Ships
- USS Dashiell (DD-659) Captain, 9 January 1944 – 24 July 1944
Captain, on the command line, is the billet. The Navy Register did not make him a captain until 1 July 1954, ten years after Dashiell. Whether he was still a lieutenant commander for every day of that tour is a harder question, and the dates themselves come from compiled commanding-officer lists, not from a deck log or from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. No other Eugene Alexander Barham turns up in the registers as a line officer of this class.
Origins
The Navy Register gives his birthday and not his birthplace. On 1 January 1952, and again on 1 January 1955, the date of birth printed beside Eugene Alexander Barham is 28 December 1911. The Lucky Bag of the Naval Academy class of 1935 gives the home that went with the name: "Slim," Oak Ridge, Louisiana. uboat.net says he was born in Oak Ridge. That matches the hometown, but the registers examined here do not say where he was born, and no birth record was found, so Oak Ridge is certain as the place he came from and only probable as the place he was born.
The class book is the only picture of him before the Navy took him, and it is a roast, not a biography. "One June morning the first Barham to head north since the Battle of Gettysburg landed in Annapolis." The Gettysburg line is a classmate's joke about a Louisiana name. It is not a genealogy, and no ancestor has been traced here. They remembered a boy who arrived with more stories than a traveling salesman, "somewhat of a card shark," who took over the bull sessions and was too lazy, for all that he was "a good athlete," to walk to the gym. The Radiator Club enrolled him. Once he was past the drawing course he "coasted over the academics." What he was proudest of was "a sweet little Louisiana girl," and the letters, they said, would have reached to Timbuctoo. The book left him undecided between going home to be a Southern planter and staying in the Navy. His classmates, "being selfish," hoped he would stay.
The girl is not named. In 1937 he married Virginia Norris, who had been born in Oak Ridge on 24 April 1912, had gone through Oak Ridge High School, and had graduated from Kidd-Key College in Sherman, Texas. Her parents were Harry Jesse Norris and Gladys Hope Norris. The yearbook and the marriage are two years apart, and nothing in the record proves the letters were hers. Oak Ridge was a small place. It is the natural reading, and it is still a reading.
He graduated with the class of 1935. The Register of 1 July 1935 lists Ensign Eugene Alexander Barham, signal number 6326, date of rank 6 June 1935, present duty Nevada. The Annual Register of the Naval Academy for 1934–35 and 1935–36 carries his name among the midshipmen and then the new graduates. The paper that appointed him, the congressman if there was one, and his class standing were not found.
Formation
His first ship was a battleship. On 1 July 1935 the Register had him in Nevada. The Navy Directory of 1 October 1935 still had Ensign Eugene A. Barham in U.S.S. Nevada, then commanded by Captain R. L. Ghormley. On the ship's own officer list that autumn he was one ensign in a long row of them. The name immediately after his on that list is Ens. E. B. Fluckey, the classmate who would later make a very different kind of reputation in submarines. Barham's own reputation was not made there. The directory gives him no billet. He was a new ensign on a big ship, learning a wardroom.
By 1 July 1936 the Register had moved him to the destroyer Overton, still an ensign, signal number now 6190. The directories of 1 July 1936 and 1 January 1937 agree: Ensign Eugene A. Barham, U.S.S. Overton. On 1 September 1937 he was still in Overton, and the ship's roster finally gives him work rather than just a name: communication and engineering, under Lieutenant A. L. Hamlin. A flush-deck destroyer did not have officers to spare. The ensign who handled both the radio and the engines was not coasting anymore, whatever the Lucky Bag had said about academics.
He married Virginia that same year, 1937, while Overton was his address. Her obituary says she traveled the world with him through the naval career that followed. It does not say where they were married, or whether she came to the ship, or what the marriage cost either of them in the ordinary way of Navy families. It does say they had a life together that outlasted the war by half a century. No child is named anywhere in it.
On 1 January 1938 he was an ensign in U.S.S. Cushing — the directory's OCR calls her Gushing, and the ship's roster spells the same error, but the flag notation is clear enough: flagship of Destroyer Division 4, Destroyers, Battle Force. The alphabetical index says Eugene A. Barham. The roster line that matches his signal number reads "Ens. B. A. Barham," which is the same man misread. By 1 July 1938 the rank had changed. The Register of 1 July 1939, in the lieutenants (junior grade) section, gives the date of that rank as 6 June 1938, dittoed down the class from the man at the head of the block. The directory of 1 July 1938 already shows him as lieutenant (junior grade) in Cushing, and the directory of 1 January 1939 still has him there. No billet is printed. He had three years in battleship and destroyer wardrooms and had made the first two promotions on the old peacetime clock: ensign on graduation, lieutenant (junior grade) three years later to the day.
