Ships
- USS Twining (DD-540) Captain, 1 December 1943 – 27 January 1945
Ellis Kerr Wakefield was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on 28 July 1906, and that city remained his home. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1930. On 30 June 1938 he was a lieutenant. From about the middle of 1939 until about the middle of 1941 he commanded the minesweeper Penguin, a small ship occupied with mine warfare and the daily drills of a peacetime crew.
He became a temporary lieutenant commander on 15 June 1942 and a temporary commander on 15 October 1942. On 1 December 1943 he took command of the new Fletcher-class destroyer Twining at her commissioning in the Bethlehem Steel yard at San Francisco. The ship honored Rear Admiral Nathan Crook Twining. She left San Francisco on 21 December for shakedown and finished that cruise at San Diego on Christmas Day. After exercises off San Diego she returned to San Francisco, embarked passengers and cargo, and sailed on 11 February 1944. She entered Pearl Harbor on 17 February.
The crew then spent about three months rehearsing gunnery, bombardment, fire support, and amphibious landings. The drills prepared them for Operation Forager, the seizure of the Mariana Islands. When the fleet went west, Twining went with it. On 19 June 1944, during the carrier battle in the waters between the Philippines and Saipan, Wakefield had the destroyer on picket station in the path of the Japanese air attack. Dive bombers and torpedo planes made repeated runs. Twining shot down two aircraft, damaged two more, and drove many others off. Her crew came through the fight intact. Wakefield received the Silver Star for the way he fought the ship that day.
Through the autumn of 1944 and into January 1945, Twining screened the fast carriers. In September she joined Admiral William F. Halsey’s force, covered the Palau landings, and stayed with the carriers for early raids on Luzon, then replenished at Ulithi early in October. She remained in that screen for the opening of the Luzon campaign and for the Third Fleet’s sweep into the South China Sea, when the carriers struck the coasts of Indochina and China. On 17 and 18 December 1944 a typhoon overtook the fleet. Three ships were lost and many others were badly damaged. Twining stood by the light carrier Monterey after fire broke out aboard the carrier, and the destroyer herself came away with only minor damage.
At Ulithi on 27 January 1945, Frank Voris List relieved Wakefield in command of Twining. Albert Francis Hollingsworth took command of the destroyer on 8 September 1945 and kept her until she was decommissioned on 14 June 1946. Wakefield’s own tour had run from the commissioning day through the Marianas battle and the carrier raids that followed.
He was later promoted to captain and retired as a rear admiral. Ellis Kerr Wakefield died on 2 June 1975, at the age of 68, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.