Ships
- USS Fullam (DD-474) Captain, 5 December 1944 – 30 September 1945
A classmate, James Abner Boyd, also of the Naval Academy class of 1938, is a different officer, and the list does not give that James a middle name. Those two dates are a compiled commanding-officer list. They are not a deck log. The Navy Registers support the name, the navy, the birth date, and the ranks up through captain. They do not, by themselves, put him on Fullam's bridge. What follows is the life the registers, the Navy Directory, the Academy yearbook, the ship's histories, and one cruise-book sketch will support. Where they stop, or where they disagree, the blank stays in the sentence.
Origins
The Register of 1 July 1944 prints a birth date on his line, after the dittos in the rank columns: 19 March 1915. The same day is the birth date the optical text of the 1 July 1943 register still holds before the footnote column breaks. The Register of 1 January 1950 stacks 3, 19, 15 beside Boyd, Gideon Millard. The Register of 1962, in the captains' list, stacks 3, 19, 15 under the birth-date place on his line. Those books are followed. None of them prints a town beside the day.
The 1938 Lucky Bag heads his page with Adairsville, Georgia, and the nicknames "giddy" and "percy." The classmates who wrote the sketch called him Gid and Giddy, and they called the place he came from "the land-locked portion of Georgia." They said he had had but one glimpse of the sea before the Academy. That is a hometown and a memory, not a birthplace. The yearbook page was read from the optical text of the Internet Archive copy, not from a photograph of the page, so a letter could be soft. The name, the town, and the nicknames are clear.
A sketch printed in the 1957 cruise book of USS Daly (DD-519), while he was commander of Destroyer Division 302 and the book calls him Captain Gideon M. Boyd, says he was born in Lakewood, New Mexico, in 1915, and that he moved to Adairsville, Georgia, when he was five. It calls him the son of Mr. G. M. Boyd of Adairsville and of Josephine K. Boyd of Stella, Nebraska. Those two addresses are where the sketch places the parents at the time the book was written, not a map of the household in 1920. No birth certificate, census line, or obituary was found in this search to confirm the parents' names. Federal homestead patents of 1913 and 1917 were issued to a Gideon M. Boyd for land at Lakewood in Eddy County, New Mexico. The name and the place fit the sketch. The patents do not say he had a son, and they are not used here as proof of the father.
Nothing read in a register names a wife or a child. The Daly sketch does. It says that in 1940 he married Ruth Stearns Hawks of Greenfield, Massachusetts, and that they had two children, Nancy and Richard. At the time of the book the family lived at 11 Hunter Street, Newport, Rhode Island. That is one biographical note in a ship's cruise book, the sort of note an officer supplies for his own page. It was not found a second time in a marriage record, a directory, or a newspaper. It is used as what that page says, not as a verified vital record. No later source read here says what became of Ruth, Nancy, or Richard.
Formation
He entered the Naval Academy on 21 June 1934. The Register of 1 July 1944 prints that day as his date of entry, on the same line as the birth date. The index of the 1935 register lists Boyd, Gideon M., as a midshipman, and the optical text of the midshipman pages includes a smashed reading, "Gideon Mdlard Boyd," among the men admitted in June 1934. The 1936 register lists Gideon Millard Boyd among the midshipmen and, in the index, Boyd, Gideon M., midshipman. The appointing state did not survive the two-column wreck of those early pages in a form safe to quote. Adairsville is the town the yearbook gives. It is not, by itself, the authority that appointed him.
The Lucky Bag is classmate prose, written to be remembered, and it should be read that way. "Gid is one of our Southern gentlemen who has had the opportunity to experience in both the Army and the Navy an unusual life." The sketch does not say what the Army part was. No register line makes him a soldier, and no West Point register was found with his name. The sentence stands as they wrote it, unexplained. "Always cheerful and with a ready smile, he has had no trouble in acquiring the friendship of those who have made his acquaintance." They said he never had trouble with academics and "just breezes along with no effort, taking things as they come." The credit line under the joke is short. Squad 2. Submarine squad, marked 1 and 2, which in that book's numbering is the first-class and second-class years. Crew, the oars, marked 4 and 2, plebe year and second-class year. A brigade rank of lieutenant (junior grade). That last title is a midshipman's stripe, not a commission. Other pages in the same book use ensign and lieutenant (junior grade) the same way, for men who were not yet officers.
