November she was in the western Pacific again, screening carrier forces that covered the convoy routes into Leyte. After a short tender period at Manus she went on to San Pedro Bay in Leyte Gulf.

That second command carried him through the last year of the war, when Japanese aircraft, kamikazes among them, were the chief danger to ships on the Philippines routes. Converse came through the war with eleven battle stars. Damage to the ship stayed minor, and she lost no one to enemy action. McDowell was her captain for two separate parts of that record: the short Solomon Islands command from 1 December 1943 to 20 January 1944, and the longer command that began on 27 September 1944 and was still his when the fighting ended. The July 1945 promotion to temporary commander came during that second tour.

In 1957 he was a captain. His father, retired Captain C. S. McDowell, a Navy engineer tied to the work of moving and assembling the great telescope for Mount Palomar, died in California that July. The family notice named Captain Ellis H. McDowell as his son.