Ships
- USS Jarvis (DD-799) Captain from 3 June 1944
Ernest Bradford Ellsworth Jr. (15 September 1909 – 22 October 2006) was a United States Navy officer from Hartford, Connecticut. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1931, and in the Second World War he commanded two destroyers in two very different oceans. The first was the old flush-deck destroyer Upshur, in which he served as executive officer from mid-1940 and as commanding officer from November 1942 into early 1944, escorting convoys in the North Atlantic. Among them was the slow convoy SC-122 in March 1943, during the largest convoy battle of the war. He then commissioned the new Fletcher-class destroyer Jarvis at Seattle in June 1944 and took her to the North Pacific, where she spent the last year of the war raiding the Kurile Islands and sweeping the Sea of Okhotsk. He received the Bronze Star with Combat "V" for that service. After the war he commanded a subgroup of the Pacific Reserve Fleet, the light cruiser Oakland during her inactivation, the fleet oiler Mattaponi, the attack transport Navarro and Destroyer Squadron 17. His last post was chief of the United States Naval Mission to Colombia. He retired with the rank of rear admiral, died in 2006 at the age of ninety-seven, and is buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego.
He was born in Hartford on 15 September 1909, into one of the oldest families in Connecticut. His father, Ernest Bradford Ellsworth, born in Hartford in 1870, had graduated from Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1893 and practiced law in the city for many years. The father was a member of the Connecticut Historical Society and the Sons of the American Revolution, and around 1900 he was an officer of the Connecticut society of the Order of the Founders and Patriots of America. The boy's grandfather, Dr. Pinckney Webster Ellsworth, had practiced medicine in Hartford for more than fifty years and gone to the First Battle of Bull Run as surgeon to the Connecticut brigade of volunteers. His great-grandfather, William Wolcott Ellsworth, had been governor of Connecticut and a member of Congress, and his great-great-grandfather was Oliver Ellsworth, Chief Justice of the United States. On his grandfather's side the family also descended from the lexicographer Noah Webster: Governor Ellsworth had married Emily Webster, Noah Webster's eldest daughter. A family genealogy of 1915 also traces the line to Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony; Bradford was the middle name of both the boy and his father.
His mother, Helen Ludentia Day, was born in 1875 in Brooklyn, Connecticut, a town in rural Windham County. She married Ernest Bradford Ellsworth on 25 September 1901. They had four children. The eldest, Frank Day Ellsworth, born in December 1902, died in February 1908 at the age of five, more than a year before Ernest was born. A sister, Eleanor Webster Ellsworth, was born in 1904, and a younger sister, Anne Greenleaf Ellsworth, in 1911. Anne later graduated from Oberlin College.
Little in the sources examined here describes his childhood beyond its setting. Both his Academy yearbook and his Navy biography agree on one thing: he learned to sail as a boy on Long Island Sound. The yearbook says he "had his first taste of the briny deep from the waters of Long Island Sound." His schooling before the Academy is not recorded in those sources.
He entered the Naval Academy from Connecticut on 12 July 1927, two months before his eighteenth birthday. The 1931 Lucky Bag sketch of "Ernie" is short, and almost all of it is about boats. "Most any free time finds him at the helm of a star boat or a half rater," it says, "and his ability in this line was well demonstrated in his winning the Thompson Sailing Trophy Youngster Year. Even at night, when liberty is granted, Ernie prefers the water to the 'bright white way' of Annapolis and is seen directing his steps to the canoe sheds. However, a clear moonlight night, a canoe, and a fair young damsel is reason enough for any man to love the water." The yearbook lists the Thompson Inter-class Sailing Prize for 1929 and 1930. His Navy biography, written in 1958, says he won the Thompson Sailing Trophy in 1928 and 1930 and took second place in 1931. He also played class soccer and class tennis and finished as a second petty officer in the midshipman organization.
His classmates described his studies in tones of mild envy. "In the troublesome details of battling the wolves from the 'ac' departments, Ernie is one of those favored mortals who pursue the golden middle path. Well above the danger line, and without need of strenuous effort, he prospers. He takes what he chooses from life, and gets the maximum contentment and success." The sketch ends flatly: "He entered the Academy and after four years is ready for the service."
The yearbook says nothing of what happened to his family while he was at Annapolis. His father died in Hartford on 2 October 1928, early in the son's second year. His mother died there three months later, on 3 January 1929, at fifty-three. So in the same academic year in which he won his first sailing trophy, he lost both parents. He was nineteen. No source examined here records how he took it, where his younger sister lived afterward, or who acted for the family.