The sentence they thought was his future is the one the career did not keep. He had "learned to love life afloat and has determined to go to the Submarine School and cast his lot with the pigboats." The registers never give him the submarine qualification. The Navy Directory never puts him on a submarine. The wish is in the yearbook. The orders that can be dated are a battleship, then destroyers.
He was commissioned ensign with his class. A class footnote in the Register of 1 July 1943 states that the ensigns of that cohort were commissioned on 2 June 1938. His own later lines do not reprint the day in a private column, but the Register of 1 July 1938 already lists Boyd, Gideon M., as an ensign, and the duty pages of that book place Gideon Millard Boyd, the optical text reading "Bovd," on New Mexico. The Navy Directory of 1 January 1939 has him an ensign on USS New Mexico. The Directory of 1 June 1940 still has him an ensign on New Mexico. The Daly sketch says he was ordered to New Mexico (BB-40) out of the Academy. The directories do not give a hull number and do not give his billet. They keep a new ensign on the battleship of that name across two years. He was not her captain. New Mexico's later war is not his story. He had left her before it began.
By 1 November 1940 the Directory had moved him. Ensign Gideon M. Boyd, USS McCall. On 1 April 1941 he was still an ensign on McCall. The Register of 1 July 1941 lists him among the lieutenants (junior grade). The block of the class of 1938 in that section opens with the date of rank 2 June 1941. His own line is one of the dittos, and the optical columns on that line are not perfectly straight, so the day is the class date at the head of the block, not a date set alone beside his name. The April directory still calling him ensign is not a contradiction. It was issued before the June promotion. The sketch says he was ordered to McCall (DD-400) in 1940. The directories agree with the year.
On 1 July 1942 the Register lists him in the lieutenants' section. The block opens with a temporary rank of 15 June 1942 and a permanent rank of lieutenant (junior grade), date of rank 2 June 1941, and his line carries the dittos. On 1 July 1943 he is still in the lieutenants, and the index reads Boyd, Gideon M., lieutenant. The temporary-rank date at the head of that block is still 15 June 1942. He had been an officer for five years. He had not yet had a command.
The war, as it can be placed on him
The Daly sketch says that while he was in McCall, in 1941, the war began, and that during the war he saw service in the Pacific in McCall and in Clarence K. Bronson (DD-668). The directories put him on McCall in November 1940 and April 1941. No later directory in the set that was read gives the day he left her. The sketch is the statement that he was still aboard when the war started. It is his later summary, not a log.
McCall's history in the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships does not name him. It does say where the ship was on the morning that matters. On 7 December 1941 she was steaming with the carrier Enterprise, on the way back to Pearl Harbor from Wake, when she got word of the attack. The task force turned to search for the Japanese fleet. The only enemy vessel the force's aircraft found was the submarine I-70, sunk on the 10th. For the rest of 1941 McCall stayed in Enterprise's screen in the Hawaiian area. If the sketch is right that he was in her when the war began, that is the morning he was at sea for: not in the harbor, not yet in a fight he commanded, a lieutenant (junior grade) on a destroyer that came home to a base already burning. The book's later chapters for McCall, the Marshalls raids, the Aleutians, Guadalcanal, are not narrated here as his cruise. The sketch says he served in her in the Pacific. It does not say he was aboard for every star she earned. McCall received nine battle stars. That number is the ship's, not a claim that he was present for each one.
The next ship in the sketch is Clarence K. Bronson. DANFS has her launched 18 April 1943 at Kearny, New Jersey, and commissioned 11 June 1943, Commander W. S. Veeder in command. The sketch says Boyd was her executive officer from that commissioning until 1944, when he became commanding officer of Fullam. DANFS does not name the executive officer. No Navy Directory for 1943 or 1944 was in the set that was read, and no deck log or war diary was opened. The executive-officer tour is one paragraph in a cruise book. It is not a signature on a log.
