Ships
- USS Bearss (DD-654) Captain from 1945
He is also not James P. Compton, the commander carried in the same Navy Directories on the staff of Cruiser Division 7; not James R. Compton of Patrol Squadron 32; not Philip D. Compton, commanding officer of Shark; not Oliver D. Compton, a Naval Reserve ensign on Benham; not George P. Compton; not Arthur A. Compton of the Marine Corps; and not the James Emmett Compton born at Greenwood, South Carolina, in 1944, a later Navy man whose life is a different obituary. Once the wartime Registers print a file number beside this officer, his is 82789.
Set against the way the same sentence is built on other pages of the list, it is the chopped start of a month. The month is not used below as a date of command. The ship is a lead only, taken up where the compilations that repeat it can be separated from the Registers.
Origins
The Registers that print a date of birth beside Emmett Mobley Compton agree. The Register of 1 July 1943 places "22 Feb. 17" on his line, after the dittos and before the next signal number. The Register of 1 July 1945 does the same: signal 5933, the name, three dittos, then 22 February 1917 and 1 July 1935. The Registers of 1 January 1950, 1 January 1954, and 1 January 1960 repeat the birth figures as 2 22 17. He was born on 22 February 1917.
No parent, no street, and no appointing senator have turned up in the volumes read for this essay. The middle name Mobley is printed in the Lucky Bag and in the Registers. It is not expanded here into a mother's surname, because no record in hand says whose name it was. The town the Naval Academy yearbook was willing to print is Greenwood, South Carolina. The Lucky Bag of the class of 1939, on the page the index numbers 104, heads the sketch "Emmett Mobley Compton, Greenwood, South Carolina," and the nickname "Emmett."
He entered the Academy on 1 July 1935. That date sits on his line in the Register of 1 July 1945, in the place where the man ahead of him, Arthur Frederick Fischer, Jr., carries a different birth date and a different entry date, so the pair is his and not a ditto carried too far. He was eighteen. The class he joined would be commissioned four years later.
The sketch over the photograph is classmate prose, not a service record, and it is the only picture of him before the fleet that has been found. It says a native son of South Carolina brought "the traditional friendliness of the South and also some of that independence of spirit for which South Carolina is especially famous." It says a "healthy, easy-going, tolerant attitude toward life" kept him on the radiator squad in spite of "athletic potentialities," and occasionally landed him in tight spots, and that "when aroused, his natural abilities have always kept him on top." The lines printed with the sketch are "Lacrosse Manager 1; Battalion Soccer 1; Juice Gang 3; Log Staff 3, 2; 1 P.O." The yearbook, on the pages read here, does not define those marks. They are left as printed: lacrosse manager and battalion soccer in his first-class year, the "Juice Gang" in his third-class year, the Log staff in his third-class and second-class years, and one petty-officer stripe.
The first-class battalion pages of the same book place a Compton in Second Company, First Battalion, under Lieutenant (j.g.) D. L. Roscoe. He is the only Compton in the class biography. A list of names that includes "E. M. Compton" falls in a passage about the new chess club, but the columns on that page are interleaved with the stamp club and cannot be trusted as a membership roll. The chess line is not used.
That is the whole of the boy from Greenwood that a document will support. No letter home, no high-school notice, no father's trade. A midshipman his classmates called easy-going, put on the Log, given the lacrosse manager's job rather than a place in the game, and credited with an independence they thought would keep him "welcome, liked, and respected" in the Navy. The Navy that followed did not make him an aviator and did not send him to submarines. The designator the later Registers give him is 1100, an unrestricted line officer. The radiator squad and the lacrosse managership are the last intimate sentences anyone published about him.
Formation
The Registers of 1936 and 1937 index him as a midshipman, "Compton, Emmett M., Mid," pages 397 and 392. On 1 July 1939, the summer of his graduation, the index is "6721 Compton, Emmett M., Ens 246." The later Registers, in the column that follows his birth date, print 6 01 39. Read the way those volumes print the same column for his classmates, that is 1 June 1939, the ordinary date on which the class of 1939 was commissioned ensign. The Register of 1 July 1941, which still indexes him as an ensign, signal 6706, prints "26 June 39" on his own line, not as a ditto. That reading is not the same as 1 June. It is left as a conflict. The commission used here is the date the later Registers repeat, 1 June 1939. He was twenty-two.