Then the ships get smaller and the jobs more specific, and the record gets thinner between snapshots. On 1 October 1939 the officer roster of the destroyer tender Altair includes "Lt. (jg) E. A. Barham" in a long tender wardroom under Commander E. W. Broadbent. The July 1939 Register's duty column is too scrambled to say whether he had already left Cushing by midsummer. The October roster is the solid one. A tender is a workshop and a hotel for destroyers, not a command. What he did aboard her is not stated.
By 1 June 1940 he was the engineer of U.S.S. Kennison. The roster is plain: Lieutenant Commander W. G. Michelet commanding, Lieutenant J. S. Reese executive, Lieutenant (junior grade) E. A. Barham, engineer, Lieutenant (junior grade) G. L. Christie, gun. Kennison was an old destroyer. Engineering officer of a ship like that, at twenty-eight, was a trade, not a title.
On 1 April 1941 the directory puts him in U.S.S. Gillis, still a lieutenant (junior grade), under Lieutenant Commander J. P. Heath, with Lieutenant W. W. Fitts as executive. Gillis had been a Clemson-class destroyer, laid up for years. She was reclassified as a seaplane-tender destroyer, AVD-12, on 2 August 1940, and placed in full commission at San Francisco on 25 March 1941, six days before the directory's date. Barham was aboard at the start of that second life, or within a week of it. The directory does not say he was a plank owner, and it does not give him a billet. DANFS then sends Gillis north: plane guard between San Diego and Seattle, Sitka in June, Dutch Harbor and Kodiak in July, and Kodiak again when the war opened, tending patrol planes in Alaskan water. None of that can be given to him. The next time his name is fixed to a ship is Dashiell in January 1944. The three years between April 1941 and January 1944 are blank in every register and directory consulted. He may have stayed for the Aleutians. He may have left Gillis within months. The sources do not say, and her later war is not his until someone finds the orders.
The Register of 1 July 1947 prints, for him and for the men around him in the class of 1935, the lieutenant date 1 January 1942. That is the wartime acceleration: lieutenant (junior grade) in 1938, lieutenant at the start of 1942, not in 1941. No Navy Directory was published after April 1941, so there is no station to hang on the new rank.
The war, as far as the paper goes
What he did from Pearl Harbor until he took a destroyer of his own is the largest hole in the life. There is no citation, no war diary signed by him, no letter, no ship's history that names him in 1942 or 1943. The special-qualification letters that the 1 July 1945 Register hangs on many of his classmates are not printed after his name. If he won a decoration, it is not in the registers read for this essay, and it is not in the widow's obituary.
Dashiell is the part the compiled list cares about, and it is the part that can be told, with the dates labeled as what they are.
USS Dashiell (DD-659), a Fletcher, was commissioned on 20 March 1943 under Commander John Boyd McLean. Her first year — the Marcus, Tarawa, and Wake raids, the close-in fire support inside Tarawa lagoon on 20 November 1943, the man killed off Efate that November — belongs to McLean. DANFS, as carried in the Wikipedia text of the article, then sends her to the west coast for overhaul. NavSource, working from National Archives photographs in the 19-LCM series, dates three post-overhaul views off the Puget Sound Navy Yard to 23 January 1944 and says the refit had given her ten 40 mm guns. Those photographs have not been examined here. The date and the yard are the point.
The compiled commanding-officer list on NavSource, credited to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and the same dates on uboat.net, put Lieutenant Commander Eugene Alexander Barham in command from 9 January 1944 to 24 July 1944, when Commander Douglas Lee Lipscomb Cordiner relieved him. the compiled list copies that pair of dates. DANFS does not name the captain at all. No deck log or change-of-command report was found. The dates are the best list available, and they are a list, not a log. If they are right, he took her during the Puget Sound overhaul, about a fortnight before those 23 January photographs, on the west coast and not in the combat zone.
