Ships
- USS Sterett (DD-407) Captain, 14 January 1944 – 27 January 1945
The 1933 Lucky Bag gives a midshipman Francis Joseph Lucien Blouin of Whitinsville, Massachusetts. The Navy Register gives the same officer, file number 72447, born 23 July 1910, appointed a midshipman on 13 June 1929. The Bronze Star citation, as printed by the Military Times Hall of Valor, awards Commander Francis Joseph Blouin the medal for commanding U.S.S. Sterett (DD-407) from February 1944 to January 1945. The Legion of Merit citation, same compilation, awards him that decoration as commanding officer of the same ship in a four-day running fight against aircraft. Those two citations are the strongest tie between this officer and Sterett. They do not fix 14 January or 27 January. Those days are repeated by the Sterett Association's chronology and by NavSource. Uboat.net, which is not a source to trust on its own, gives 19 January 1945 as the end and cites NavSource, which does not agree with itself. No deck log has been read for this essay. The January dates are a tradition of secondary lists, compatible with the Bronze Star's "February 1944 to January 1945," and not yet proved by a log.
He was a Massachusetts mill-town boy who became a destroyer captain and, long after the war, a vice admiral. The record of who he was at home is better for his parents' house than for any house he made himself.
Whitinsville
The biography printed in the 1963 cruise book of U.S.S. George Clymer (APA-27), when he was a rear admiral and Commander, Amphibious Force, Seventh Fleet, says Francis J. Blouin was born in Northbridge, Massachusetts, on July 23, 1910. The Hall of Valor page gives the same birthday and birthplace and calls Whitinsville his home. Whitinsville is not a separate town. It is the mill village inside Northbridge, and the Lucky Bag used the village name. The 1944 Register's "23 July 10" and "Mass." sit under the same man. Nothing in these sources disagrees about the day.
The company paper of the mill that dominated that village supplies the family the Navy registers never bothered to print. The Whitin Spindle, in its 1959 volume, noted that on April 6 Lucien Blouin completed his fifty-third year at the Whitin Machine Works, which places the start of that job in April 1906, and that on May 31 he and Mrs. Blouin observed their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The same paragraph names four sons in uniform: Captain Francis Blouin, USN; Captain Clarence Blouin, USN; Captain Raymond Blouin, USCG; and Lieutenant (junior grade) Robert Blouin, USN. A later squadron memoir says Clarence Arthur Blouin was born January 27, 1917, to Lucien and Agnes Blouin of Whitinsville. Agnes is that memoir's name, not the Spindle's. The Spindle says only Mrs. Blouin. The fit is otherwise tight. Francis carried Lucien in his own name. Clarence's birth date matches a different Blouin in the wartime Navy Register, an officer who is not this man. In 1959 the mill still thought of Francis as a captain, which matches a flag date of July 1, 1960, in the Clymer biography and rules out treating him as already an admiral in his parents' anniversary year.
The Spindle does not name a wife or a child of Francis. Neither does the Washington Post obituary of January 26, 1993, at least in the text that page still shows. That silence is the largest personal gap in the life. The parents and the three brothers are documented. The household he may have left behind when he went to sea is not.
He did not come to Annapolis straight from the village school. The Lucky Bag says he arrived after a successful year at Worcester Tech. The Clymer biography says he attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute before his appointment to the Naval Academy in 1929. The Register's appointment date is 13 June 1929. There is no sign he took a Worcester degree. One year, then the Navy.
The regiment, and the ships before the war
Classmates in the 1933 Lucky Bag called him Champ, Ferdinand-Jupiter, and Blouey. The sketch is yearbook prose, which means it is a portrait with a joke in it, not a fitness report. They made Whitinsville "the literary center of the United States" and told the reader to ask Champ. They said plebe year held no terrors and youngster year was easy, and that second-class summer was better than either. They put him on the cross-country team all four years and made him captain in first-class year, gave him a track letter and an "N," and numerals in basketball. They said he got to the hops with "an attractive femme" and shook "a wicked hoof." They also wrote that his eye was on the Navy "not just on the line, but also on the ranks of the sky-fighters." The registers and directories that follow show a line officer on battleships, destroyers, and a cruiser. No aviation designator appears beside his name in the directories used here. The yearbook records the ambition. It does not record a flight rejection, and none should be invented.
He was graduated and commissioned ensign on June 1, 1933, according to the Clymer biography. The 1 January 1933 Navy Directory, issued before that commissioning, does not list him. By the directory of July 1, 1934, Ensign F. J. Blouin, signal number 5912, is on the roster of the battleship New Mexico, in a wardroom that also carried Lieutenant A. Macondray, Jr. Atherton Macondray would later be Sterett's first commanding officer. The directory puts both of them on New Mexico in the summer of 1934. It does not say they were friends. On January 1, 1935, the directory still has Ensign Francis J. Blouin on New Mexico. The cruise-book biography's "tour on the battleship New Mexico" is the same ship.
