Ships
- USS Samuel S. Miles (DE-183) Captain, 4 November 1943 – 21 May 1944
George B. Coale, born on 16 September 1905, was a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve. He commanded the net tender Larch from 13 December 1941 to 12 April 1942. On 10 March 1942, off Barnegat Light, New Jersey, Larch picked up survivors of the American tanker Gulftrade after U-588 torpedoed her, and on 13 March recovered a survivor of the Chilean freighter Tolten, sunk in the same waters by U-404. He then commanded the minesweeper Chickadee from 9 November 1942 to 29 July 1943.
On 4 November 1943 he commissioned the destroyer escort Samuel S. Miles at the New York Navy Yard. Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock in Newark had laid the Cannon-class ship down on 5 July 1943 and launched her on 3 October. The sponsor was the widow of Samuel Stockton Miles, a Navy doctor killed at Tulagi on 7 August 1942 while going forward under fire to treat the wounded.
Coale took Samuel S. Miles through shakedown off Bermuda. The escort left New York on 30 December 1943, transited the Panama Canal, and reached the Marshall Islands on 19 February 1944. In the spring of 1944 she guarded fleet oilers, including the April screens for fast-carrier strikes against the Caroline Islands and the Hollandia area of New Guinea.
Henry G. Brousseau, Jr. relieved him on 21 May 1944. Samuel S. Miles shot down two planes off Saipan on 18 June 1944 and sank the Japanese submarine I-177 near the Palau Islands on 3 October 1944, both after Coale had left the ship.