Ships
- USS Black (DD-666) Captain from 22 October 1945
Lieutenant Commander Eugene Howard Simpson, United States Navy, became captain of the destroyer Black on 22 October 1945. He held the duty in the rank of lieutenant commander, the officer to whom the ship and her crew answered.
Black (DD-666) was a Fletcher-class destroyer, built for carrier screens, antisubmarine work, and gunfire support. She carried the name of Hugh D. Black, commanding officer of the destroyer Jacob Jones, who was lost when that ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic in February 1942. Simpson took Black after her fighting service in the Pacific was already finished.
Japan had surrendered the month before. In October a destroyer captain still ran a full ship: boilers and turbines, five-inch guns, torpedoes, depth charges, and a wartime crew of more than three hundred. Simpson’s authority covered navigation, engineering, gunnery, and the daily order of a commissioned destroyer while the Pacific Fleet turned to occupation duty and the passage home.
Jack Maginnis and Edward Reuben King served in Black as well. A destroyer’s life runs through a chain of officers, each receiving a ship already shaped by earlier cruises and earlier watches. Simpson entered that chain on 22 October 1945.
His command opened with Black still in commission and still a working fleet destroyer. The guns had to be kept ready, the machinery nursed, and the crew handled as the Navy stood down from the Pacific war. That captaincy, begun on 22 October 1945, is the mark of his service in her.