Ships
- USS Franks (DD-554) Captain, 2 April 1945 – 22 April 1945
The Navy's own lists know him as one man and almost nothing else. Gerald Frederick Case was born on 4 October 1915. By the summer of 1942 he was a machinist, a warrant officer whose permanent status was still enlisted. Three years later, a lieutenant, he was the officer a shipmate says took the bridge of USS Franks after the destroyer was torn open alongside the battleship New Jersey off Okinawa. He was still on active duty on 1 January 1966, a commander of the regular line, qualified in the Register's shorthand for command of destroyers, with a Bronze Star entered as his highest Navy decoration and no citation attached to it. The registers never give him a town, a parent, a wife, or a child. They never say where he died. What they do give is a mustang's ladder, dated to the day, and one night in April 1945 that other people remembered because a captain did not survive it.
Origins
No birthplace is printed beside him in the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers. The date is. On 1 July 1943, in the lieutenant (junior grade) list, the birth column on his line reads 4 October 1915. The same date sits on his line in the lieutenant list of 1 July 1944, in the commanders' list of 1 January 1956, and in the unrestricted-line commanders' precedence list of 1 January 1966. It does not move. A secondary commanders' index on the web puts the birth at Wallowa, Oregon, and the death on 3 January 1992 in King County, Washington. Those two places are not in any register read for this essay, and they are not used as fact here.
Parents, school, and the town he left are not in the registers either. The earliest service date the Navy later computed for him is a pay-entry base date of 23 August 1933, printed on the 1966 precedence list. The Register's own note says that column is the date which reflects all service for pay purposes, not a recruiting-station diary. If it is close to the day he first entered, he was seventeen: his eighteenth birthday was still six weeks off. That is arithmetic, not an enlistment paper. There is no rating, no training station, and no ship for the 1930s. The man who appears in 1942 already has a trade. The years in which he learned it are blank.
Formation
On 1 July 1942 the Register lists him among the machinists, signal number 14860, Gerald Frederick Case, temporary rank dated 17 June 1942 by the ditto that runs down that page from the first machinist in the block, permanent status enlisted. The alphabetical index of the same book compresses him to "Case, Gerald F., Mach." A machinist was a warrant officer risen from the engine-room ratings. The Register does not say which rating, or on what ship he had stood his watches. It says only that when the book was closed for 1 July 1942 he held a warrant, not a commission, and that the Navy still considered his permanent place to be in the enlisted ranks.
The next year's book catches the commission. The Register of 1 July 1943, under the rules printed in its own notes, gives a temporary officer who holds no permanent officer rank a "date of entry" equal to the date the President made the original temporary appointment to commissioned rank. In the lieutenant (junior grade) block his line is signal 10723, temporary rank dated 1 May 1943 by ditto from the head of that block, permanent status still "Enl.," birth 4 October 1915, and a date of entry carried forward as 23 July 1942 from an earlier line on the same page that breaks the ditto. The 1 January 1953 Register, which is cleaner because the date is on his own line, calls 15 June 1942 the date of rank of his first commission. Those three June and July dates do not agree with each other, and the two that depend on dittos can slip if a broken ditto was lost in the printing or the scan. What is not in doubt is the shape of the thing. Within a few weeks in the summer of 1942 an enlisted engineer became a warrant machinist and then a temporary commissioned officer. By 1 May 1943 the temporary rank was lieutenant (junior grade). He was twenty-seven.
He was not a Naval Academy man, and the wartime registers do not mark him "(N. R.)." He was a temporary officer of the Navy whose permanent status remained enlisted. On 1 July 1944 the lieutenant list gives him signal number 10543, temporary rank dated 1 July 1944, permanent status still enlisted, the same birthday. The alphabetical index of that Register pairs the signal number with the name and the rank and, on the line as printed, file number 168271. That file number is the thread. It is his again in the indexes of 1 July 1945, 1 January 1952, 1 January 1953, 1 January 1956, 1 January 1958, and 1 January 1959. One Gerald Frederick Case, not a cloud of initials.
The 1 July 1945 Register still has him as a lieutenant. Between those two July books, the only July that mattered to the people on one destroyer, he was the engineer officer a shipmate later described, and then, for a short and ugly interval, the man on the bridge.
War years as lived
The orders that put him in Franks (DD-554) have not been found. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships does not mention him. What it does say, in the standard ship history reprinted by HistoryCentral, is where the destroyer was in the first days of the Okinawa assault. She had been plane guard for carriers covering the landings of 1 April 1945. On 2 April she was badly damaged, and her commanding officer was fatally injured, in a collision with New Jersey. She sailed at once for temporary repairs at Ulithi and left there on 13 April for overhaul at Puget Sound Navy Yard. The HistoryCentral transcription prints the battleship's hull number as BB-63, which is Missouri. The collision the crews of both ships described was with New Jersey, BB-62. The hull number in that transcription is wrong. The event is not.
