Ships
- USS Edsall (DD-219) Captain, 30 September 1937 – 2 February 1939
Lieutenant Commander Frederick Sears Conner was captain of the United States Navy destroyer Edsall from 30 September 1937 to 2 February 1939. The ship, DD-219, was a Clemson-class flush-deck destroyer from the yard of William Cramp and Sons in Philadelphia. She was launched on 29 July 1920 and commissioned on 26 November 1920. Her name honored Seaman Norman Eckley Edsall, killed on 1 April 1899 with a landing party from the cruiser Philadelphia near Vailele, Samoa.
The destroyer he took over had spent her whole commissioned life with the Asiatic Fleet. A. H. Rice was her first commanding officer. In the years just after that, command passed through Halsey Powell, Harry Robert Bogusch, William Callender Irving Stiles, Robert Todd Young, and Lemuel Earl Lindsay. Her work was the long circuit between Philippine anchorages and the China coast: gunnery and engineering drills, visits to the treaty ports, and the ordinary watch over American residents and merchant ships.
That station life continued under Jules James, Thomas Cross Slingluff, and Byron Scott Dague. Conner assumed command after the clash at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937 had already widened into war across eastern China. Through the autumn of 1937 and the whole of 1938, Edsall stayed with the Asiatic Fleet in Philippine and Chinese waters, one of the older destroyers on hand while the fighting spread, looking after American lives and property along the coast. His tour ended on 2 February 1939.
Edsall remained in the Far East after he left her. In the first weeks of the Pacific war she escorted convoys in the waters off northern Australia and the Dutch East Indies. In January 1942 she joined Australian corvettes in the action that destroyed the Japanese submarine I-124 off Darwin, and in February she picked up survivors of the seaplane tender Langley. On 1 March 1942, well south of Christmas Island, Japanese battleships, cruisers, and carrier aircraft brought her to action. She dodged heavy gunfire for a long time, was disabled by dive bombers, and sank. Nearly everyone aboard was lost, including Army pilots she was carrying, and a few men taken from the water by a Japanese cruiser were killed afterward. The captain in that last fight was Lieutenant Commander Joshua J. Nix. Conner had left Edsall more than three years earlier. Searchers found the wreck in deep water south of Christmas Island in 2023, and it was identified in 2024.