Ships
- USS Arkansas (BB-33) In command, 1 April 1945 · Relieved on 18 August 1945
George McFadden O'Rear was born on 19 December 1895 in Jamestown, Alabama. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served in the regular Navy. On 1 July 1921 he married Helen Louise Edson in New York City. They had a daughter, Virginia. In 1930 the family was living in Coronado, California, a town tied to the Navy's Pacific bases.
In 1924 and 1925 he commanded the submarine R-9, one of the small R-class boats that filled out the undersea fleet between the world wars. He later shifted to destroyers and commanded Smith from 11 June 1938 until 12 June 1940. On 1 August 1939, while he still had that ship, he was promoted to commander. Those were the last peacetime years before the United States entered the Second World War.
On 18 June 1942 he received the temporary rank of captain. His seagoing command in the last year of the war was the battleship Arkansas (BB-33). She was a Wyoming-class ship commissioned in 1912, and by 1945 she was the oldest American battleship still in combat, with a main battery of twelve 12-inch guns. In 1944 she had fired in support of the landings in Normandy and southern France, then left the Atlantic for the Pacific.
On 1 April 1945 O'Rear was in command of Arkansas when American soldiers and Marines landed on Okinawa. Through the weeks that followed, the battleship stood offshore and used her 12-inch guns and her 5-inch battery against Japanese positions in support of the troops ashore. It was the last great amphibious assault of the Pacific war, and her part in it was sustained gunfire support.
After that bombardment she went to Guam for dry-docking, then to San Pedro Bay at Leyte in the Philippines. She was still there on 18 August 1945, when Captain Wade DeWeese relieved O'Rear. Japan had announced its surrender three days earlier. The formal signing in Tokyo Bay was still to come.
DeWeese took Arkansas on to Okinawa and then to the United States, where she helped carry veterans home. In the summer of 1946 the Navy sent the old ship to Bikini Atoll as a target in the atomic bomb tests. She survived the air burst. On 25 July 1946 the underwater explosion sank her in the lagoon.
O'Rear lived more than thirty years after leaving the ship. He died on 30 May 1979 in Massillon, Ohio, at the age of eighty-three, and was buried in Arlington, Virginia.