On January 1, 1936, the directory has moved him: Ensign Francis J. Blouin, U.S.S. Overton. On January 1, 1937, he is a lieutenant (junior grade) and still on Overton. The 1936 Navy Register's index already styles him lieutenant (junior grade). If that register and the January 1936 directory are both meant to speak as of New Year's Day 1936, they disagree about the rank, and the directory is the one that names the ship in plain words. A date of rank of June 1, 1936, often copied on weak websites, would reconcile a register compiled later in the year with a directory that still says ensign in January. It is not adopted here as a fact. What is solid is the ship: he learned destroyers on Overton across at least the year 1936, and he made junior lieutenant while he was there or just as he left.
January 1, 1938, and again January 1, 1939, the Navy Directory places Lieutenant (junior grade) Francis J. Blouin on the destroyer Monaghan. The 1939 Navy Register, in the same season of publication, places Francis Joseph Blouin at the Naval Academy for instruction. Two official books, one year, two duties. Orders and printing lags can do that. The documents do not say which was late. By the 1940 Register he is on the heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa. By the Navy Directory of June 1, 1940, he is lieutenant (junior grade) and gunnery officer of the destroyer Cole, under Lieutenant C. W. Moses. By the directory of April 1, 1941, he is back, still a lieutenant (junior grade), on Tuscaloosa. The Clymer biography lists Cole and Tuscaloosa together and says the cruiser tour was in the Atlantic. It does not sort the dates. Read straight, the papers allow a Tuscaloosa assignment at the start of 1940, a gunnery billet on Cole that June, and Tuscaloosa again by April 1941. They also allow a simple lag between a register and a directory. The biography's claim that he served in both ships holds either way. The claim that Tuscaloosa duty was Atlantic is the biography's, not a deck log's.
The 1941 Register's index calls him a lieutenant. The April 1941 directory still says lieutenant (junior grade). Promotion fell in 1941, after April 1 if both books are right, and the day is not fixed here. The 1942 Register's index still has him a lieutenant. Somewhere after that, and before the 1944 Register, he became a lieutenant commander: the 1944 book lists Francis Joseph Blouin, file 72447, as "Lt. Cd.," with the birth date 23 July 1910 and the midshipman date 13 June 1929. The combat citations of 1944 and 1945 address him as commander. The 1947 Register's index lists him as a commander, and so do the registers of 1950 and 1952. Temporary wartime ranks moved faster than the bound registers. The compiled list's "Commander" is the rank the citations use. It is not a claim that he was already a commander on the first day he walked aboard Sterett. That day is itself not proved.
The early-war shore duty is the softest panel in the wartime story. The Clymer biography says he served in the Office of Communications, Chief of Naval Operations, during the early period of the war, and then returned to sea in 1944 as commanding officer of Sterett and Ingersoll. No Navy Directory for 1942 or 1943 was in hand to confirm the communications desk. The sentence is left as what that 1963 biography says. If it is right, the choice it records is the one that cost him the war he had been watching from Washington. He went back to a destroyer in the Central Pacific in the year of the Marianas, the Philippines, and the kamikaze.
Sterett
Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the text carried by the Destroyer History Foundation from the Naval Historical Center, never prints Blouin's name. It does print the ship's movements through the months the Bronze Star says he commanded her. Those movements are the skeleton. They are not a diary of his orders.
At the end of 1943 Sterett escorted Alabama to Pearl Harbor and on to the Ellice Islands and reached Funafuti on 21 January 1944. Two days later she put to sea with Bunker Hill and Monterey. The Sterett Association's chronology, which once misspells him Boulin, says Lieutenant Commander Frank G. Gould was relieved by Commander Francis J. L. Blouin on 14 January 1944 while the ship was in port at Pearl Harbor. That is the compiled list's start date, with a place attached. DANFS does not give the Pearl Harbor day. A relief on the 14th, during the Alabama passage through Pearl, is possible. It is not in the official ship history.