He graduated and was commissioned an ensign on 4 June 1931. His first ship was the destroyer Sicard, a four-stacker of the Battle Force operating out of the West Coast. He stayed in her for two years, doing what his service record calls "all duties," the ordinary education of a junior officer in a small ship. In February and March 1932 the Sicard took part in the fleet problem in Hawaiian waters. On 25 March 1933, while he was still in the Sicard, he married Frances L. Chapman of San Diego.
In May 1933 he went to the battleship Tennessee. He stayed four years, serving in her turrets and as ship's secretary, and was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) on 4 June 1934. His Navy biography remembers these years mainly for sailing. As a young officer, it says, he "took part in Fleet Sailing Races (whale-boats and ketches) in Battleship Competition while assigned to the USS TENNESSEE." His first son, Ernest Bradford Ellsworth, was born on 22 December 1934.
A run of short and varied assignments followed. In April and May 1937 he briefly commanded the fleet oiler Ramapo, and from May 1937 to May 1938 he was electrical repair officer of the repair ship Medusa. In June 1938 he received a command he would hold for two years. This was Eagle 48, one of the small steel patrol boats built by the Ford Motor Company at the end of the First World War. By then she was assigned to naval reserve training in the Third Naval District, and his service record places him at Perth Amboy, New Jersey. During that command his second son, Ronald Chapman Ellsworth, was born on 12 June 1938, and he was promoted to lieutenant on 1 July 1939. It was modest duty, training reservists in a small, elderly vessel, but it gave him command of a ship before he was thirty. War broke out in Europe while he held it.
In June 1940 he reported to the Upshur as executive officer. He would spend nearly four years in her, longer than in any other ship. The Upshur was a Wickes-class flush-deck destroyer completed in 1918. She had been laid up at Philadelphia from 1936 and was recommissioned in October 1939 for the Neutrality Patrol. Her captain when he joined was Lieutenant William K. Romoser, and the Navy Directory of 1940 lists "Lt. E. B. Ellsworth, exec" beneath him. As executive officer he was responsible for the ship's administration, discipline and training. That December the Upshur and the new destroyer Madison escorted the heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa, carrying Admiral William D. Leahy to his post as ambassador to Vichy France, for the first two days of the voyage from Norfolk.
In March 1941 the Upshur became part of the Support Force, a command of destroyers, tenders and patrol-plane squadrons formed, in the words of her official history, for assignment to "distant seas." She operated from Argentia in Newfoundland, from Narragansett Bay and Boston, and, after American forces occupied Iceland that summer, from Reykjavik. In September 1941 she was one of five American destroyers under Captain Morton L. Deyo that met the British convoy HX-150 off Newfoundland and escorted it to the mid-ocean meeting point. Her official history calls it the first convoy "assisted by the United States Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic," nearly three months before the country entered the war. According to the ship's official history, the Upshur steamed on the convoy's port side, "500 to 2,000 yards out, searching with her sound equipment on a 30-degree sector during the day." In the weeks that followed, the destroyer Kearny was torpedoed and the Reuben James, another flush-decker of the Support Force, was sunk by a U-boat.
The official history describes the North Atlantic weather in the old flush-deckers: "Biting cold winds and raging seas combined to make life miserable on board the older destroyers like Upshur." Ice formed by freezing spray built up on their upper works and dangerously increased their top-weight. On 5 February 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, the Upshur and four other ships from Londonderry hunted a U-boat that seemed to be trailing them and attacked it seven times with thirty depth charges, without a kill. Two days later, escorting the westbound convoy ON-63, her lookouts sighted a U-boat on the surface. She chased it twice, the second time at flank speed, and fired two rounds from her forward gun before it dived. No ship of the convoy was lost. In March 1942, according to a secondary compilation, she escorted troop transports from Charleston toward the Caribbean. In May Lieutenant Commander Lot Ensey relieved Romoser in command, and Ellsworth stayed on as executive officer. A secondary compilation records the Upshur on convoys between Trinidad, Guantánamo and Key West from July to October of that year. Ellsworth was promoted to lieutenant commander from 15 June 1942.
On 1 November 1942 he took command of the Upshur, and his Navy biography dates his promotion to commander from the same day. He was thirty-three. He had spent two and a half years as second-in-command of the same ship and knew her and her crew well.
In March 1943 the Upshur was sent to strengthen the British Escort Group B5, under Commander Richard C. Boyle in the destroyer Havelock, for the eastbound slow convoy SC-122. The accounts examined here disagree on where she came from. One says she was sent from Argentia to replace a British destroyer that was under repair. Another says she arrived after delivering the Iceland-bound section of the westbound convoy ON-170. The convoy, about fifty merchant ships in fourteen columns, was crossing the Greenland air gap, the stretch of mid-ocean beyond the reach of most land-based patrol aircraft. Close by was the faster convoy HX-229. About forty U-boats in three wolf packs were gathering against the two convoys. On the night of 16–17 March U-338 got inside SC-122's screen and sank three ships of its leading row and damaged a fourth. Over the next three days the two convoys together lost more than twenty merchant ships. It was the largest convoy battle of the war, and the losses of that month led to the British and American decisions on support groups and very-long-range aircraft that turned the Atlantic campaign that spring.
