Ships
- USS Stephen Potter (DD-538) Captain, 28 December 1944 – 21 September 1945
George Read Muse was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, on 21 September 1915, into a family already tied to public service. His father, George W. Muse, was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and later served as district attorney for Lawrence County. Muse grew up in New Castle, attended the Arthur McGill and George Washington schools, and graduated from New Castle High School in January 1933. He prepared for Annapolis at Bullis Preparatory Academy in Washington, D.C. At the Naval Academy he played lacrosse, basketball, and football, and he graduated with the class of 1938, receiving his commission in the United States Navy that year.
His command in the Pacific war was the Fletcher-class destroyer Stephen Potter (DD-538). Bethlehem Steel built her at San Francisco. She was launched in April 1943 and commissioned on 21 October 1943 under Charles Helmick Crichton. Leonidas Walthall Pancoast relieved Crichton in May 1944 and commanded her through the Marianas, the Philippine Sea, and the first months of the campaign to retake the Philippines. Muse, a commander, took the ship from Pancoast on 28 December 1944. Stephen Potter was already a veteran of the fast-carrier war, and she would finish that service with ten battle stars. Muse remained her captain until she left commission on 21 September 1945.
From the first days of his command, Stephen Potter stayed with the fast carrier task groups, generally in Destroyer Squadron 52 and Destroyer Division 103. In January 1945 she screened carriers supporting the landings at Lingayen Gulf on Luzon, during a winter of strikes that reached the Philippines, Formosa, the China coast, Indochina, Okinawa, and the Japanese home islands. February found her off Iwo Jima. In March the same force struck Japan. On 20 and 21 March, while damaged carriers retired from those attacks, Stephen Potter shot down one enemy aircraft and assisted in the destruction of several others as the task group fought off repeated raids. She remained on the carrier screen through the Okinawa campaign in April and May, when Japanese aircraft pressed the picket line and the escort ships day after day.
Those months brought him the Silver Star. The decoration covered his conduct as commanding officer from 28 December 1944 to 17 April 1945, with particular notice of the air attacks on 20 and 21 March, when the destroyer was covering the withdrawal of damaged ships. The award recognized gallantry and steady leadership across that stretch of the Western Pacific war. In July 1945 Stephen Potter entered the Mare Island Navy Yard for an overhaul that ran into early September. She was still on the California coast when Japan surrendered in mid-August. On 21 September 1945 Muse decommissioned the ship, and she was laid up in reserve at Long Beach.
Korea drew him into a different kind of naval duty. About three months before the fighting began in June 1950, he joined the staff of the commander of United States Naval Forces, Far East, and he remained with that command through the war. When the armistice negotiations opened, he prepared the papers for the talks and attended sessions in person, including meetings held inside territory controlled by the enemy. The work placed a destroyer captain of the Pacific war in the bargaining that brought the shooting to a halt.
A cruiser command followed in the next decade. On 7 July 1961 Muse became commanding officer of the guided-missile cruiser Oklahoma City, and he had her through 1962. From 1962 to 1965 he directed officer distribution at the Bureau of Naval Personnel, the office charged with placing some 75,000 naval officers in their assignments. On 7 September 1965 he reported as chief of staff and aide to the commander of the Cruiser-Destroyer Force, Pacific Fleet, and he served in that billet until 9 September 1966. The Legion of Merit recognized that year of staff duty with the Pacific cruiser and destroyer force.
Promotion to rear admiral came in January 1967. In May 1970 he took charge of United States Naval Forces in the Philippines, a shore command that returned him to the western Pacific during the Vietnam War. He afterward led the Naval Reserve Training Command at Omaha, Nebraska. In June 1972 he retired, closing a career of nearly forty years that had run through the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam, and he settled in North Carolina. George Read Muse died at Pinehurst on 30 October 2001, at the age of eighty-six, and his remains were placed in the columbarium at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.