Ships
- USS Selfridge (DD-357) Captain from 26 November 1936
The initials open. The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps of 1 July 1940 prints the name in full, Horace Donald Clarke, commander, and the same three names stand at the head of his page in the Lucky Bag of the Naval Academy class of 1915. He is a regular officer of the United States Navy, not of the Royal Australian Navy. He is not Max Joshua Clark, the RAN officer of HMAS Nizam and HMAS Warramunga, whose name is spelled without the e and whose life is a different essay. He is not Robert William Clark, a classmate who appears on the same page of the Academy's annual register for 1914–15, appointed from New York, not from Iowa. He is not Stuart Benson Clark of that class, the Chicago man the Lucky Bag calls Stewey. He is not William Price Oliver Clarke, a different officer in the same Navy registers. He is not the baseball player Horace Meredith Clarke.
What the books give is a birth date, a town the class book claims, an Academy life written by classmates in the jokes of 1915, and then a string of stations: a light cruiser's gunnery department, a new destroyer leader, the War College, two destroyer divisions, the ordnance department at Annapolis, and, in a personnel bulletin's synopsis rather than in a deck log read here, the battleship Idaho. After that the record thins into a temporary commodore's rank, a retired rear admiral's line, and a death that was not found. Where a source does not say a thing, it is not supplied.
Origins
The Navy Register of 1 July 1940, in the columns that face the commanders' names, gives his birth as 15 May 1892 and the state as Iowa, and his entry into the service as 10 May 1911, also from Iowa. The same birth date and the same entry date are on his line in the registers of 1 January 1933, 1 July 1942, and 1 July 1945. The entry date is the day the Academy took him, not a commissioning. The Annual Register of the United States Naval Academy for the year then current, in the roll of midshipmen of the first class, lists Clarke, Horace Donald, relative standing 145, state from which appointed Iowa, date of admission 10 May 1911. He was admitted five days before the birthday the later registers assign him. The register does not name a county, a school, or a parent. The class book does name a town.
The Lucky Bag for 1915 prints, over his photograph, Horace Donald Clarke, Eagle Grove, Iowa, and the nickname "Don." Under that it lists what the class chose to count: soccer numerals, the class song committee, the hop committee in first-class year, the choir in all four years, and the glee club. Farther on in the same volume he is carried as a second bass, "H. D. Clarke, 1915." The sketch that follows is a classmate's portrait, not a conduct report. It says demerits came his way many at a time, that his good times conflicted with the Regulations of the U.S. Naval Academy, 1911, and that he broke regulations only after deciding the game was worth the candle. It says that for three years he valued his "skag" above the risk of being caught, that when retribution came he took it smilingly, and that he spent the best part of second-class year on the station ship the midshipmen called the Reina. A mock roster later in the book, "Roster of Officers in a Qualified Sense" of Reina Mercedes, lists "Clarke, H. D., 90 days" among men credited with days, in a joke chain of command. That roster is not an order. It is the same story the sketch is telling, in the class's own slang. The official conduct file was not read.
The sketch's judgment of the man, which is all a Lucky Bag is, is that he was not impulsive and not quick of thought or action, "one of those methodical, lovable individuals who keep the world on its handle," not "savvy," with "a natural antipathy to the insides of text-books," and with "some solid ideas in the back of his head." The line the book sets under the page, in the place where these sketches put a saying, is "Perhaps Señor Clarkie can tell us?" It is printed as his tag. It is not a letter, and it is not testimony. The relative standing of 145 on the first-class roll is the Academy's number, not the class book's joke, and it sits in the same direction as "not savvy." How many men were in the class is not stated on the page that carries him, so 145 is not turned here into a fraction of the class.
In the same annual register he is cadet lieutenant of the Seventh Company, in the organization of the third battalion. The detail for the summer practice cruise of 1914 places "Clarke, H. D." in the Seventh Company of USS Illinois. That is a midshipman's billet on a summer cruise, not a command of the ship. No parents, no brothers, no school before Annapolis, and no appointment paper beyond the state and the date, were found. Eagle Grove is the Lucky Bag's town. The registers say only Iowa.
Formation
The years between graduation with the class of 1915 and the spring of 1930 are not in any station list read for this essay. No ensign's ship, no wartime destroyer, no letter from 1917 or 1918, was recovered. The blank is the blank. What begins in 1930 is a sequence of printed duties, each true only for the day the book was issued.