The Navy Directory, not the Register, is what says where the new ensign went. The Directory of 1 June 1940 lists "Compton, Emmett M., ens, u s s Montgomery." The Directory of 1 April 1941 lists him the same way: ensign, USS Montgomery. The books do not give a hull number, a billet, or a department. They do separate him, on the same pages, from the other Comptons already named. The Montgomery then in commission, the ship whose 7 December 1941 action report is headed U.S.S. Montgomery and signed at Pearl Harbor, was the destroyer minelayer DM-17. The directories assign him to the name. They do not assign him to the morning of the attack, and that report does not mention him.
On 1 July 1941 the Register still has him an ensign. On 1 July 1942 the index has changed grade: "6506 Compton, Emmett M., Lt 234." On 1 July 1943 he is still a lieutenant, signal 6347. No Register consulted for the year between July 1941 and July 1942 prints him as lieutenant (junior grade). If he held that grade, it fell between the annual books. It is not invented here to fill the step.
On 1 July 1944 the index reads "6156 Compton, Emmett M,, Lt. Cd 82789 106." Lieutenant commander, file number 82789, the page the index calls 106. On 1 July 1945 the alphabetical block gives signal 5933, "COMPTON EMMETT M," "L TCD," file 82789. The same volume's body list, as already cited, gives the birth date and the Academy entry. No number stands, in the OCR of those pages, in a column of special courses that would mark him a submariner, an aviator, or a postgraduate. Classmates in the same indexes carry staff corps abbreviations and Marine commissions. His line does not.
That is the formation the peacetime and early-war Navy actually recorded. Midshipman from the summer of 1935, ensign from the summer of 1939, still an ensign in the Directory of April 1941 and in the Register of July 1941, lieutenant by July 1942 and still a lieutenant in July 1943, lieutenant commander by July 1944, file 82789. One ship named, twice, and not described. No aviation designation, no submarine qualification, no course digit the Register thought worth printing. The man the Lucky Bag had kept on the radiator squad reached the rank at which the Navy gave officers destroyers, and the Registers stopped saying where he was.
War years as lived
The Registers of the war years dropped the station column that had made Montgomery visible. From the summer of 1941 until the compilations that name Bearss, the official books used here have his rank and not his ocean.
What they have is the rank, and it is not a cruise. He was an ensign on Montgomery at the two directory dates, 1 June 1940 and 1 April 1941. Eight months after the second of those dates, on 7 December 1941, the commanding officer of Montgomery (DM-17), nested with Mine Division Two in berth D-3 at Pearl Harbor, signed an action report. The signature is R. A. Guthrie, lieutenant commander. The report commends "all hands" and names one seaman. It does not name Compton. Nothing found for this essay says whether the ensign of April was still on board in December, had been detached, or was ashore. The attack is the ship's. It is not narrated as his morning.
After that the paper is blank until the grade changes already given: lieutenant in the Registers of 1 July 1942 and 1 July 1943, lieutenant commander, file 82789, on 1 July 1944 and again on 1 July 1945. No war diary, no deck log, and no award citation in the sources consulted puts a ship under his name in those three years. No letter, no newspaper, and no classmate's memoir has turned up to say what he did with the independence the Lucky Bag had advertised. The pressure of those years, if he was at sea for them, is not in the file that could be opened from here.
The only ship command attached to him in print is USS Bearss (DD-654), a Fletcher-class destroyer commissioned on 12 April 1944 under Commander John A. Webster. The encyclopedia stub says a lieutenant commander took her in 1945. uboat.net lists Lieutenant Commander Emmett Mobley Compton from 13 April 1945, with no end date, and says it has no career information and no events for him. NavSource's commanding-officer list, credited there to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, gives March 1945 to September 1946. Those two lists do not agree on the month he reported, and neither is a deck log. The ship's own published histories, including the Wikipedia summary of the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships entry, tell Bearss in the North Pacific through the end of the war and back to Charleston in December 1945, and they do not mention Compton at all. A list can put a name on a ship. It cannot, by itself, put the man on a bridge at Matsuwa or in the Sea of Okhotsk.
He was still a lieutenant commander in the Register of 1 July 1945, two months before the war ended. If the NavSource end date were right he would have kept Bearss through the first postwar year, until September 1946, and the ship went into commission in reserve that July and out of commission in reserve the following January. Those are the ship's dates, from the same published summary, and they are not his until a log says so. No decoration is printed beside his name in the Registers read here. None has been found in a citation.