The sources examined here do not agree on how much of the battle the Upshur saw. The convoy records compiled by Arnold Hague show her with SC-122 from 12 to 16 March only, that is, up to the eve of the main attacks. A detailed narrative of the battle published on a reference website, however, places her with the convoy that night and names her, with the Swale, Godetia and Havelock and two Royal Air Force Liberators, among the ships that drove off the U-boats keeping contact on 17 March. No action report by Ellsworth, and no record of any attack made by his ship in the battle, has been found.
The ship was in British waters soon afterward. In early April 1943 British records place her in anti-submarine exercises with British submarines off Lough Foyle, near Londonderry, on 3, 4 and 8 April. On 9 April she sailed from Liverpool with five other American destroyers as escort for convoy UC-2, eleven merchant ships, most of them American tankers bound for Curaçao and Aruba. The convoy arrived on 23 April. The official history describes the Upshur's service over these two years only in general terms: convoy escort "from the eastern seaboard of the U.S. to the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, from the inhospitable climes of the North Atlantic to the tropical Caribbean." As the Allies gained the upper hand in the Atlantic, the official history says, "newer and more modern destroyers replaced the aging flush-deckers as front line convoy escorts." That year the Upshur became a plane guard and target ship for carrier pilots training off Norfolk and Quonset Point. Ellsworth gave up command in February or March 1944. A ship-listing compilation dates his relief as 12 February, and his Navy biography gives March.
From March 1944 he was at Seattle, fitting out a new destroyer. The Jarvis, of the Fletcher class, built by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation, was commissioned on 3 June 1944, "Cmdr. E. B. Ellsworth in command." She was a much larger and more powerful ship than the Upshur: 2,050 tons against 1,247, five 5-inch guns against four 4-inch, and a complement of 320 against 113. After shakedown off California, she left Seattle on 25 August escorting the battleship South Dakota to Pearl Harbor. On 3 September she sailed alone for Adak in the Aleutians to join the North Pacific Force.
The rest of his war was fought on one of its least-known fronts. The Jarvis joined Destroyer Division 114 of Destroyer Squadron 57, with the Bearss, John Hood and Porter, in Rear Admiral John L. McCrea's Task Force 92. The force's task was to harass the Japanese garrisons in the Kurile Islands, the chain running from the tip of Kamchatka toward Hokkaido, more than six hundred miles west of Attu. The official history of the John Hood describes the force as guarding the nation's northern "back door," and says its missions were "hampered by bad weather, and well beyond the range of friendly air cover." The official history of the Jarvis says that she "battled stormy seas and prolonged bad weather to conduct eight raids on shipping and shore installations from Paramushiru to Matsuwa." The Navy's list of the ship's engagements includes the bombardment of Matsuwa on 21 November 1944 and of Suribachi Wan on Paramushiro on 5 January 1945, and an attack on Kurabu Zaki on 18 February. In mid-May the force made its first extensive surface sweep into the Sea of Okhotsk, behind the island chain. More sweeps and bombardments followed in June, July and August.
Ellsworth's Bronze Star citation lists the actions for which he was decorated. It cites "bombardments of Matsuwa Island on June 10, June 11 and August 11, 1945; the bombardment of Suribachi Wan on July 21, 1945; anti-shipping sweeps in the Sea of Okhotski on June 11, June 24–25 and July 16–19, 1945; and an anti-shipping sweep east of the Kurile Chain on August 11, 1945." It continues: "Skillfully maneuvering his vessel during these engagements, Commander Ellsworth contributed materially to the success of his ship in delivering effective gunfire against enemy shore installations and in destroying a Japanese convoy." The convoy action was the sweep of 24 and 25 June. According to the official histories of the other ships, the destroyers came on a small Japanese convoy trying to reinforce the Kurile garrisons. The Porter sank a merchant ship of about 2,000 tons with gunfire, and the John Hood helped sink one cargo ship and probably a second. Secondary compilations based on Japanese records say that several small escort vessels were also lost to the division in the last days of June. The sources examined here do not establish what the Jarvis herself hit. On 11 August, four days before the Japanese surrender, the task group destroyed another convoy, according to the history of the John Hood. His own citation includes both a bombardment of Matsuwa and an anti-shipping sweep east of the island chain that day.
