Ships
- USS Allen (DD-66) Captain from 23 August 1940 · Relieved on 21 November 1941
Frederick Paul Williams was born on 3 February 1903 in Macon, Alabama. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1925 and made his career in the United States Navy. On 1 January 1940 he was a lieutenant commander.
On 23 August 1940, as a lieutenant commander, Williams took command of USS Allen (DD-66) at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and returned the destroyer to commission. Allen was a Sampson-class ship built by Bath Iron Works in Maine. She had been launched in December 1916, commissioned in January 1917 under Samuel Woods Bryant, and used in the Atlantic during the First World War. After reserve time and a spell training naval reservists at Washington, she had lain at Philadelphia from March 1928. Williams brought back the last ship of her class as the Navy grew after war began in Europe.
Her new commission opened with a short period on the East Coast. On 4 November 1940 she was ordered to Destroyer Division 80 on the West Coast, and on 9 December she sailed for Pearl Harbor, where the Pacific Fleet was then based. Through most of 1941 Allen worked with the other old destroyers of that division, Schley, Chew, and Ward, watching the harbor entrance and the channels to the open sea and patrolling for submarines around the Hawaiian Islands.
Williams was relieved on 21 November 1941 by Daniel Byrd Miller. On the morning of 7 December 1941 Allen was still at Pearl Harbor, moored in East Loch northeast of Ford Island, and Miller was her commanding officer. The ship spent the rest of the war on escort and patrol duty, mainly in Hawaiian waters, and later returned to Philadelphia to be decommissioned in October 1945.
Williams was made a temporary commander on 1 August 1942 and a temporary captain on 20 July 1943. He died on 4 October 1970 in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, at the age of sixty-seven.