Ball, George Gill

Ships

• USS Lamson (DD-367) Captain from 24 November 1945

Compiled lists give him USS Lamson (DD-367) from 24 November 1945.

The name is right. The Navy Registers print “George Gill Ball,” and the later alphabetical indexes print “BALL GEORGE GILL,” file number 100411. He is not Frank Haywood Ball, file 058703, born 15 October 1900. He is not George Cornelius Ball, Jr., a classmate whose file in the same indexes is 100183 and whose birth date on the 1944 Register is not this man’s. He is not Frank C. Ball, the aviation pilot, and not Frederick O. Ball, file 058409, the hospital-corps officer. The jacket that stays with this name from the 1944 index through the Register of 1 January 1968 is 100411.

“Captain” on the command line is the old word for the officer in command. It was not a rank he held in November 1945, so far as the registers show. On 1 July 1945 he is still in the lieutenants, a temporary lieutenant whose permanent grade is ensign. On 1 July 1947 the index calls him a lieutenant commander. The promotion falls in the twenty-four months between those two books. “Lieutenant Commander” may be what the quarterdeck called him on 24 November 1945, and it may be a later grade read backward. The registers do not say which.

The date 24 November 1945 is not in the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships text read for this essay, and it was not read off a deck log. NavSource’s command list, credited to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, prints the same day, and carries him to 1 June 1946, relieving Robert McCormick Ayer. The ship’s own history, the public-domain DANFS account reproduced by destroyerhistory.org and historycentral.com, and incorporated in the Wikipedia page that points at the Naval History and Heritage Command entry, never names him. The NHHC page itself did not open. What DANFS does say is where the ship was. She left Sasebo after about a month of occupation duty, departed Japan on 29 October 1945, and reached San Diego on 29 November. She was at Bikini Atoll in May 1946 for the Able shot of Operation Crossroads and was sunk in that explosion on 2 July 1946. If the compiled change-of-command day is right, he took her in the last week of the voyage home, five days before San Diego. If the compiled relief day of 1 June 1946 is also right, he was still her captain when she went out to the atoll and was gone before the bomb. Neither of those days has been confirmed against a log. The fighting career DANFS gives her, including the kamikaze hit off Ormoc Bay on 7 December 1944, belongs to other captains. He is not one of them in any source read here.

Origins

The registers are exact about the day and thin about the house.

On 1 July 1943 his line in the lieutenants, signal number 7427, carries the birth date 22 July 1919 and the entry date 22 June 1937. The name is not on that OCR line. The index of the same book ties signal 7427 to “Ball, George G., Lt.” On 1 July 1944 the name is on the line: signal 7343, George Gill Ball, born 22 July 1919, entered 22 June 1937, file number 100411 in the index. The captains’ precedence list of 1 January 1960 prints the birth again, 22 July 1919, beside the same man. Uboat.net repeats 22 July 1919 and adds San Antonio as the birthplace. The birth date matches the Registers. The city of birth does not. San Antonio is where the Academy’s books put him when he entered. That is not a birth certificate.

The Annual Register of the Naval Academy for 1937–38, in “Midshipmen of the Fourth Class,” class of 1941, 587 members, lists “Ball, George Gill,” appointed from Texas, symbol K(2), admitted 22 June 1937, age at admission 17 years and 11 months. The symbol key in that book says K is a congressional appointment and (2) is entry by the certificate method, the substantiating certificate, rather than the regular mental examination or the college-certificate method. He did not come up from the fleet. A member of Congress from Texas nominated him, and the Academy took the certificate in place of the full examination. The book does not name the member, the district, or the school that wrote the certificate.

Seventeen years and eleven months on 22 June 1937 is the age of a boy born on 22 July 1919, or within a few days of it. The Register’s later birth column and the Academy’s age column agree. They do not, by themselves, prove the town.

The Lucky Bag of 1941, in the class index, gives the address the regiment had for him: 401 Terrell Road, San Antonio, Texas. The same book’s sketch is headed San Antonio. No source read here names the people who lived in that house, a parent, a brother, or what the household did. A genealogy index styles him George Gill Ball II, which would imply a father of the same name. The page behind that index did not open, and nothing in the Navy’s books confirms the “II” or the father. No wife and no child appear in any record used here.

Formation

He entered with the class he finished with.

The Lucky Bag says the first of the class of 1941 arrived in June 1937, “the drums of war still faint and far away,” and that graduation came on 7 February 1941 instead of the first week of June. The war had moved the calendar. His own admission date, 22 June 1937, is inside that arrival. His permanent ensign’s date of rank, in every wartime register that carries the class block, is 7 February 1941.