On 1 April 1930 the Navy Directory lists "Clarke, Horace D," lieutenant commander, Naval Academy, Annapolis. On 1 January 1933 the Register lists him still a lieutenant commander, present station Concord, and the Directory of the same day is more precise: lieutenant commander, gunnery officer, USS Concord. The date-of-rank column in that register is a ditto. It runs back, through a run of other lieutenant commanders, to the last date the printer set in type, 4 June 1926. That is the date used here for his rank as lieutenant commander, with the ditto stated so the chain can be checked. The same page dates the sea service he was then in as having begun on 6 June 1930, and dates the end of the cruise before that as June 1927. His total sea service, in that book's columns, was 13 years and 7 months. The 6 June 1930 date is the start of a cruise, not a sentence that says "reported to Concord." On 1 April 1930 he was still at the Academy. Sometime between that April and January 1933 he was at sea, and on the later date he was Concord's gunnery officer. The register does not say "commanding." Other men on the same page are marked commanding. He is not.
On 1 January 1936 the Directory's optical text, which is rough, still has him a lieutenant commander at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. On 30 June 1936 the Register of 1 July 1940, by the same ditto that gives his neighbors their date, makes him a commander. The 1 July 1936 Register lists him among the commanders under the name Horace Donald Clarke.
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the text carried by the HyperWar transcription, says the second Selfridge (DD-357) was commissioned on 26 November 1936, "Comdr. The Navy Directory of 1 April 1937 still has "Clarke, Horace D, comdr, comdg u s s Selfridge," and the Directory of 1 January 1938 says the same. The ship's history for the months inside those dates is his cruise in the only sense a ship's history ever is: the hull's movements while the station lists still have him in command. She shook down in the Mediterranean in January and February 1937 and came back to the east coast, by the Caribbean, in March. From April into August she was in post-shakedown overhaul and training out of Philadelphia. In September, escort duty with the President took her to Poughkeepsie. In October she went to Norfolk and started for the Panama Canal and the Battle Force, was turned back for another presidential escort in early November, and sailed again for the west coast on 9 December. She passed the Canal, joined the Battle Force as flagship of Destroyer Squadron 4 on 13 December, and reached San Diego on the 22nd. The history then says that, except for fleet problems and exercises, she remained in the southern California area for the next two years. That sentence runs past him. By 1 July 1938 the Directory has him as an instructor at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, not on Selfridge. The Register of 1 July 1940 dates the end of his previous sea tour as June 1938. He is in command on New Year's Day 1938. He is ashore at Newport by the first of July. The day he was relieved was not found. The California years the history continues to narrate are not written here as his.
He was still an instructor at the War College on 1 January 1939. The registers from 1940 onward mark him with the qualification numbers 16 and 32. In the explanatory notes of the 1 July 1940 Register, 16 is "Completed Naval War College senior course" and 32 is "Completed course in chemical warfare." The books do not say in which year he finished either course. They say that by the summer of 1940 the Bureau was printing both marks after his name, and that in 1938 and 1939 it had him teaching at the college whose senior course is the first of those marks.
On 1 October 1939 the Directory lists him as commander of Destroyer Division 83 and also commanding USS Lawrence. The Register of 1 July 1940 dates the sea service he was then in as having begun on 26 September 1939, five days before that directory. The register's duty line, as of 1 July 1940, is no longer Lawrence. It is "Commander, Destroyer Division 16." The Directories of 1 June 1940, 1 November 1940, and 1 April 1941 all put the same duty on a ship: commander, Destroyer Division 16, USS Mayrant. He had changed division and changed hull between 1 October 1939 and 1 June 1940. Lawrence is not carried past the October directory. Secondary lists that keep him in Lawrence until October 1940 are not followed.
Mayrant (DD-402), in the fighting-ship history, had commissioned on 19 September 1939 with Lieutenant Commander E. A. Taylor in command, so Clarke was not her first captain. What the history says she did in the summer of 1940, after shakedown and a long training period, is escort the President on a tour of east-coast defenses, and later in the year escort him again to island bases acquired from Britain. The directories have Clarke as division commander in her on 1 June and 1 November 1940, which brackets that summer and that autumn. They do not say he stood the watch on either presidential trip. They say the division commander on the days the Directory was closed was Horace D. Clarke, and that the ship in those months was doing that work. By 1 April 1941 he was still on Mayrant and still a commander. The history's account of her off Newfoundland in the spring and summer of 1941, and of the Atlantic Charter escort in August, falls across the end of his sea tour and then past it. The Register of 1 July 1942 dates the expiration of his last cruise as April 1941 and the start of the shore duty that followed as May 1941. August 1941 is not given to him.