What DANFS does give is the kind of war that ship fought in the months he later said were his as second in command. She reached Pearl Harbor 21 November 1943. From January 1944 she screened Task Force 58 for the Kwajalein landings and the raids on Truk, Saipan, and Guam, then the Bismarck Archipelago landings, Palau, Yap, and Woleai, the New Guinea landings, Truk again, and in June the Marianas. She was one of the ships that turned searchlights up as homing beacons for carrier pilots at the end of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, 19 and 20 June 1944, when the fleet lit itself so its aviators could get down. She was in the screen for the Palaus in September and for the Leyte Gulf fighting in October, on the Cape Engaño side of it. If he was her executive officer through 1944, that is the year he was asking another man's permission to keep a new destroyer in station beside the carriers. The books do not quote him. They do not say he asked for the transfer, or dreaded it, or wanted it. They say, in his later sketch, that the tour ended when he got Fullam.
The Daly sketch says he became commanding officer of Fullam (DD-474) in 1944 and served in that capacity until 1946. NavSource's commanding-officer list, credited to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves and not offered as a deck log, reads: Lieutenant Commander Gideon Millard Boyd, 5 December 1944 to 30 September 1945. uboat.net repeats the 5 December 1944 start and leaves the end blank. A crew photo album kept for Fullam captions pictures "CO Gideon M. Boyd" at Eniwetok and in an ice storm in the Gulf of Alaska, and a view of the ship at Kodiak in 1945. The album is memory, and the Eniwetok caption's year, 1944, does not fit the ship's dated movements. The name on the pictures is the same man.
DANFS, read here in the reprint carried by the Tin Can Sailors ship page and labeled Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, March 2016, does not name him either. It does date the ship. Fullam was commissioned 2 March 1943 under Commander H. C. Daniel. Her 1943 and most of 1944, including the night of 12 September 1944 when she collided with Noa (APD-24) and Noa sank, belong to other commanding officers on the compiled list. She rescued Noa's men, did her Peleliu firing with a damaged hull, and went to the west coast for overhaul. The compiled list puts William Daniel Kelly in command until 5 December 1944 and Boyd in command from that day. If that day is right, he took a repaired ship, not the ship that hit Noa. He did not inherit the collision. He inherited what came after the yard.
DANFS then says she returned to Pearl Harbor for training on 24 December 1944, did picket duty off Pagan, and reached Saipan on 15 February 1945. She sailed on the 16th to screen and to give fire support off Iwo Jima through the 28th. A Tin Can Sailors article of January 2001, which is a ship history and not a log, says that when she left Iwo she had expended 4,558 rounds of 5-inch. That figure is not in the DANFS paragraph read here. It is left as the article's number. After replenishment at Leyte she sailed on 27 March in the screen of escort carriers for Okinawa, covered the landings of 1 April, and with her group struck the airfields in the Sakishima Gunto from which the kamikazes were coming.
On 4 May 1945, DANFS says, she was screening Sangamon (CVE-26) with another destroyer when four kamikazes came at the carrier. The screening destroyers shot down three. The fourth crashed Sangamon's flight deck and drove men over the side. The destroyers picked those men up and stood by while the carrier put the fire out. The Tin Can Sailors article of 2001 tells the same afternoon differently in the details: one plane missed, two were shot down, the fourth hit. It adds that rescue operations were directed by the commander of Destroyer Squadron 45, who was aboard Fullam. That officer is not named in the article, and he is not Boyd unless a source says the squadron commander and the ship's captain were the same man. None read here says that. What can be said is narrower. If Boyd was Fullam's commanding officer that day, the ship he commanded was in the screen, her guns were in the fight, and men from the carrier came out of the water alongside her. The order that sent the boats, and whose voice gave it, is not in a document opened for this essay. From 13 May, DANFS has her on antisubmarine patrol and antiaircraft support off Hagushi Beach, and as antiaircraft support for fighter-director ships on the radar pickets. She sailed from Okinawa on 1 July, escorted landing craft to Guam and an escort carrier on to Eniwetok, and on 11 August cleared Eniwetok for Adak, assigned to operate with carriers against northern Japan. She arrived after the surrender. She patrolled and escorted in the Aleutians until she entered Puget Sound Naval Shipyard on 13 November 1945. In March 1946 she went to San Diego. She was decommissioned there on 15 January 1947. DANFS gives her seven battle stars. As with McCall, the stars are the ship's.