DANFS then gives the ship's movements, still without his name. After training in the Hawaiian Islands she arrived at Guadalcanal on 16 March 1944. She sailed the next day and bombarded Kavieng, New Ireland, on 20 March. From 6 April to 13 May she did fire support, patrol, and convoy escort while landings were made on the New Guinea coast. DANFS does not name the beaches. She was back at Port Purvis, on Florida Island in the Solomons, on 17 May, preparing for the Marianas. On 4 June she sailed to guard transports held in reserve for the assaults on Saipan and on Tinian. She screened the landings at Guam and provided fire support from 20 to 26 July.
Set the command list against that last sentence. If he was relieved on 24 July, he had the ship for the opening of the Guam bombardment and not, or not certainly, for the last two days of the window DANFS gives the ship. Cordiner's date on the same list is 24 July 1944. The fire-support days cannot be divided between them on the evidence in hand. What can be said is that the only combat command of his that these records show was a new destroyer in the last stage of an overhaul and then, within two months, on the bombardment circuit from the Solomons to Kavieng, along the New Guinea coast, and up to the Marianas, guarding the transports that were not in the first wave and then shooting at Guam.
There is no letter, no endorsement, no story from the wardroom about how he behaved when the shooting started. The class book had called him a talker and a little lazy. The Navy had since made him an engineer and a communications officer and, if the lists are right, a destroyer captain at thirty-two. That is a change of work, not a character study. Kavieng on 20 March 1944 was shore bombardment, not a surface fight. The New Guinea weeks were escort and fire support. Off Saipan and Tinian he was with the reserve transports, which is necessary work and not the assault line. Guam was the hottest of it, and the record does not say whether Dashiell was hit, or whether anyone aboard was killed, while he had her. DANFS's casualties and the kamikaze episodes — the flag shifted to Dashiell off Mindoro in December 1944 after a crash into the flagship, the Lingayen Gulf fighting in January and February 1945, the radar-picket battle of 14 April 1945 — all fall after 24 July 1944. They are Cordiner's ship, or the ship's, not Barham's. The ten battle stars DANFS gives Dashiell for the whole war are the ship's, earned across captains. They are not his decoration.
The rank on the bridge is the other unsettled thing. The compiled lists call him a lieutenant commander for the entire tour, and uboat.net's own rank table then contradicts its command table: it dates a temporary lieutenant commander rank from 1 May 1943 and a temporary commander rank from 1 March 1944, which would make him a commander for the Kavieng, New Guinea, and Guam months. The 1 May 1943 date does not appear in the Navy Registers checked. What those registers do show is this. On 1 July 1945 the alphabetical index lists "BARHAM EUGENE A" as CDR. On 1 July 1947 he stands in the class block with the rank abbreviation LT, the dates 1 January 1942 and 1 March 1944, birth 28 December 1911, and first commission 6 June 1935, and his classmates carry the same pair of dates. By 1 January 1952 his permanent rank is commander, and the date of that rank is 1 March 1944. The straightforward reading is that 1 March 1944 was the commander date later made permanent, and that in the spring of 1944 the Navy was already treating the class of 1935 as commanders, while the July 1947 register still printed the permanent lieutenant rank beside the 1 January 1942 date. If that reading is right, the compiled list's "Lieutenant Commander" fits January and February 1944 and is wrong from March on. If the compiled lists are right instead, he remained a lieutenant commander through the relief in July. Both cannot be true. No order promoting him, and no Dashiell log headed with his rank, was found.
He left her, on the compiled date, on 24 July 1944. Where he went next is not in the registers. The 1 July 1945 Register names him and calls him a commander and does not give a ship. The war ended without another command attached to his name in any source used here.
The cost
The cost that can be documented is not a wound and not a decoration. It is the choice the Lucky Bag posed and the years the registers cannot fill.
He did not go home to be a planter in 1935. He stayed. Virginia went with him, by her obituary's account, "throughout his Naval Career" — the funeral home's text spells it "Navel" — until retirement. The obituary does not describe a separation, a close call, or a grief. It describes a marriage that absorbed the moving. No son or daughter is mentioned, in the obituary or anywhere else found. When she died, the people named were nieces and nephews. That is not proof they never had a child who died young and went unmentioned. It is what the family chose to put on the page: a couple, and then the wider family.