The same 1 July 1942 Register lists him among the captains. The date-of-rank column is again a ditto, back to 1 July 1941, and the page is the captains' page. On 1 April 1941 the Directory had still called him commander. The Annual Register of the Naval Academy dated 2 June 1941, for the academic year 1941–1942, already styles him "Capt. Horace D. Clarke, Head of Department" of Ordnance and Gunnery, a department whose head sat on the Academic Board. A book dated 2 June calling him captain, and a Navy Register dating the rank 1 July, are both in the record. They are not reconciled here. The Academy register of 22 June 1942, for the academic year 1942–1943, still has Captain Horace D. Clarke as head of that department, with Commander John E. Whelchel as executive officer. The next year's register does not. For 1943–1944 the head of Ordnance and Gunnery is Captain Duncan Curry, Jr. Clarke had left the billet the Academy was willing to print.
The 1 July 1942 Register, which still has no wartime duty column worth the name, gives his sea service in the rank he then held as five months, and his total sea service as 17 years and 4 months. The man who had been "not savvy" in 1915 was, by the middle of the war, the officer the Academy had put over ordnance and gunnery. The registers do not say he asked for the chair, or that he was sent there because a command had gone badly. They say where he was.
The war, as lived
The United States entered the war while he was at Annapolis, not while he was on Mayrant. Pearl Harbor is 7 December 1941. The Academy register of the following June still has him as head of department. Nothing read here puts him on a ship's bridge in the first year of the Pacific war. The destroyer he had left in the spring of 1941 went on, in the fighting-ship history, to Newfoundland, the Atlantic Charter, the North Atlantic, and later the Mediterranean. That is her war. It is not his command. Selfridge's war, the guns at Pearl Harbor, Savo, Vella Lavella, the torpedo that took her bow, is likewise after him. He had been off her since the first half of 1938.
What the wartime registers do say is rank. On 1 July 1942 he is a captain, date of rank 1 July 1941. On 1 July 1944 the index of the Register still lists "Clarke, Horace D., Capt." On 1 July 1945 he has moved. He is in the commodores' section. The date of temporary rank, by a short ditto from Stewart Allan Manahan's printed date of 3 April 1945, is 3 April 1945. His permanent status on that page is captain, date of rank 1 July 1941, birth 15 May 1892, entry 10 May 1911. Commodore, in that wartime usage, was a temporary rank. The page says so in the column heading.
The battleship is not in those registers. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships history of Idaho (BB-42) does not name her commanding officer for 1943 or 1944. No deck log, no war diary, and no change-of-command report was read. The only place his name is tied to her, in a source found for this essay, is a synopsis of a decoration.
The Hall of Valor compilation, citing the Bureau of Naval Personnel Information Bulletin No. 358 of January 1947, and marking the citation itself as needed, summarizes a Legion of Merit to Commodore Horace Donald Clarke for service as commanding officer of USS Idaho from 14 February 1943 to 2 August 1944, in the Bismarck Archipelago and in the Aleutians, the Marshalls, the Gilberts, and the Marianas. A second synopsis, citing Bulletin No. 381 of November 1948, gives him a Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit, and calls him rear admiral, as commanding officer of the Pre-Commissioning Training Center at Norfolk from February 1945 to 2 September 1945. The same site's header for that second award prints a different span, "February – April 6, 1945." The bulletin pages were not opened. The wording above is the compilation's synopsis, not a citation read from the page. The rank "commodore" on the Idaho award is the rank in the 1947 synopsis. The registers have him a captain through at least 1 July 1944, and a commodore only from 3 April 1945. The rank "rear admiral" on the Norfolk award is the rank in the 1948 synopsis. On 1 July 1945 the Register still calls him commodore, permanent grade captain. Later rank may have been written back onto the synopsis. It is not used here as the rank he held in the billet.