How much of that last cruise was his depends on a date nobody has logged in a source opened here. If the compiled list is right, he was relieved on 30 September 1945, and the Aleutian patrol was only partly his: the ship had been in northern waters since mid-August, and she did not reach the yard until November. The next officer on that same NavSource list is Lieutenant Thomas Douglas Wilson, from 10 March 1946. Between 30 September 1945 and 10 March 1946 the list names no one. The sketch's "until 1946" would fill that hole, and the Gulf of Alaska caption would fit a man still aboard in the ice. Neither is a log. The fighting that is securely inside every version of his command is Iwo Jima in February 1945 and Okinawa from the landings through 1 July, including the afternoon of 4 May off Sangamon. He was a lieutenant commander. The Register of 1 July 1944 lists him in the lieutenant commanders, temporary rank dated 1 March 1944 at the head of the class block, permanent rank still lieutenant (junior grade) from 2 June 1941, and the index reads Lt. Cd. The 1 July 1945 register prints his name in the line sequence with his classmates. The optical text did not yield a clean rank word on that particular line. Nothing read here promotes him to commander before the end of the fighting.
He was twenty-nine when the compiled list says he took Fullam. The yearbook's cheerful man, who had seen the sea once before Annapolis and had meant to go to pigboats, was the captain of a Fletcher-class destroyer that had already been broken once and sent back out. The records do not say whether he was frightened, or hard, or kind. They say the ship did the firing and the screening, and that his name is the name the later lists and his own sketch put on the command. A crew list kept for Fullam includes a line "Mrs Gideon M Boyd (Captain)," which reads as a next-of-kin note beside his title, not as a second officer. It is a private compilation. It fits the wife in the 1957 sketch. It does not add a date.
No award citation for him was found. A search of the Hall of Valor index did not surface a page for Gideon Millard Boyd, so no magazine page of a citation was seen. The absence of a page in that index is not proof he received nothing. It is proof that no citation was in the sources opened. The registers do not print a decoration on his line in any year that was read cleanly. Fullam's battle stars are not his medals.
He lived. The Virtual Memorial Hall of the Naval Academy, on the page for the class of 1938, records a long roll of classmates killed from 1941 through the middle of the decade. His name is not on it. Men whose signal numbers sat near his in the 1944 register are on it, Floyd Bruce Garrett, Jr., among them, dead in December 1944. That is the class's cost, read off a memorial list. It is not a diary of what Boyd felt about any one of them.
What it cost, and what he had at home
The choice that is actually on paper is the one he announced at graduation and did not get. He had determined to go to Submarine School. The first orders put him on a battleship. The next put him on a destroyer, and the war kept him in destroyers: junior officer, then, if the sketch is right, executive officer of a carrier-screen destroyer, then commanding officer of another. No letter of application, no bureau endorsement, no refusal, was found. It is not honest to say the Navy denied him a boat he had earned, or that he changed his mind. It is honest to say the life he described to his classmates and the life the directories record are not the same life. The sea he got was the destroyer sea, in the Pacific, for the whole war.
The other cost is the one the sketch implies and does not describe. He married in 1940, the year he went to McCall. The children exist, in that sketch, by 1956 or 1957. Between the wedding and the Newport address lie McCall, Bronson if he was in her, Fullam, and the occupation months or the postgraduate years. No letter home was found. No newspaper in the search told the Greenfield family what the ship was doing. The separation is the shape of the orders, not a scene. Ruth Stearns Hawks is a name in one cruise book. She is not a character the records let anyone write.
He was not wounded in any report read here. He was not killed. The men off Sangamon whom the destroyers pulled out of the water are in the ship's history as lives saved beside Fullam, not as a story with his name on the boat. If there was a night that marked him, the papers opened for this essay do not contain it.