The yearbook page that is his, printed page 281, sits between Frederick Joseph Ruder of Columbus and Jay Crittenden Moss of Long Beach. The photograph is a midshipman in the usual dark uniform, the signature under it “George G. Ball.” The prose is his classmates talking, and it should be read that way. They found him “calm cool, collected, and composed,” “the most imperturbable bit of protoplasm you’ve ever seen,” “a real man’s man,” “a veritable messiah of good will to all of more than a nodding acquaintance.” They guessed at the cause and then declined to choose: “Perhaps it is his fairness; perhaps, his open mind; perhaps, the combination of an unassuming and an unruffled outlook.” The jokes are small and domestic. He had not yet, they said, taken a shower in which he remembered both soap and towel. In a shut room he would say “Hey! My claustrophobia!” and they would open the windows and freeze. That is a roommate’s complaint, not a diagnosis, and it is the only sentence in the sources that puts him under any kind of pressure before the war. The pressure is a closed room at Annapolis. What he did when the pressure was a ship, a watch, or a letter of commendation is not in the yearbook and not in the registers.

Under the sketch the activities are his, in the middle column, not Ruder’s and not Moss’s: Manager Lacrosse 4, 3, 2; Boat Club 3, 2, 1; Radio Club 3; Company Representative 1. The numerals are the class years, fourth class through first. He managed lacrosse for three years and stopped before first class. He was in the Boat Club for the last three years, the Radio Club in his youngster year, and company representative in the final year. The book does not say which company.

The Annual Register’s table of relative standing, “present first class (class of 1941), for the third year of their academic course, 402 members, June 1940,” puts him at 138. In a class of 402 that is the middle, a little above it. Ordnance and gunnery is 33, the one strong number. Navigation is 277. Mathematics is 319. Seamanship is 120. Electrical engineering is 113. English, history, and government is 182. Marine engineering reads 199; the first digit sits against the column rule and is the faint one on the page. Aptitude is 54. Conduct is 1, and so is the conduct of other men on the same page, so the 1 is a clean-record mark shared with classmates, not proof that he stood alone. The table is June 1940. It is not his final standing at graduation, which this register, closed on the third year, does not give.

Nothing in the Academy books says he wanted destroyers, or submarines, or the air. The Boat Club is the only sea-like line under his name, and a midshipman’s boat club is the Severn, not the Pacific.

The war, as the registers have it

The Navy Register is a precedence book. It will say what grade he held on the first of July, and it will not say what ship he stood on.

On 1 July 1941 he is an ensign, signal 7354. The date-of-rank column in his class block is 7 February 1941. The next column is headed, in that book, “Date of present shore duty, leave, or commencement of cruise,” and his line reads 5 March 1941. The column’s own title refuses to say which of the three it was. A new ensign, four weeks out of Annapolis, was either on leave, on shore duty, or at the start of a cruise. The register does not choose. The column for the end of his last cruise is a ditto, and the ditto is too long to trust.

On 1 July 1942 he is a lieutenant (junior grade). The date of temporary rank, dittoed from Lloyd Verne Young’s explicit “15 June 42” through an unbroken run of classmates to signal 7394, is 15 June 1942. Permanent status is still ensign, date of rank 7 February 1941. The war had given him a half stripe on top of a commission that, in the permanent list, was sixteen months old.

On 1 July 1943 and again on 1 July 1944 he is a lieutenant. Temporary rank dates from 1 December 1942, dittoed in both books from an explicit “1 Dec. 42” at the head of the class block that contains him. Permanent grade is still ensign of 7 February 1941. By the summer of 1944, two and a half years into his war, the permanent Navy still had him as the ensign it had made on graduation day. The lieutenant’s stripe was temporary, which is how the Navy promoted that class, and it is the stripe the fleet would have seen. The registers do not attach a ship, a squadron, or a special-course code to his own line. Classmates on the same pages carry codes the book defines: naval aviator, qualified in submarines, submarine instruction, the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. His 1944 line has the name, the dittos for rank, the birth, and the entry, and no qualification of his own. If he had one, this printing does not show it.

On 1 July 1945 he is still in the lieutenants, and the name now carries a mark the 1944 line did not. The explanatory notes of that register define (H-1) as “Awarded Special Letter of Commendation and authorized to wear Commendation Ribbon.” His line reads “George Gill Ball (H-1).” Oscar Frank Dreyer, immediately above him, is (G-1), the Bronze Star, and is not this man. The letter itself is not printed. The ship is not printed. The action is not printed. Between 1 July 1944 and 1 July 1945 the Navy recorded that someone in authority had written him a special letter of commendation and allowed the ribbon. That is the only decoration the registers examined here give him. It is also the only evidence, in those books, that the war had asked him to do something another officer thought worth writing down. What he had done, and where, is the blank at the center of his war.

Uboat.net, which has no career narrative for him and no commands, gives the same rank dates the registers give through lieutenant, and then a temporary lieutenant commander’s date of 20 July 1945. That day would sit neatly between the lieutenant of 1 July 1945 and the lieutenant commander of 1 July 1947. The site does not cite the order. It is not used here as the date.