If the Idaho dates in the synopsis are the dates of command, they can be set beside the ship's history and no closer. DANFS has Idaho sailing on 7 April 1943 for the Aleutians, flagship of the bombardment and patrol force around Attu, giving gunfire support to the landings on 11 May, then working against Kiska until the assault of 15 August, by which time the Japanese had already left. She was back at San Francisco on 7 September 1943, off Makin on 20 November, off Kwajalein on 31 January 1944, at Kavieng in New Ireland for a diversionary bombardment on 20 March, off Saipan for the pre-invasion bombardment of 14 June, off Guam in July, and at anchor at Eniwetok on 2 August 1944. That last date is the last date in the award synopsis. It may be a relief. It may be the day a clerk closed a period of service. No order was found that says which.
The geography matches. Aleutians, Gilberts, Marshalls, Marianas, and a bombardment at Kavieng in the Bismarck Archipelago, are what the synopsis names and what the ship's history describes between April 1943 and 2 August 1944. The match is why the synopsis is not dismissed. It is not a cruise narrative. The history does not say the flagship's captain was Clarke on 11 May off Attu, or on 14 June off Saipan. It does not quote him. It does not give a decision that was his rather than the force commander's. After 2 August the same history takes Idaho to Espiritu Santo, Peleliu, Bremerton, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Tokyo Bay. Those months are not his on any source read here, and they are not told as his.
The Academy side of the same months is only the negative. He is head of department in the register dated 22 June 1942. He is not head of department in the register for 1943–1944, which names Curry. A February 1943 start on Idaho would sit between those two books. That is consistent. It is not the orders.
The Norfolk training command is thinner still. The synopsis is the whole of it: pre-commissioning training, Norfolk, from February 1945, or from February to 6 April, depending on which line of the same compilation is read, and in the longer version out to 2 September 1945. His temporary rank as commodore dates from 3 April 1945, inside that year. No newsletter, no station order, and no roster of the center was found that names him. The 1 July 1945 Register proves the rank. It does not prove the building.
Cost
No action report in his name was found. No count of men killed on a ship while he had her was found, because the only wartime command the better sources will even argue for is Idaho, and that argument is a decoration synopsis, not a log. The Legion of Merit, as the synopsis defines it, is for exceptionally meritorious conduct in outstanding service, not for a cited act on a cited day. The Gold Star is the same kind of sentence, for a training center. What it cost him to take a battleship into the Aleutians, or to leave her, is not in the paper. The class book of 1915 had said he took punishment smilingly and met good and bad with "a smile and a calm unconcern." That is a midshipman's reputation, thirty years earlier. It is not evidence of how he was off Attu.
He commissioned a new destroyer leader and left her before the war. He commanded a division on Mayrant in the year of the presidential cruises and left her in the spring the neutrality patrol widened. He was at a school of gunnery when the fleet was burning at Pearl Harbor. The Pacific fighting the award synopsis attaches to him is the fighting of a bombardment battleship, flagship of other people's landings, and even that is known as the ship's itinerary, not as his. Then a commodore's commission and a training command whose dates do not agree with each other. None of that is a judgment that the service was small. It is a statement of what was printed.
No wife is named in any source read here. No child is named as his. A Horace Donald Clarke, Jr., appears in later Navy registers and in a Naval Postgraduate School program of 1954. The registers do not say whose son he was. The "Jr." is not turned into a family.
After
On 1 January 1952 the Register lists Clarke, Horace D., as rear admiral, retired. The same volume, in another stretch of the optical text, also carries him as a commodore. The retired rear admiral's line is the one followed for his final grade. How the two lines sit together, tombstone rank or a second list of wartime commodores, was not settled from the broken columns. He is still on the retired list as a rear admiral in the registers of 1 January 1956 and 1 January 1957. The register of 1 January 1958, searched for the name, has Horace Donald Clarke, Jr., and does not have the admiral. Absence from one optical text is not a death date. No obituary, no cemetery record read from a stone, and no Navy notice of death, was found.
The Hall of Valor page gives a home of Portsmouth, Virginia, and says he retired as a rear admiral. The retirement the registers support. Portsmouth is that site's field. It is not in the Navy Register's birth column, which says Iowa, and it is not used as a residence. Norfolk, where the second synopsis puts him in 1945, is close enough to Portsmouth that a database could have blurred them. That is a guess about the database, not a fact about him, and it stays here as a guess.
He left a name in the commissioning sentence of a destroyer, a qualification for the War College senior course and for chemical warfare, two synopses of the Legion of Merit, and a retired rear admiral's line that can be followed to the first days of 1957 and no farther. He did not leave, in anything read for this essay, a quote from the war, a photograph captioned by a shipmate, or a date of death.