Ships
- USS Intrepid (CV-11) Captain from 15 February 1945 · Relieved on 31 January 1946
Giles Elza Short was born on 25 March 1896. His home of record was Washington, D.C. He graduated in June 1918 with the United States Naval Academy class of 1919, the class whose course was cut short by the First World War. He was promoted to commander on 1 July 1939 and to the temporary rank of captain on 17 June 1942. After the Second World War he retired as a rear admiral.
His first large wartime command was the escort carrier Bogue, which he took on 26 September 1942. In the spring of 1943 he led the first escort-carrier task group the Navy sent into the Atlantic. From April through June the convoys that group escorted lost no ship, and for that service he received the Legion of Merit. Aircraft from Bogue badly damaged the German submarine U-569 on 22 May 1943, and her crew scuttled her in the North Atlantic. On 5 June an Avenger from the ship, assisted by a Wildcat, sank U-217 with depth charges. Short left Bogue on 9 July 1943.
He held a short command of the fleet carrier Ticonderoga from 28 January to 7 February 1945. On 15 February 1945 he relieved Joseph Francis Bolger as commanding officer of Intrepid. The Essex-class carrier had been commissioned in August 1943 under Thomas Lamison Sprague. Among the captains who had her for a brief period in the spring of 1944 was Short's Academy classmate William Dodge Sample.
In mid-February 1945 Intrepid was back in fighting condition and steamed for Ulithi, arriving on 13 March. She sailed the next day for strikes against airfields on Kyushu. On the morning of 18 March a twin-engine Japanese bomber broke through the defensive fire, turned toward the ship, and exploded about fifty feet from the forward boat crane. Burning gasoline and fragments started fires on the hangar deck, and the damage-control parties put them out quickly. The air group kept flying. On 7 April, aircraft from Intrepid took part in the carrier attacks that sank the battleship Yamato and ships of her screen as that force came out toward Okinawa.
Off Okinawa on 16 April a Japanese plane dove into the flight deck. Eight men were killed and twenty-one were wounded. The crew extinguished the gasoline fires in less than an hour, and about three hours after the crash planes were landing on Intrepid again.
Short was still in command when Intrepid lay at Eniwetok and, on 15 August 1945, received the order to cease offensive operations. On 21 August she sailed to support the occupation of Japan. She left Yokosuka on 2 December and reached San Pedro, California, on 15 December 1945. Robert Edwin Blick, Jr. relieved Short on 31 January 1946.