After
The sketch is the only continuous account of the peacetime career, and it should be labeled as that. From 1946 until 1949, it says, he took a postgraduate course in guided missiles at the Naval Postgraduate School, then still at the Naval Academy, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. No thesis under his name was found in the search. The Register of 1 January 1950 lists him as a lieutenant commander. The digits beside the name agree with the birth date 19 March 1915 and with 2 June 1938, the commissioning day. The date-of-rank digits on that broken line are not clean enough to turn into a day. A July 1947 index line that the optical text reads as "C DR" would make him a commander by then, and another 1947 line reads "L TJG" for him and for the classmates next to him. Those two readings cannot both be his rank. They are left in the gaps. The 1950 book, which says lieutenant commander in a form that matches the men beside him, is the one used for that New Year.
The sketch says he then commanded USS R. E. Kraus (it prints EDD 849) until 1951. NavSource's compiled list, again Hechler and Reeves, not a log, dates Commander Gideon Millard Boyd from 10 July 1949 to March 1951. The same page says the ship was reclassified AG-151 on 25 August 1949 and back to DD-849 on 11 January 1954. If both the sketch and that list are right, most of his command was after the reclassification to AG-151, and the "EDD" in the sketch is a different experimental designation that was not confirmed in the DANFS text, which was not opened for Kraus. He is not followed past March 1951 on that list. Kraus's later wars are not his.
The sketch says that in 1951 he became air defense officer on the staff of Commander, Operational Development Force, and that in 1953 and 1954 he took the strategy and tactics course at the Naval War College in Newport. In 1954 through 1956 it says he was executive officer of USS Baltimore (CA-69). No register line and no cruise book of Baltimore was found to confirm the billet. Baltimore's war is earlier than this tour. It is not retold here. By 1 January 1955 and 1 January 1956 the registers list him as a commander, in the block with his classmates, designator of an unrestricted line officer. The optical date of rank in those years is too broken to prefer over the cleaner date that appears once he is in the captains' list.
In July 1956, the Daly book says, he broke his pennant in Daly as Commander, Destroyer Division 302, and he was still in that billet when the book was written. It gives him eight years in destroyers before the division, which is a round number, not a sum that can be audited from the directories. It calls him Captain in the heading and Commodore in the body, the courtesy title of a division commander embarked. The Register of 1 January 1957, in the commanders' lineal list, still reads CDR beside his name and beside DuBois and Managhan, with the digits 7, 01, 56. The alphabetical index of that same register reads CAPT on the line of Boyd, Gideon Millard, file number 081101. The Register of 1962 puts him in the captains' section, unrestricted line, designator 1100, with 7, 01, 56 in the present-rank date, birth 3, 19, 15, and the index reads CAPT. The 1962 book is the clear one. He was a captain on the active list in 1962, and the date of rank that book stacks on the captains' line is 1 July 1956. The 1957 commanders' list, if the optical text is believed, had not yet moved him. Both readings are reported. The cruise book's "Captain" in the summer of 1956 agrees with the 1962 date. It does not settle the 1957 contradiction.
The same sketch says he was a Methodist, a Mason, a member of Sigma Xi, and a member of the American Ordnance Association. Sigma Xi is a research society. It fits a man who had spent three years on guided missiles, and it is still only a line in a cruise book. The Newport address, the church, and the lodge are the shore life the book claims for him at about forty-one, with a wife and two children and a division pennant. No photograph of the house was found. No lodge roll was found.
The active-duty register of 1962 is the last official book opened that names him. A retirement date of 1 February 1968, and a death on 11 August 1993 in Santa Clara County, California, appear on uboat.net, which prints no certificate and no obituary. They are not used as facts. No Navy Department Library biographical file for him was found. No obituary was found. The public record assembled here leaves him a captain on the active list in 1962, a husband and a father in a 1957 sketch, and then silent. What he left Nancy and Richard, if they lived to receive it, is not in these papers. What survived of him in the records is the rank, the ships the directories and the sketch will support, and the yearbook's picture of a cheerful inland boy who had seen the sea once and asked for submarines.