From 29 January to 7 March 1944 DANFS has Sterett in the Marianas and Marshalls. On the 29th the carriers' planes struck Roi and Namur in Kwajalein Atoll. Then the 12 February raid on Truk. Five days later she covered the carriers during raids on Tinian and Saipan. She left the Marshalls for the New Hebrides and joined the Emirau invasion force, stopped at Purvis Bay on Florida Island on 4 April, and at Efate on 7 April, on her way to the United States. Pearl Harbor again on 16 and 17 April. Puget Sound Navy Yard on the 29th. A short yard period, then San Francisco, then back to Pearl on 10 May, exercises, and a sortie with Task Group 12.1 for the Marshalls. At Majuro from 30 May she went out with Task Force 58 on 6 June to screen the support carriers for the Marianas invasion.
The Bronze Star citation, Hall of Valor's text, says that from February 1944 to January 1945 his ship "played an important part in the capture and occupation of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, in the Marianas, and was a unit of Task Force Fifty-Eight in the first air strikes on the Bonin Islands, Palau, Yap, and Ulithi." DANFS for the middle of June matches the Marianas half of that sentence without using his name. From 11 to 25 June she cruised with the carriers as they launched and recovered strikes on Saipan, Iwo Jima, Guam, and Rota, "periodically fending off Japanese aerial retaliation." That window covers the Battle of the Philippine Sea, which DANFS does not name in this paragraph. From 25 June until 7 July she patrolled around Guam and Rota and bombarded Guam. After covering the carriers over Yap, Palau, and Ulithi she sailed for Eniwetok and then Puget Sound again: Pearl Harbor 10 to 14 August, Bremerton on the 20th. Overhaul and trials on the west coast, then west on 13 October. She sortied from Oahu with Task Unit 16.8.5 on 19 November and entered Seeadler Harbor, Manus, twelve days later. Two weeks before Christmas 1944 she entered Leyte Gulf for patrol and convoy duty.
The citation's "remainder of this period" was "escorting the re-supply echelons in Mindoro in support of the Philippine Campaign, during which it underwent many air attacks and shot down eight enemy planes." DANFS tells one convoy, not a count of eight. The day after Christmas she started for Mindoro with a supply convoy. Two days later the Japanese attacked. Early that morning three kamikazes dove at the convoy. Antiaircraft fire splashed the first. The second and third crashed into merchantmen. Sterett, DANFS says, endured the "Divine Wind" until the task unit was dissolved on New Year's Day 1945. That day she returned to San Pedro Bay "claiming the destruction of one enemy suicide plane for herself and assists in eliminating two others."
The Legion of Merit citation, again as Hall of Valor prints it, and with the ship's name misspelled Sterret in the header, does not give a month. It says that as commanding officer during a four-day running battle against enemy aircraft he was constantly alert, and that by gunfire, shiphandling, radar warning, and assistance to the convoy he contributed to the convoy's protection, "to the destruction of thirty-seven enemy aircraft and to the damaging and driving off of many more." Thirty-seven is the citation's number for the fight he contributed to, not a sentence that says Sterett alone shot down thirty-seven. Eight is the Bronze Star's number for what "it," the ship, shot down across the Mindoro resupply period. One, plus two assists, is what DANFS says the ship claimed on New Year's Day, after a morning in which the first of three kamikazes was splashed by fire that the history does not assign to a single ship. Those three numbers cannot be added into one tidy score. They are left in disagreement. The four-day running battle in the Legion citation is not dated. The Mindoro convoy, from the day after Christmas to New Year's Day, is the only multi-day air attack on a convoy that DANFS describes inside the months the Bronze Star gives him. It is the likely action. The citation itself does not say so.
He is not given Sterett's April. DANFS, after New Year's Day, has her for three months on patrol and convoy duty in the South and Central Pacific, "primarily" in the Solomons, and then off Okinawa by 13 April, including a kamikaze hit at radar-picket station 4 on 9 April that opened her side at the waterline, killed her power, and sent her to Kerama Retto under her own steering aft. The association says that on 27 January 1945, after a highline transfer in the Philippine Sea, Gordon B. Williams relieved him, and that Williams, not Blouin, had the ship when the kamikaze hit. The Bronze Star stops in January 1945. If the 27 January relief is right, the Okinawa damage was his successor's. DANFS names neither officer. A Luzon battle star for the Lingayen landings of 4 to 18 January appears in the association chronology and does not appear, as a landing, in the DANFS paragraph that carries Sterett from Mindoro into Solomon patrols. The Bronze Star talks about Mindoro resupply, not Lingayen Gulf. He is not put on that beach here.
Sterett's Presidential Unit Citation and most of her battle stars belong to 1942 and 1943, Guadalcanal and after, under other captains. DANFS and the association even disagree about the ship's total, thirteen in one rendering of the official history and twelve in the association's count. None of that earlier score is his.
Ingersoll, and the picket line
It is in the Clymer biography, in one clause: commanding officer of Sterett and Ingersoll. It is in the Silver Star.
