Ships
- USS President Adams (AP-38) In command, 7 August 1942
Commander Frank H. Dean of the United States Navy was in command of the transport President Adams on 7 August 1942, the morning American Marines landed at Guadalcanal and Tulagi. A member of the Naval Academy class of 1917, he had taken the ship on 30 January 1942.
President Adams was a Maritime Commission C3 passenger and cargo ship built at Newport News, Virginia, and commissioned on 19 November 1941. Her first commanding officer was Commander C. W. Brewington. Dean succeeded him at the end of January, as the transport finished working up and shifted toward the Pacific.
Through the first half of 1942 President Adams trained with troops off the California coast. In June she embarked the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Marines and, on 1 July, sailed for the South Pacific with the force assembling for the first American amphibious offensive of the war. By 4 August she was at Nouméa, New Caledonia, crowded with Marines and fitted with landing craft and climbing nets.
From 7 to 9 August 1942 her boats put Marines ashore in the Guadalcanal–Tulagi area, with Dean in command. She stayed with that campaign, carrying men and cargo through the months of fighting that followed. When Japanese forces left Guadalcanal in February 1943, the Navy redesignated President Adams an attack transport and assigned her the hull number APA-19. Dean was still her commanding officer.
Dean left President Adams on 28 July 1943 after about eighteen months aboard. In 1945 he was a captain on duty at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and he later became a rear admiral. His son, Frank H. Dean Jr. of the Naval Academy class of 1943, commanded a motor torpedo boat in the Southwest Pacific, received the Silver Star, and died in an airplane crash on the West Coast on 7 September 1945.