The witness is Leon Cooper, who wrote in 2004 for The Jerseyman, the magazine of the battleship museum, that he had been a lieutenant (junior grade) and first lieutenant of Franks, the damage-control officer, and that he had roomed with "Gerry." Cooper calls Case the chief engineer, "a mustang from the engineer ratings," and says an executive officer who lasted about three weeks had gone overboard one night, been picked up by a destroyer astern, and never come back, so that the chief engineer became the exec and the engineer's assistant became chief engineer. None of that relief is in a deck log or a war diary read here. The mustang part is the one piece the registers had already proved. A lieutenant whose permanent status the summer before was still enlisted is exactly the officer who would be running a Fletcher's boilers and, if the exec's billet opened, standing next to the captain. Cooper says they called themselves, he and a new NROTC ensign named James A. Boult, "Case-Hardened Ensigns." The joke only works if Case was the one who worked them.
Cooper's night of 2 April is the only account that puts Case on the ship by name. They had just gone to bed. The blow was loud enough that both men thought they had hit a mine. They dressed, took life jackets, and ran on deck. Cooper went to look at the damage. Case went to the bridge. Cooper says the captain had gone to the port wing, the wing that was no longer there, and had fallen to the main deck, and that Case had taken command by the time Cooper got up there. A chief machinist's mate on New Jersey, Victor P. Feltes, whose handwritten log the same issue quotes, timed it: 2112, the battleship going full astern as the destroyer cut across her bow, a glancing blow, then down the port side. Feltes understood that the skipper and the officer of the deck were the casualties and that half the bridge was gone, and that New Jersey was back in formation in half an hour. He does not name the officer who was left on Franks.
Cooper does, and he is specific about what Case did with the first minutes. He ordered the first lieutenant below to see whether the hull was open. Cooper reported no damage below, no flooding, engines and steering still there. The visible damage was above the waterline: the port wing of the bridge gone, the searchlight platform on the forward stack twisted from athwartships to fore and aft, a quadruple 40 mm mount lifted off the gun deck and dropped on the main deck. They lit running lights, Cooper believed, so that nobody else would hit them in the dark. The captain was taken to sick bay. Cooper remembered a broken rib and a punctured lung, and the communications officer, whom he names as Lieutenant Bob Numbers, cut about the scalp after being swept into the flag bags. A muster found nobody missing. The next day, in Cooper's telling, Franks joined a fueling group and the captain was transferred to a fleet oiler that had a better doctor. He did not survive. He was buried at sea several days later. Cooper's spellings of the captain's name wander — Stephen, Stephans, "CDR D. R. Stephans." Compiled lists call him David Richard Stephan and date his death 4 April. No casualty card was read for this essay. DANFS says only that the commanding officer was fatally injured.
Cooper says Case then took Franks to Ulithi, that a tender could not do the work, and that the ship was due in any case for new guns and radar, so they were sent on to Pearl Harbor, where "a new regular captain, Gene Henry," came aboard, and from there to Bremerton. DANFS compresses the same voyage: Ulithi at once, departure 13 April, overhaul at Puget Sound. It does not mention Pearl Harbor or name either officer. Eugene Baker Henry Jr. is the name the commanding-officer compilations put in the ship after Case. The dates those compilations print — Case in command from 2 April to 22 April 1945, as a lieutenant, acting — are not in DANFS and not in a deck log found here. They fit the gap the ship history leaves open, between a captain fatally injured on the 2nd and a yard period that began after the 13th, and they fit the rank the Register gives him on both sides of that month. They are not, by themselves, a log.
He was still a lieutenant on 1 July 1945. The war he is known to have commanded lasted, if the lists are right, twenty days, and every one of those days was a damaged destroyer on the way out of the Okinawa screen toward a yard, not a ship being fought. Franks came back to the western Pacific in August, after he was gone, and was placed out of commission at San Pedro on 31 May 1946. That return is the ship's. It is not established as his.
Cost
The collision killed the captain and wrecked the bridge of a destroyer that had been doing the unglamorous job of plane guard. It did not, on Cooper's inspection, open the hull. The cost that can be named without invention is the captain's life, the men hurt on the bridge, a ship hauled out of the screen at the start of the Okinawa campaign, and three weeks in which a lieutenant who had been an enlisted engineer was the senior officer left. What Case thought, what he wrote home, whether he believed the turn that led to the collision had been the captain's, Cooper's story of a sharp return to station at a combined speed of something like thirty-six knots — none of that is Case's own voice. Cooper is reconstructing a watch he did not have. Feltes, on the battleship, thought New Jersey was not at fault. The two memories can both be loyal and still not be a finding.
