Pacific ships

USN · Commander

Tatom, Eugene

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Ships

Eugene Tatom, a graduate of the Naval Academy class of 1931, commanded the light aircraft carrier Cabot (CVL-28) in the first year after Japan’s surrender. He took her as a commander on 18 December 1945 and was relieved on 10 September 1946. He later rose to the rank of captain.

Cabot was an Independence-class ship, completed on a cruiser hull and commissioned on 24 July 1943 under Malcolm Francis Schoeffel. She spent 1944 and 1945 with the fast carriers in the Pacific. Stanley John Michael commanded her from May 1944 until February 1945, and Walton Wiley Smith held command from then until the day Tatom relieved him. On 25 November 1944 a kamikaze struck her off Luzon. She repaired enough damage to remain in the fight and was still in the western Pacific when the war ended. By mid-December 1945 her combat cruises were finished.

Tatom’s nine months were a peacetime tour, while the Navy was laying up the wartime fleet and keeping only a short further commission in ships like Cabot. On 10 September 1946 he turned the carrier over to Robert Webster Slye. She left active service on 11 February 1947. Years afterward she returned as a training carrier and, much later, served Spain as Dédalo. Those years lay beyond his tour.

In October 1949, still a commander and then 41 years old, Tatom testified before the House Armed Services Committee in the public argument over unification, the atomic bomb, and the place of long-range bombers in American strategy. To show that such a bomb had to be placed accurately to do its work, he said a person in ordinary clothes could stand at one end of the north-south runway at Washington National Airport while an atomic bomb exploded at the other end and escape serious injury.

The next day he tied that claim to the official report on the Hiroshima bomb. As he read the report, clothing and buildings had shielded people from flash burns inside about 3,250 feet, and he gave the length of the runway as 6,840 feet. Committee chairman Carl Vinson answered that he would rather be in Georgia. The remark drew wide notice, and critics treated the 1945 weapon as already behind the bombs then expected. The hearing left Tatom in the public record as a witness in the Navy’s case over how a future war would be fought, alongside the postwar command of Cabot that runs in the record from Smith to Slye.