The blank from the spring of 1941 to January 1944 sits on top of the opening of the Pacific war. If he was still in Gillis, he was in Alaskan waters and not at Pearl Harbor, and he spent the first half of the war tending seaplanes on the northern edge of it. If he had already been ordered elsewhere, that other life is invisible. Either way, the only months in which he can be watched in combat are the six months in Dashiell, and even those are the ship's months, not his. There is no sentence in a report that says what he decided under fire. The bombardment of Kavieng, the New Guinea escort work, the reserve transports off Saipan and Tinian, and the Guam firing are the pressure the record allows. He brought a new destroyer out of a yard and into that circuit, and he turned her over in the middle of the Guam window if the 24 July date is exact. Then he disappears from the operational record while the ship goes on to Mindoro, Lingayen, and Okinawa under other men.
After
On 1 January 1952 he was still a commander, date of rank 1 March 1944, designator not needed to identify him: a surface line officer of the class of 1935, born 28 December 1911, commissioned 6 June 1935. On 1 January 1955 the Register places him in the captains' section. The date of present rank printed there is 1 July 1954, the same date printed for the classmates in that block. The line abbreviation is OCR'd throughout that section as CDR, which is the machine misreading a captains' page; the section title is CAPTAINS, and the alphabetical index of the same volume lists him as captain, designator 1100, original commission 6 June 1935. uboat.net's date for captain, 1 July 1954, matches the register. Its further claim that he retired on 1 January 1958 as a commodore does not.
The Register of 1 January 1955 still has him on the active list, as a captain. The Register of 1 January 1958 lists "BARHAM EUCENE A" — the spelling is the OCR — as CAPT RET, with the file number 074874 that the 1 January 1960 Register repeats beside "BARHAM EUGENE ALEX CAPT RET." He was a retired captain on or before 1 January 1958. He was not carried as a commodore or as an admiral. The widow's obituary, written in 2010, remembers retirement "in the early 1960's" and calls him "Eugene Alexander Barham, USN retired." The early 1960s are a few years later than the register. Memory in an obituary loses to the Navy's own list on the date. The register does not give the day he left, only the window: after 1 January 1955 and on or before 1 January 1958. It also does not say what billet the captain's rank was spent in. NavSource's history of USS English (DD-696) lists "CDR Eugene Alexander Barham" as commanding officer from 25 August 1948 to September 1950. That would sit inside his commander years and would put him in a Sumner-class destroyer for the ship's first Mediterranean tour with the Sixth Fleet, which Wikipedia, from DANFS, dates from 6 September 1949 to 26 January 1950, and for the start of the Korean emergency. English sailed from Norfolk for Korea on 6 September 1950. If the NavSource month is right he had just left her, or was leaving as she went. DANFS does not name him. No register entry found for 1948–50 gives his duty station. The English command is therefore not used here as fact. It is a compiled list, the same kind of list that supplies the Dashiell dates, and it may be true. It is not confirmed.
What is confirmed about the ending is Virginia's account. They came back to Oak Ridge. "The Barhams returned to Oak Ridge, where they served their community for many years." The offices she lists are hers: treasurer of the Pierian Club for many years, Communion Steward, Women's Missionary Society, member of the church. His share of "they served" is not itemized. She died at home in Oak Ridge on the afternoon of 5 March 2010, aged ninety-seven. The funeral was at 3 p.m. on Sunday, 7 March 2010, at the Oak Ridge United Methodist Church, the Rev. Judith Bazer officiating, with burial afterward in the Oak Ridge Baptist Church Cemetery, Golden Funeral Home in charge. She was preceded in death by her parents, by her sister Emma Sue Norris Shepard, and by her husband.
The survivors she named were nieces and nephews: Virginia Sue Shepard Barr, Nancy Files Allen, Garnett Jane Barham, Sally Barham Dienes, Terrell Barham Moss, Lydia Barham Oswalt, Mary Files Winsor, Frank Gibson Barham, Thomas E. (Gene) Barham, Alexander Pipes Barham, Hall Brodnax Barham, William Preston Barham, and Clint Edwin Shepard, and a further host of great- and great-great-nieces and nephews. The pallbearers were a nephew, William Preston Barham, and great-nephews. No child of Eugene and Virginia is in that list. His own funeral, his grave, and the day he died are not in it either.
uboat.net says he died on 22 November 1999, aged eighty-seven, and gives no place. The age fits a man born on 28 December 1911. No obituary, no cemetery record, and no Navy death notice was found to confirm the day. Until one turns up, 22 November 1999 is a date from a compiled website, not a closed fact. He had been out of the Navy for something like forty years. The public record of those years is his wife's memory of Oak Ridge, the community work they did there, and the nieces and nephews who stood as what the marriage left behind.