That citation, which Hall of Valor attributes to Commander Destroyers Pacific serial 04340 of December 29, 1945, awards the Silver Star to Commander Francis Joseph Blouin for command of U.S.S. Ingersoll (DD-652) "at Okinawa Gunto, Nansei Shoto, from 24 May to 26 June 1945." The ship was a radar picket and "a frequent target for many extraordinarily heavy raids launched day and night." He "performed the vital functions of providing early air warning and fighter direction and succeeded in shooting down one enemy plane and assisted in destroying two more." That is the whole personal claim the citation makes. Early warning, fighter direction, one plane, two assists. No wound. No statement that the ship was hit.
DANFS for Ingersoll, the HyperWar transcription of the Naval History Division text, again never says his name. It was commissioned at Boston on 31 August 1943 under Commander A. Veasey, a spelling the history uses. Her 1944 was the Marshalls, Truk, the Palaus, Hollandia, Peleliu, Formosa, and Leyte Gulf, including a long stern chase after Cape Engaño in which she fired one torpedo at long range and did not engage the remaining heavy ships. That year is not his on any source consulted. She was detached on 1 February 1945, reached Pearl Harbor on 7 February, and San Pedro on 15 February for battle repairs and crew rotation. She sailed again on 18 April, trained, left for Ulithi on 2 May, and went to Okinawa as a patrol vessel screening flight operations.
Off Okinawa on 24 May, DANFS says, the ship engaged a small suicide boat. Next day she shot down two Japanese aircraft. Two more were splashed on 28 May. She continued patrol and picket duty through June and rejoined Task Force 38 on 1 July. The Silver Star's window is 24 May to 26 June, so the suicide boat and the late-May air raids fall inside the days the citation says he had the ship. The citation's "one" and "two assists" are not the history's "two on the 25th and two more on the 28th." Ship totals and a captain's citation often count different guns and different shares of credit. They are not forced to agree here. The suicide boat is the ship's history, not a sentence in his citation. He is not described, by any source in hand, as the man who conned her onto that boat.
NavSource, a weak list, dates his Ingersoll command from 14 February 1945 to April 1946 and then gives the ship to Lieutenant Commander Robert Larue Tully until decommissioning on 19 July 1946. Uboat.net, citing nothing better, runs him from 14 February 1945 to 19 July 1946, the day DANFS says she decommissioned at Charleston. February 14 would put the change of command at San Pedro during the repair period DANFS describes, after Veasey's long wartime cruise and before the April departure for Pearl. That is a plausible seam. It is not a log. If he was still in command on 2 September 1945, he was the captain whose ship DANFS places at anchor in Tokyo Bay for the surrender on Missouri. DANFS does not say the captain's name. If NavSource is right that he left in April 1946, he would have had the occupation, the 5 December departure from Japan, the January arrival at Boston, and the move to Charleston, and not the decommissioning crew. If uboat.net is right, he took her out of commission. None of those endings is adopted. The only dated command the strong citation actually covers is 24 May to 26 June 1945.
After 1 July, still unnamed, Ingersoll screened Task Force 38 in the last raids on Japan, and on 15 July bombarded the iron works at Kamaishi with a battleship-cruiser-destroyer group, one of the first surface bombardments of the home islands. Then the surrender, the demilitarizing of bases, and the long trip home. How much of that was his watch is exactly the gap the secondary end-dates pretend to close.
After the guns
The Clymer biography sends him from the two destroyers to duty as executive officer of the cruiser Manchester, then to a year of postgraduate training at the Naval War College in 1948, then to duty as aide to Fleet Admiral W. D. Leahy, then Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief. Manchester (CL-83) was a postwar ship. The biography does not date the executive-officer tour beyond placing it before the War College year. Leahy's time as chief of staff ran out in 1949. The aide job, if the biography is right, was a short one at the end of that old admiral's last office. In 1949-50 the same biography makes Blouin director of the Legislative Division in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Nothing in the Post obituary adds a private view of that work. It was the start of the second career, the Washington one, which would be longer than the shooting one.
The Post of January 26, 1993, calls him "a destroyer skipper in the Pacific in World War II and the Korean War." The Clymer biography is more precise and less dramatic. It says he was, successively, commander of Escort Destroyer Division 12 "at sea during the Korean hostilities," then on the staff of the Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, and in 1954 on the Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Division commander is not the same job as the captain of a single destroyer. The Post's phrase may be a compression. It may be a mistake. The biography is the fuller document and the earlier one, printed while he was alive and in command of an amphibious force. The division number and the fact of sea duty during the Korean fighting are taken from it. The image of him as a ship's captain off Korea is not.
