Ships
- USS Paul Hamilton (DD-590) Captain from 1 September 1945
George Francis Dalton (born 14 December 1916) was an officer of the United States Navy, a member of the Naval Academy class of 1938, who commanded the destroyer USS Gridley (DD-380) through the last Philippine campaign of the Second World War and in the spring of 1945, then took the destroyer Paul Hamilton (DD-590) into the quiet months after the Japanese surrender. He was the son of one of the most celebrated football players the Academy ever produced, a man who died when George was two, and the younger brother of a naval aviator who was shot down over the Solomon Islands in 1943. He stayed in the service long after the war, commanding a destroyer, a dock landing ship and a destroyer division, and reached the rank of captain in 1957. He should not be confused with Carl Malcolm Dalton, an older naval officer of the same surname, with no documented family connection, who served in the same years, nor with Donald MacLean Dalton, Joseph Francis Dalton, or the several other Daltons who appear in the Navy's registers of the period.
The registers of the Navy give George Dalton's date of birth as 14 December 1916. His Naval Academy yearbook, the Lucky Bag of 1938, lists his home as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and calls him a "Navy Junior", the service's term for an officer's child. The officer in question was his father, Lieutenant Commander John Patrick Dalton of the Academy class of 1912. To a generation of Annapolis men, "Jack" Dalton was a legend rather than a name: captain of the 1911 Navy team and an All-America halfback, he kicked the 35-yard field goals that beat Army 3–0 in both 1910 and 1911, and he was later elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. One of the Academy's goat mascots was named "3-0 Jack Dalton" in his honour. He served through the First World War and, according to accounts compiled for the Academy's memorial records, fell ill while serving as navigator of the armoured cruiser Frederick, then temporarily serving as a troop transport. He died of pneumonia in the naval hospital at the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn on 10 March 1919, at the age of twenty-nine.
George was then a little more than two years old. His brother, John Shaw Dalton, had been born on 24 June 1915 in Chelsea, New Jersey. Their mother's name is recorded as Edythe. Little else about the household survives in the sources examined here: there is no published account of where the widow raised her sons, how she supported them, or what they knew of the father whose fame followed the family name. What is documented is the path both boys took. Each of their yearbook entries says that he came to Annapolis after seven years at military schools, and by the summer of 1934 the brothers, a year and a half apart in age, were entering the Naval Academy together. John gave his home as Overbrook, a neighbourhood on Philadelphia's western edge. The registers record George's appointment as a midshipman on 19 June 1934.
The two Daltons went through Annapolis together as members of the class of 1938, and the Lucky Bag sketches of them, written by classmates, are the nearest thing in the record to a portrait of either young man. Both sketches mention the same seven years of military school, and both describe a runner.
George's entry gives him the nickname "Slewfoot". "Placing athletics near the top of the list," it says, "he gave his best to football until he decided that track was his one true love. 'Where's George?' 'Out working on the hurdles.' And that holds true even in the midst of winter. He has not broken any records yet but is still dreaming of it." The writer adds that he had "an utter contempt for pipe smoking", dated now and then, kept out of the disciplinary trouble the yearbook calls "the trees", and "never knows the time of the next formation." The summary judgment is that of a friend: "A man with a lot of perseverance, a fine sense of humor, and an optimistic personality. In short, he will always come out ahead." His activities are listed as football in three years and track in all four, with a varsity letter, together with the chairmanship of his class's ring dance committee and the midshipman rank of lieutenant (junior grade).
John, "Jack" or "J. Shaw" to his classmates, was the faster and better-known athlete, captain of the track team and a sprinter who, in the yearbook's account of the 1937 season, won both the 100- and 220-yard dashes against Penn State "by a large margin". The caption of the 1937 track team photograph lists two Daltons in the same row. The picture the sources leave is of two brothers in the same uniform, on the same cinder track, the elder in the lead and the younger out on the hurdles in midwinter.
Both graduated in June 1938; George's commission as ensign is dated 2 June 1938. Their careers then divided. The registers of 1939 and 1940 place George in the destroyer leader USS Moffett. The 1942 register, which no longer printed duty stations, records that he had been on continuous sea duty since June 1938, four years without a shore tour, and that he had been promoted lieutenant (junior grade) on 2 June 1941 and temporary lieutenant on 15 June 1942. John went from the light cruiser Philadelphia to destroyers and then, in 1941, to flight training at Pensacola, where he was designated a naval aviator in December 1941.