The Jarvis returned to Adak from her last raid on 15 August 1945. She then steamed to northern Japan for the occupation, arriving at Aomori on 8 September. For the next two months she worked in the Sea of Japan, assisting occupation landings and destroying military installations on Honshu and Hokkaido. His Navy biography says that "upon the termination of hostilities he took a leading part in the demilitarization of North East Hokkaido." No further details of that work have been found. The Jarvis left Yokosuka on 19 November and reached Pearl Harbor on 29 November. There she joined the "Magic Carpet" fleet bringing veterans home, and she sailed on 1 December for the East Coast by way of San Diego and the Panama Canal, reaching Charleston on 22 December. Ellsworth gave up command on 3 January 1946.
The Jarvis, unlike the Upshur, was a new ship that he had commissioned and brought into action himself. His war had covered both ends of the destroyer service. In the Atlantic he had been in an old ship near the limit of her usefulness, where the enemy was a submarine that usually could not be seen. In the North Pacific he commanded a modern ship that went looking for the enemy and fired on shore positions and shipping. In both, the official histories dwell on the weather. Besides the Bronze Star, his decorations included the American Defense Service Medal with the "A" device for service in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbor, the American, European-African-Middle Eastern and Asiatic-Pacific campaign medals, the last with one operation star, and the Navy Occupation Service Medal with the Asia clasp. No letter, diary or oral history by him from these years has been found.
Most of his postwar career was spent on the West Coast, much of it in San Diego, his wife's home city. From February 1946 to March 1948 he commanded a subgroup of the San Diego Group of the Pacific Reserve Fleet, which was laying up the ships the Navy no longer needed. In March 1948 he became executive officer of the light cruiser Oakland. That spring and autumn the Oakland made two long cruises in Chinese waters, supporting the American mission to the Nationalist government as it fell apart under communist pressure. He received the China Service Medal for that period. At the end of February 1949 the cruiser reported to the Pacific Reserve Fleet for inactivation. In March he became her commanding officer while still serving as executive officer, and he held both posts until she was decommissioned at San Francisco on 1 July 1949. From July 1949 to November 1950 he was executive officer of the Recruit Training Center at San Diego.
He was promoted to captain on 1 September 1950. In December of that year he took command of the fleet oiler Mattaponi, recommissioned on 28 December for the Military Sea Transportation Service as T-AO-41. During his command she operated mainly along the West Coast, made one voyage to Japan in March 1951, and spent the summer carrying fuel from Aruba to East Coast ports, with one run to Iceland. His biography dates the end of this command to January 1952, and his service transcript to May 1952. From 1952 until late 1954 he was reserve coordinator on the staff of the Commandant of the Eleventh Naval District at San Diego.
On 18 November 1954 he took command of the attack transport Navarro. In 1955 she returned from the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific. He commanded her until February 1956, and from April 1956 to the late summer of 1957 he was Commander Destroyer Squadron 17 in the Cruiser-Destroyer Force of the Pacific Fleet. The sources examined here describe neither command.
Late in 1957 he went to Bogotá as Chief of the United States Naval Mission to Colombia, with the additional duty of Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group there. The Navy biography published on 3 January 1958 describes him in that post, and it is the last official account of his career found. The Navy Register for 1959 still listed him as an active captain. The Register for 1960 listed him as a rear admiral on the retired list. The exact date of his retirement, and the basis for the higher rank, are not given in the sources examined here. At that time the law allowed officers specially commended for performance of duty in combat to be advanced one grade on retirement, but no source examined here says whether his promotion was made under that provision.
Very little is known about his last forty-seven years. A family genealogy compiled around 1940 is the latest record found of his wife and sons, and no later information about them has come to light. His younger sister Anne, Mrs. William James Sexton, died in 2007, the year after he did. Ernest Bradford Ellsworth Jr. died on 22 October 2006, at the age of ninety-seven. He was buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery on Point Loma in San Diego. Veterans Affairs records list him there with the rank of rear admiral and service in the Second World War and Korea.
The record he left is thin and mostly official, but it shows a consistent life. There is the boy who learned to sail on Long Island Sound and the midshipman who spent his liberty in the canoe sheds and won the Academy's sailing prize, while in the same year both of his parents died at home in Hartford. There are the four years in the Tennessee's turrets and whaleboat races, and a first command in a reserve training boat before he was thirty. In the Upshur he served first as executive officer and then as captain, escorting convoys across the North Atlantic before and after Pearl Harbor and into the great convoy battle of March 1943. In the Jarvis he spent a year of cold-weather raids off the Kuriles, recognized by the citation for "skillfully maneuvering his vessel." Afterward came a long and unremarkable career of reserve fleets, ship commands and staff work that ended in a diplomatic post in South America. How he thought or spoke about any of it was not found in the sources examined here.