Ships
- USS Franks (DD-554) Captain from 22 April 1945
Lieutenant Commander Eugene Baker Henry became captain of the destroyer Franks on 22 April 1945. The Fletcher-class ship had already spent more than a year and a half in the Pacific, and he remained her commanding officer through the end of the war and the first months of peace, until she was decommissioned on 31 May 1946.
Franks (DD-554) was built by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation and launched on 7 December 1942. She carried the name of William Joseph Franks, a Civil War sailor awarded the Medal of Honor for serving a landed howitzer at Yazoo City in 1864. The Navy commissioned her on 30 July 1943 with Nicholas Adair Lidstone in command. That autumn she reached Pearl Harbor, screened escort carriers for the landings at Tarawa, and patrolled off Betio into late December.
David Richard Stephan relieved Lidstone on 30 June 1944. Under him, Franks bombarded Guam in July, covered the occupation of Ulithi after operations at Palau, and from October screened escort carriers through the Leyte landings and the Battle off Samar. She continued with the fast carrier force to Mindoro and Luzon, struck targets ahead of the Iwo Jima invasion in February 1945, and in March worked the approaches to Okinawa, bringing down a Japanese aircraft on 18 March. She then joined a battleship group shelling the island.
On 2 April 1945, while operating with those battleships off Okinawa, Franks collided with New Jersey and was badly damaged. Stephan was fatally injured and died on 4 April. Lieutenant Gerald Frederick Case served as acting commanding officer from the day of the collision until 22 April, when Henry assumed command.
Henry took the ship in the aftermath of that collision. His captaincy covered the remaining weeks of the Pacific war and the months after Japan's surrender. He was still in command when Franks left commission on 31 May 1946.