After
The next dated fact is a marriage, and it comes from his widow's obituary, not from a Navy book. Alice Elizabeth Compton, born in 1927 at Elberton, Georgia, to Wilena and Douglas Compton, left Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, after her sophomore year, where she had been a music major, and married Lieutenant Commander Emmett Mobley Compton in 1946. She already bore the surname. The obituary does not say whether they were cousins or only namesakes, and nothing else found here settles it. The year 1946, with no month given, makes her eighteen or nineteen and him twenty-eight or twenty-nine. The rank she remembered for the wedding is the rank the July 1945 Register had printed the summer before.
The Registers after the war keep the name and change the grade, and they still do not name a ship. On 1 January 1950 the line reads Compton, Emmett Mobley, LCDR, with the figures 7 01 49, the birth figures 2 22 17, and 6 01 39. On 1 January 1954 he stands in the block headed "COMMANDERS LINE," and the grade abbreviation beside the name is CDR, while the same 7 01 49 still sits in the date column ahead of the same birth date. A lieutenant commander's date of 1 July 1949 in the 1950 book, and a commander's date that the 1954 OCR still prints as 1 July 1949, cannot both be taken as the day he put on the new stripe. The 1950 book is used for the grade it prints, lieutenant commander. The 1954 book is used for the grade it prints, commander. The shared 1949 figure is not smoothed into a promotion date.
On 1 January 1960 he is in the section headed "LINE CAPTAINS." The column key on that page gives lineal number, name, designator, present rank, and date of entry. His lineal number reads 02563-90. The source code is 01, which that Register's own note defines as the Naval Academy, and the year group is 39. The designator is 1100. The present-rank date, in the place where the captains around him carry their dates, is 7 01 58, read as 1 July 1958. Birth is again 22 February 1917, and the entry figures are again 6 01 39. The Register of 1 January 1964 still lists "COMPTON EMMETT MOBLEY," source 01, year 39, designator 1100, with 07 01 58 on one of the two OCR passes through his line. A second pass in the same file reads 07 01 50. The 1958 date is the one that matches the 1960 captains' section. The 1950 reading is not used as a second date of rank.
One billet in those captain's years is on paper. A declassified roster filed in the CIA reading room, headed "Project USEFUL, 25–26 May 1965, Student Roster, Joint Staff – Defense Intelligence Agency," lists "Emmett M. Compton, Capt, USN," present assignment "Chief, General Operations Division, J-3." The roster gives him two days as a student and a staff title. It does not say what the course taught, how long he had held the division, or what the division did on any morning that was not 25 or 26 May. The initial M and the rank match the Register captain. The full middle name is not on the roster. No other Emmett M. Compton, captain, U.S. Navy, has appeared in the Registers read here.
The Register of 1 January 1968, officers on active duty, has an alphabetical Compton block. Emmett Mobley Compton is not in it. Bryan, Charles, Clark, Freddy, and the rest are. He is not between them under any spelling tried. By that New Year's Day he was off the active list this volume records.
His wife's obituary, published in 2021, is the only account of the life that list does not show. She wrote that for twenty-eight years she lived "her life of duty as a naval officer's wife," and that she sang in musical theater "in many of their assignment locations, from Coronado, CA to Virginia Beach to Alexandria, VA." Alexandria is at least consistent with a Joint Staff tour in the Washington area in 1965. Coronado and Virginia Beach are places she named, not ships, and not dates. Upon his retirement they moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico. She took a B.A. in economics and sold real estate. The obituary does not date the retirement. Twenty-eight years counted from the 1946 marriage would run past the 1968 Register, which already omits him. Both statements are in the sources. They are not reconciled below.
He died in 2003. The obituary says "Captain Emmett M. Compton, (USNA 39') Ret." died that year, and does not say the day or the cause. The Social Security entry for an Emmett Compton, born 22 February 1917, last residence Las Cruces, zip 88005, gives a date of death of 20 September 2003. The index does not print the middle name. The birth date is the Register's birth date, the year is the widow's year, and the town is the town she said they moved to. No death notice of his own, and no grave record, was found to confirm the day independently. He was eighty-six if that September date is his.
She died on 29 May 2021 in Austin, Texas, at ninety-three. The children she named are Catherine Anne Masterson of Atlanta, John Douglas Compton of Albuquerque, and Mary Alice Durbin of Austin, and she named five grandchildren. That is the family the obituary says he left. Nothing in it, or in the Registers, says how he was with them, or what the sea had cost the household. The widow's sentence is that she was at peace and looking forward to reuniting with him. It is her sentence, not his.