For the first half of the war, the record of George Dalton's own movements is thin. The officer registers of 1942 and 1943 give his rank but not his ship. The one contemporary description found for this period comes, at second hand, from a Philadelphia newspaper account of August 1943, as summarised in the Academy's memorial records: it described Lieutenant George Francis Dalton as the executive officer of a destroyer in the Pacific area. The ship is not named.
That newspaper account was published because of his brother. John Dalton had gone to the South Pacific as a fighter pilot with the escort-carrier air groups working out of Guadalcanal. Logs of the escort carrier Suwannee show him flying through the spring of 1943, sometimes as a flight leader. On 18 July 1943, while escorting land-based bombers over the Russell Islands in the Solomons, his F4F-4 Wildcat was shot down. He was twenty-eight. He was listed as missing in action and his body was never recovered; his mother was recorded as his next of kin. If the newspaper account was accurate, George was at sea in the same ocean when it happened. Nothing in the sources records how he learned of it or what he said.
By 1944 the registers list George Dalton as a lieutenant commander, and in the autumn of that year he was given command of USS Gridley, a pre-war destroyer of 1937 that had been at sea in the Pacific since the first day of the war. Ship-history compilations disagree about the date he took over, giving either 1 November or 29 November 1944. If the earlier date is right, he took over as she was returning to the fleet anchorage at Ulithi, where she arrived on 2 November escorting the damaged carriers Franklin and Belleau Wood.
According to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Gridley left Ulithi again on 5 November 1944 with the fast carrier task force for the Leyte operation. She was later attached to a group of escort carriers and served as a bombardment and patrol ship during the landings in Lingayen Gulf on Luzon, staying in that work until 10 February 1945. These were the months when Japanese suicide aircraft were striking the escort-carrier groups off the Philippines and the destroyers screening them. The official history does not record any particular action by Gridley in this period, and no action report or award citation naming her captain has been found, so the details of how Dalton handled his ship and crew under that pressure cannot be reconstructed from what survives.
After Lingayen Gridley went back to Ulithi and then escorted the battleship Mississippi to Pearl Harbor. Dalton took her on through San Diego and the Panama Canal to New York, where she arrived on 30 March 1945 and entered the New York Navy Yard the next day for what the official history calls much-needed repairs. It was the same navy yard in whose hospital his father had died twenty-six years earlier. Gridley finished her overhaul and sailed from the United States on 22 June 1945 for the Mediterranean, where she would spend the following months on passenger, freight and convoy work between North African, Italian and French ports. Dalton was relieved of command on 10 July 1945, less than three weeks after she sailed.
On 1 September 1945, the day before the formal Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay, he took command of USS Paul Hamilton, a Fletcher-class destroyer that had come through the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns and had arrived at San Diego on 8 July for overhaul. His war had ended and her fighting was over. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships records that Paul Hamilton reported to the Pacific Reserve Fleet on 24 September 1945. Ship-history sources show Dalton in command until February 1946, which suggests that his job was to see her laid up rather than take her anywhere.
Dalton stayed in the regular Navy. The registers of the 1950s list him as a commander, with a date of rank that their numeric columns render as 11-05-45, a reading consistent with a commander's rank first reached in late 1945. From August 1949 to September 1951, according to ship-history compilations, he commanded the destroyer USS Glennon (DD-840). The same kind of source gives him command of the dock landing ship USS Fort Mandan (LSD-21) from January 1955 to 4 March 1956, as a commander of the class of 1938.
He was promoted to captain with a date of rank of 1 May 1957. A history of the destroyer USS English (DD-696) records that on 24 May 1958, while English lay in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, "Capt. G. F. Dalton relieved Capt. E. B. Jarman as Commander Destroyer Division 22", with English as his flagship and Borie, Hank and Wallace L. Lind under his command. English went to Guantánamo Bay for refresher training that summer and, with the rest of Destroyer Squadron 2, sailed for the Mediterranean in October 1958; the history does not say whether Dalton was still in command of the division by then.
He remained on active duty as a captain through the register of 1 January 1966. He does not appear in the 1967 edition, which suggests that he left active service in 1966, after more than thirty years in uniform counting his time at Annapolis. No published record of his retirement, his marriage or children, his later life, or his death has been found. His father and his brother both died young and in uniform, and are remembered in Academy halls of honour and in football history. George Dalton, the hurdler whose classmates predicted he would "always come out ahead", outlived them both by decades, and the record that survives of him is mostly the record of the ships he commanded.