Ships
- USS Jenkins (DD-447) Captain, 8 July 1945 – 31 December 1945
Gene Thomas Shirley, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, became captain of the Fletcher-class destroyer Jenkins (DD-447) on 8 July 1945. He held that command through 31 December 1945, a stretch that covered the last weeks of fighting in the Pacific and the first months after Japan laid down its arms.
Jenkins was already a veteran when he came aboard. Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company at Kearny, New Jersey, laid her down in November 1941, launched her in June 1942, and the Navy commissioned her on 31 July 1942 under Harry Fanker Miller. After training she left Casco Bay, Maine, in October 1942 as escort for a convoy bound for the North African landings, screened heavy ships off Casablanca, and then turned back to prepare for the Pacific. She reached the war in the South Pacific in January 1943 and operated with Destroyer Squadron 21 in support of the New Georgia campaign, including the Battle of Kula Gulf in early July 1943, while Miller was still in command.
Madison Hall relieved Miller on 9 July 1943 and commanded her into the winter. Philip Daly Gallery took her on 29 December 1943 and kept her through the long central and southwest Pacific campaigns that followed. A shore battery damaged the destroyer off Luzon in December 1944. In April 1945, while the squadron supported the landing at Tarakan, Borneo, Jenkins struck a mine in a channel that had already been swept. One man was killed. She stayed in the war zone after the explosion, and Gallery remained her captain until Shirley relieved him.
Shirley assumed command on 8 July 1945. Five weeks later, on 15 August, Japan announced it would surrender, and the instrument of surrender was signed on 2 September. For the rest of 1945 Jenkins was his ship, a commissioned destroyer whose hard fighting belonged to the captains who had gone before him and whose first wartime commission was running out.
His command ended on 31 December 1945. Jenkins remained in commission into the spring and was decommissioned at San Diego on 1 May 1946. The Navy brought her back in 1951 as an antisubmarine destroyer, sent her to the western Pacific through the Korean War and into the Vietnam years, and sold her for scrap in February 1971. Shirley’s place in her story is the last wartime command, from midsummer 1945 through the end of that year.