Ships
- USS Shields (DD-596) Captain, 12 June 1945 – 22 October 1945
Lieutenant Commander George Thornhill McDaniel was commanding officer of the United States Navy destroyer USS Shields (DD-596) from 12 June 1945 to 22 October 1945. He held that duty through the last weeks of fighting in the Pacific and the first weeks after Japan surrendered.
USS Shields (DD-596) was a Fletcher-class destroyer, built for speed and for the mixed work of screening carriers, escorting convoys, and firing on shore targets. She carried five 5-inch guns, torpedoes, and a heavy antiaircraft battery. Commissioned at the Puget Sound Navy Yard on 8 February 1945, she had been in service only four months when McDaniel took the bridge.
George Bernard Madden had commanded USS Shields (DD-596) from commissioning and had taken her through her first trials and training. McDaniel relieved him on 12 June 1945 and became responsible for a crew that was still learning the ship. Marcy Mathias DuPre served as an officer in USS Shields (DD-596) in that same early chapter of her life.
The summer of his command was the summer the war closed. On 15 August 1945 Japan accepted the Allied terms, and on 2 September the formal surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay. McDaniel was still commanding officer of USS Shields (DD-596) on both days. Aboard a destroyer that new, the work remained watches, drills, and engineering reliability, carried on while the fleet turned from strikes against Japan toward the movements that opened the occupation.
He gave up command of USS Shields (DD-596) on 22 October 1945. In a little more than four months he had been responsible for her passage from the last wartime alerts into the busy routine of a fleet that no longer expected battle. Those months place him with the ship at the end of the Pacific War.