Ships
- USS Patterson (DD-392) Captain from 22 September 1937
Francis T. Spellman was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on 23 February 1895, and he came from Boston. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1917. An act of Congress of 22 May 1917 advanced the new graduates at once, and he received the temporary rank of lieutenant (junior grade) as the United States entered the First World War.
He served in the battleship Oklahoma in 1918 and 1919. In 1924 he was on the faculty of the Naval Academy. From 1930 to 1934 he served with the Asiatic Fleet, including duty in the cruiser Rochester in 1932 and in the cruiser Houston in 1933. Before he was given a destroyer, he was gunnery officer of the battleship Nevada.
On 22 September 1937 Commander Spellman became the first commanding officer of Patterson (DD-392) when the destroyer was commissioned at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington. The yard had launched her on 6 May 1937. Miss Elizabeth P. Patterson sponsored the ship, named for Commodore Daniel Todd Patterson, a naval officer of the early republic.
Her first cruise began on 26 November 1937. After a call at San Francisco she entered Pearl Harbor on 7 December, then turned back and reached the navy yard again on 22 December. Coastal drills filled the winter. Late in March 1938 she made a second run to Hawaii and, on 28 April, came into San Pedro to take up work along the western seaboard. Spellman remained in command into 1939 while Patterson exercised with the fleet off the West Coast. In the years after he left her, the destroyer went to war from Pearl Harbor, served through the Solomons and the later Pacific campaigns, and received thirteen battle stars.
In the Second World War he served in the fleet oiler Chemung in 1941 and 1942, and he then commanded the heavy cruiser Chester. By the Gilbert Islands operation he was a captain. For his leadership of that cruiser from 18 to 26 November 1943, during the occupation of the Gilberts, he received the Silver Star. He retired in 1947 as a rear admiral and died on 28 October 1972.