Ships
- USS Alabama (BB-60) Captain from 16 August 1942 · Relieved on 17 March 1943
George Barry Wilson was born on 27 March 1892 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1914. He made his career in the United States Navy, and by the summer of 1942 he was a captain selected to take a new battleship out of the builder’s yard.
On 16 August 1942, at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, Wilson took command of Alabama (BB-60) as she was commissioned. The South Dakota-class ship had been laid down in that yard on 1 February 1940 and launched on 16 February 1942, with Henrietta Hill, wife of Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, as sponsor. Her crew came to call her the Mighty A. For the next seven months Wilson’s work was to turn a new hull into a working battleship.
Alabama began her shakedown cruise in Chesapeake Bay on 11 November 1942. At the start of 1943 she went north for operational training out of Casco Bay, Maine, and she was back in the Chesapeake on 11 January for the closing week of that cruise. After an availability at Norfolk she joined Task Group 22.2 and returned to Casco Bay on 13 February 1943 for tactical maneuvers. Through that winter the ship drilled her gunnery, engineering, and shiphandling in the Chesapeake and in the cold waters off the Maine coast.
Wilson was relieved on 17 March 1943. He was ill at the time, and Neil Kittrell Dietrich served as temporary captain for the next three days. Fred Durrel Kirtland then took command. Under Kirtland, Alabama joined the British Home Fleet for the northern convoy routes and later moved to the Pacific. In the years after that first wartime cruise, command of the battleship passed in turn to Vincent Raphael Murphy, William Bernard Goggins, Edward Harris Pierce, Claude Fenn Bailey, and Charles B. Phillips.
On 3 October 1942, while he was still aboard Alabama, Wilson received the temporary rank of rear admiral, and he finished the tour as her captain. After he left the ship he became chief of staff to Admiral Harold R. Stark, commander of United States Naval Forces in Europe, and on that staff he shared in the planning for the 1944 invasion of Normandy. He was awarded the Legion of Merit as a rear admiral and retired in that rank. Wilson died on 4 December 1949. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on 7 December 1949.