There is a decoration, and there is no story attached to it. The Register's code, explained in the front of the book, shows only the highest Navy decoration. On 1 January 1953 Case's line carries an 8, and the 1953 code list says 8 is the Bronze Star Medal. On 1 January 1966 the same single digit sits in the decoration column between his birth date and his qualification codes, and the 1966 list again says 8 is the Bronze Star. The Register does not say when it was awarded, for what action, or whether it had anything to do with 2 April 1945. It is the highest Navy decoration the book was willing to print beside his name. It is not a citation. Treating it as the medal for that night would be a guess, and the guess is not made here.
The other cost is the one the registers cannot price. He had come up from the engine room to a temporary lieutenant's commission in two years, and the first time the sources show him in command, the command was a wreck in the dark, the captain dying below, and the job over as soon as a regular officer could be sent. Cooper, who liked him, still described Henry as "a new regular captain." The distinction was the one the wartime Navy itself drew, and the Register had been drawing it in the column marked permanent status.
After
By 1 January 1952 he is in the lieutenant commanders' line list, under his full name. The Register of 1 January 1953 is the one that dates the rank. He stands in the lieutenant commanders, line, signal 9025, permanent rank lieutenant commander, date of present rank 1 July 1949, date of rank of first commission 15 June 1942, and beside the Bronze Star code a special-qualification code 06, which that year's own list defines as the General Line School. Sometime between the summer of 1944, when his permanent status was still enlisted, and the opening of 1953, the temporary mustang had been taken into the regular line as a permanent lieutenant commander. The 1966 precedence list gives the mechanism a number rather than a narrative. His source code is 51. The Register defines 51 as augmentation of a reserve or temporary officer to the regular Navy from active duty, under Public Law 347 of the 79th Congress, or Public Law 308 of the 84th, or Public Law 861 of the 85th. It does not say which of those laws was his. His service-date year is 42, the Register's mark for the year commissioned service was deemed to have begun, which matches the 1942 commission and not a later integration.
On 1 January 1956 the book lists him inside "Commanders, Line," but the column is careful. Permanent rank: lieutenant commander. Designator: 1100, a line officer of the regular Navy not restricted in the performance of duty. Date of present rank: 1 January 1955. He was wearing a commander's rank, dated from New Year's Day 1955, while his permanent grade on that page was still lieutenant commander. The alphabetical index of the same Register, and the indexes of 1 January 1958 and 1 January 1959, style him CDR, designator 1100, file 168271. The split between permanent and present grade is a feature of the postwar officer laws, not two men.
The 1 January 1966 precedence list is the last active-duty portrait the registers consulted here contain. He is an unrestricted-line commander, lineal number 003553-30, source code 51, service date 42, designator 1100, date of rank 1 January 1955, born 4 October 1915. The qualification columns, read against that year's code tables, give him three things the Navy thought worth printing: under designations, qualified for command of destroyers; under technical qualifications, General Line School; under service colleges, the Armed Forces Staff College. The pay-entry base date is 23 August 1933. The fourth digit of 1100, by the Register's own translation, means an officer of the regular Navy whose permanent grade is ensign or above. He was no longer a temporary officer sitting on an enlisted rating. He was also not, in this book, a captain.
That last point collides with the only postwar story a shipmate told. Cooper, writing in 2004, said Case "went on to become a four-striper," that he "commanded an APD during the Korean War," and that he "was the Director (OIC) of the Naval Sonar School in San Diego." The registers through 1 January 1966 make him a commander, not a captain. They do not list duty stations at all, so they neither confirm nor deny the sonar school, and they say nothing about Korea. Compiled commanding-officer lists, which are not deck logs, put a Gerald Frederick Case in USS Blessman (APD-48) in the summer of 1946, and they disagree with each other about how long he stayed and about whether to call him USNR. The summer of 1946 is not the Korean War. None of those later commands is narrated here as a cruise. Cooper also said, in the same letter, "Gerry Case is now dead." By the spring of 2004 that much was true in the memory of a man who had roomed with him. The date and the place were not part of the sentence.
No obituary, no widow, no children, and no retired-list volume were found. The 1966 Register says retired officers are carried in a separate publication. He was still active when that active list was closed on 1 January 1966. A commanders' website gives a retirement date of 1 October 1966 and stops his rank at commander. That date was not found in a register. If it is right, he left the Navy that autumn as a commander, thirty-three years after the pay-entry date of a seventeen-year-old, and twenty-one years after the night he took a broken destroyer out of the Okinawa screen. The Navy's printed record, which is almost the whole of the record, never says what he did with the years after the ships.