He was still a commander in the 1952 Navy Register. By the Whitin Spindle's anniversary note of May 1959 he was a captain. The day he made captain is not in either paper. The Clymer biography says he was advanced to rear admiral on July 1, 1960. Weak rank tables on the internet say January 1, 1959, for rear admiral and July 27, 1966, for vice admiral. The biography and the later citations fit a flag on July 1, 1960, better than a flag in 1959, because the sea commands of the late 1950s are told before the sentence "following promotion to flag rank."
Those commands, still from the 1963 biography: U.S.S. Mount McKinley, the amphibious flagship, from October 1957 until December 1958, and with her Sixth Fleet operations during the Lebanon crisis; then Commander, Amphibious Squadron Four, and also Commander, Amphibious Force, Sixth Fleet. After the flag: assistant to the Director of Strategic Plans on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations; Deputy Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until August 1, 1961; then Commander, Amphibious Group One, and Commander, Amphibious Force, Seventh Fleet. The cruise book that prints this sketch exists because George Clymer was in that force. The page is a Navy biography reproduced for the crew, not a memoir. It stops when he is already in the Seventh Fleet job. It does not describe a decision he made in Lebanon, or a landing he refused, or a letter home. The crisis is a clause.
The next dated duty is again a citation. All Hands for January 1967 is the source Hall of Valor gives for a Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit, to Rear Admiral Francis Joseph Blouin, as Director of the Far East Region in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, from October 1963 to July 1966. The work, in the citation's words, was "developing recommendations on politico-military matters" for countries where the United States faced "some of its most crucial and complex problems with respect to both military strategy and foreign policy." The Post remembers the same office as "director of the Far East Region in the office of the secretary of defense in the 1960s." He was a rear admiral through the end of that tour. The All Hands text still calls him rear admiral for service ending in July 1966.
By February 1, 1970, the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings list of flag officers has him as Vice Admiral Francis J. Blouin, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans and Policy), lineal number 16, under the Chief of Naval Operations. The Gold Star in lieu of a second Navy Distinguished Service Medal, in the full citation Hall of Valor prints, covers that billet from June 1968 to July 1971. It says he was directly involved in the strategic posture of the United States and in force structure, principal adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations on matters before the Joint Chiefs, routinely in contact with the State and Defense Departments, and adviser to the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations on international politico-military affairs. A first Distinguished Service Medal is also listed, as a synopsis only, with the words "Citation Needed." That first award is not treated as a sourced decoration here. The second one is.
The Post says that in 1968 he was named deputy chief of naval operations for plans and policy, "the position from which he retired in 1971." The citation's closing month is July 1971. A retirement on the first of that July is a common story on weak sites and is not required by the Post. He retired from that desk, a vice admiral, in 1971. He had been a commissioned officer since June 1933.
The end, and what is missing
Francis Joseph Blouin died on January 24, 1993, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, after a heart attack. He was 82. That is the Washington Post, published January 26. The Hall of Valor page uses the same death date. Uboat.net places the death at Bethesda. In 1993 Walter Reed Army Medical Center was still in Washington, not at the Bethesda campus it later joined. The Post is followed. The Post's retrieved text does not name a wife, a child, a church, or a cemetery. It does not quote him. It gives the destroyers, the Joint Chiefs, the Far East desk, the plans-and-policy job, the heart attack, and stops.
What he left the parents in Whitinsville can be said more clearly than what he left a family of his own. Lucien Blouin had come to the Whitin Machine Works in April 1906, married about 1909, and in 1959 still had a wife and four sons the company thought worth printing: a Navy captain who had commanded destroyers under the kamikazes and who would be a vice admiral, a Navy captain who had been a fighter pilot, a Coast Guard captain, and a junior lieutenant. The son's middle name was the father's. The son had wanted, at twenty-two, both the line and the sky. The line is what the registers kept. The sky went, if anywhere in that house, to Clarence.
The pressure the citations actually describe is professional and narrow. On Sterett it was convoy antiaircraft, radar warning, and shiphandling across days when kamikazes were hitting merchantmen and the count of planes depends on which document you trust. On Ingersoll it was the picket line at Okinawa for a month, early warning and fighter direction, one plane shot down and two shared, while the ship's history records a suicide boat and a higher tally of aircraft. He came off those ships alive, with a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit with Combat "V," and a Bronze Star with Combat "V," and with no citation that says the ship was lost or that he was hurt. The cost that can be documented is the year he spent out of the Navy Department and on those two hulls, and then, much later, the years he spent as a staff officer inside the Vietnam-era arguments over the Far East and over what forces the country would buy. The private cost is not in the papers gathered here.