He was twenty-two when the Pacific war began and twenty-six when it ended. The Academy had taught him to seem unruffled, and the Navy had promoted him on the class timetable from ensign to lieutenant (junior grade) to lieutenant, and had added a commendation ribbon, without ever writing down, in the books that list every officer, the name of a ship. The Lamson command comes after all of that.

Lamson, and what the command was

If the compiled date holds, he became her captain on 24 November 1945. Japan had surrendered on 2 September. DANFS has her leaving Japan on 29 October, after the occupation month at Sasebo, and making San Diego on 29 November. The war he had been commended in, whatever it was, was over before he is said to have had a command at all.

A Mahan-class destroyer at the end of 1945 was a used ship. Hers had been a long Pacific war under other men: Pearl Harbor, the South Pacific, Tassafaronga, New Guinea, Leyte, the kamikaze at Ormoc, the yard at Puget Sound, air-sea rescue off Iwo Jima, the surrender of the Bonins at Chichi Jima on 3 September, then Sasebo. None of that is his. What would have been his, if he took her on the 24th, was the last of the homeward passage and then whatever a destroyer does in a navy that is sending ships to be expended. DANFS next has her at Bikini in May 1946. Test Able sank her on 2 July 1946. She was struck on 15 August 1946. NavSource’s list takes him off on 1 June 1946, which would mean he sailed her toward the test and left before it. That is a possible reading of two dates from two kinds of source. It is not a fact until a log or an orders jacket says he was aboard at Eniwetok, or at Bikini, or on the beach when the shot went. This essay does not have that page.

There is a hardness in the assignment even without the bomb. The first command the compilations give him is a ship whose crew had already done the thing destroyers were built for, under other captains, and whose remaining work was to go home and then, as it happened, to sink on purpose. Whether he felt that, or was glad of any command after four years of unrecorded sea duty, or was simply the lieutenant commander next in line, is not in the paper. The yearbook’s word for him was unruffled. The registers do not say whether the word still fit.

After

He stayed.

On 1 July 1947 the Register’s index has file 100411, BALL GEORGE G, lieutenant commander, line, class of 1941. On 1 January 1950 he is still a lieutenant commander, designator showing the line and the year group 41, pay entry 7 February 1941. On 1 January 1952 he is a commander, designator 1100, the same pay-entry date. The commander’s exact date of rank was not read off a precedence page. It falls between those two New Year registers. Uboat.net’s 1 January 1951 is inside the window and is not confirmed.

He is a commander, designator 1100, on 1 January of 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, and 1959. On 1 January 1960 the captains’ precedence list has him: lineal number 02590, sub-number 85, source code 01, which that register defines as Naval Academy, year group 41, designator 1100, present rank dated 1 July 1959, born 22 July 1919. The same block of classmates, Shutt, Lynch, Foster, Strieter, Dreyer, Rodman, Anderson, Cagle, carries the same present-rank date. The captaincy was a class wave, not a lone promotion. The index of that book and the indexes of 1 January 1964 and 1 January 1968 still list him as a captain, 1100, and do not mark him retired. George Francis Ball on the same 1960 page is a chief warrant officer marked RET. This man is not.

The 1960 notes say the precedence list includes a pay entry base date, the date that reflects service for pay. On his line, and on the lines of the Naval Academy men beside him, that date reads 7 February 1941, the day the wartime registers give as his ensign’s date of rank. Another cluster of figures on the same line, reading like 8 April 1940, does not match a column the header makes plain. It is left unused.

Compiled commanding-officer lists, the same Hechler and Reeves work behind the Lamson dates, later attach his name to Carmick, reclassified DMS-33, in 1953 to about 13 or 15 February 1954, and to Perry (DD-844) from 1955 to 4 August 1957. Those pages were not checked against a log or a Navy Directory of duty stations. They are not narrated here as commands he is known to have held. A commercial page about asbestos on Samuel N. Moore (DD-747) prints his name among men associated with that ship. It does not say he commanded her, and it is not used.

No paper read here says what he did with the years after the 1968 Register, whether he retired on 1 July 1971 as uboat.net states, where he lived, whom he married, or what he left in a house. The commendation ribbon is the last wartime trace. The captain’s date of rank, 1 July 1959, is the last firm promotion. The Register of 1 January 1968 is the last time this search saw the Navy still listing him.

Death

Two dates are in print, and they disagree.

Uboat.net says he died 1 May 2002 in Arlington, Virginia, aged 82. A death-notice index, obituariesonthenet, says George Gill Ball of Arlington, Virginia, died 18 May 2002, aged 82, and that an obituary ran on 19 May 2002 in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. The index’s sentence calls 18 May a Sunday. 18 May 2002 was a Saturday, and 19 May was the Sunday, so the weekday in that generated sentence is wrong even if the calendar day is right. The Virginian-Pilot text itself was not found. No cemetery record, no will, and no survivor list was opened. If he was born on 22 July 1919, he was still 82 on both of those May dates. The age does not decide between them. Arlington is the one place both accounts name, and neither account was confirmed against the newspaper or a grave.