Ships
- USS Killen (DD-593) Captain from 4 May 1944
The initials expand from the Navy's own books, not from a guess. The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of 1 July 1945 carries one officer of that name in the commanders: Howard Grant Corey, signal number 2984, and the index of the same volume gives the file number 63132 and the rank commander. The Navy Directory uses the same shortened style the list uses, "H. G. Corey" and "Howard G. Corey," on the engineering line of the destroyer Henley. He is the commander the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships names, again in initials, when the destroyer Killen was commissioned. The Navy Cross citation later spells the name in full and repeats the service number 0-63132.
He is not the other Coreys who share the registers. Dunnleigh Corey was a medical officer already in the 1925 book. Thomas Vincent Corey, Walter Harris Corey, James Harold Corey of the Supply Corps, William John Corey of the Coast Guard, Roland Reece Corey, Jr., and the Marine officers Russell Elisha Corey and Lester Wilson Corey are different men. Brayton Corey C., Jr., in the 1941 directory, is a Marine reserve aviator. Richard Allen Corey, Marion Willson Corey, and the later Coreys are later still. Douglas Lee Lipscomb Cordiner and Lewis Corman sit on the lines immediately beside him on the captains list and, in the directories, often on the same page. They are not him. No second H. G. Corey of the line appears in the registers read for this essay.
Origins
He was born on 22 May 1907. That date is the birth column of the 1 July 1945 register, the figures 22, May, and 07 standing in the same place as the birth dates of the classmates above and below him, and it is the birth column again on the 1 July 1947 register, printed there as month, day, and year. The Honolulu Advertiser of 6 August 1987, noticing his death three days earlier, said he was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and that he was eighty. The age fits 1907. A compilation that puts the birthday on 29 May is wrong against the register.
The registers do not name a town, a father, or a mother. The 1930 Lucky Bag does name a place, and it is not the birthplace. The yearbook heads his page "Howard Grant Corey," the nickname "Steve," and "Long Beach, California." The sketch, which is classmate prose written to be clever, says he was "another sun-kissed Californian made by early removal from Tennessee." The move is the yearbook's story. No passenger list and no census page were read for this essay to date it. The same sketch says the sea habit was already on him before Annapolis, "a between (here-and-there) year spent walking the bridges of palatial liners." That is a roommate's sentence, not a shipping article. It is not used here as a documented year in the merchant marine. What it does mark is the story his classmates chose to tell: a Tennessee child brought west, and a boy who had already been on ships' bridges before the Academy took him.
The nickname outlived the yearbook. The Advertiser obituary calls him Howard "Steve" Grant Corey, and a 1993 memorial notice uses Howard G. "Steve" Corey. Nothing in the Navy registers explains the name. No brother or sister is named in any source read here.
Formation
The date-of-entry column on the 1 July 1945 register reads 14 June 1926. For a Naval Academy graduate that column is the day he entered the Academy, not the day he was commissioned. The Lucky Bag of 1930 is the class book, and the index sends "Corey, H. G." to the regiment page and the gym page. On the regiment page he is one of the First Company platoon commanders, with Haven, Gluntz, and Heiser, under company commander T. B. Hughes. Four stripes in first-class year is what that job was. The book does not say how he got the stripes, or whether he wanted them.
The sketch is cast as a mock official letter, "From: The wife," "Subject: Steve, data on." The wife is the joke of the form. It is not evidence that a midshipman was married. What the paragraphs actually claim is a boy always going somewhere, pounding a mat for gym "between monkey-like antics on the rope," and a few lucky football passes that helped the company's Harvard Shield points. The gym chapter is less of a joke. He is in the squad photograph, center row, between Williams and Craig. When G. G. Palmer sprained both ankles, the chapter says Jukes took one meet and then "had to leave the rest of the tumbling to Corey and Hughes." The rope, in the same chapter, belongs to King, not to Corey. The sketch's "antics on the rope" and the chapter's tumbling line are the athletic record that can be tied to his name without disentangling a two-column activity list the optical text has scrambled. Baseball captaincy and the presidency of the Naval Academy Christian Association sit in that scrambled block and belong, on the evidence of the biographies and the captions, to other men. A reception-committee photograph does put Corey in the middle row. That is as far as the extracurricular list is pressed.
The summary the roommate wrote is the character the class was willing to print: "Friendly, sincere, and earnest," a man who "seems to get large quantities of joy out of living," "one of the best roommates in the Academy." The line about the "strong-arm squad" is yearbook slang for how he handled himself with other people. It is not a disciplinary record. The sketch says he could concentrate "amid swinging bats and rebounding balls," after the usual announcement that the next assignment would be a beating. Classmate praise is not a fitness report. It is the only portrait of him before the Navy's duty lines begin.
The class was commissioned in the ordinary way. On the register of 1 July 1947 his pay-entry base date, and the pay-entry date of the officers in the same block of the class of 1930, is 5 June 1930. The Navy Directory of 1 October 1930 already has him an ensign on the battleship Nevada. He is still an ensign on Nevada in the directories of 1 January 1931, 1 April 1931, 1 January 1932, and 1 April 1933, and in the register of 1 January 1933. The directories do not give his billet. A first cruise on a battleship was the ordinary making of an ensign. The paper gives the ship and the rank and stops. He was a lieutenant (junior grade) by the directory of 1 April 1934. The day he left the ensign's grade falls between the 1 January 1933 register and that April directory. It is not printed, in the books read here, as a date of rank, so the day is left open.
The April 1934 directory sends the new lieutenant (junior grade) to the Sixteenth Naval District, the Philippines, with no ship named. By 1 October 1934 he is on Panay. He is still on her on 1 January 1935. Panay was the Yangtze Patrol gunboat, built in Shanghai and commissioned in 1928 for the Asiatic Fleet's work of standing off a river where, in the decade before he joined her, firing on gunboats had become routine. The directories do not say whether he was on deck, in a boat, or in the engine room, or how many months of the river he actually saw. They do say he was gone before the gunboat's famous day. On 1 October 1935 the directory has moved him to Destroyer Squadron 5, on the tender Black Hawk. On 12 December 1937 Japanese aircraft sank Panay above Nanking, three of her men killed. That attack is not his. By then the books have him elsewhere for two years.
The elsewhere was another Asiatic ship, and this time the billet is named. The directory of 1 January 1936 lists him a lieutenant (junior grade) on Peary. The directory of 1 April 1937 still has him on Peary, and adds the word the later war would turn on: engineering officer. The register of 1 July 1936 still has the junior-grade rank. He was a lieutenant by 1 January 1938. The day he made lieutenant falls between 1 April 1937 and 1 January 1938. A secondary list says 26 July 1937. That day sits inside the window and is not confirmed from a register line read in place, so it is not stated here as fact.
Peary was an Asiatic destroyer. He did not stay to see what the war did to her. By 1 January 1938 the directory has him a lieutenant at the Naval Academy, Annapolis, and the directory of 1 January 1939 says the same, without the word "instructor" that the book uses for other officers on the same page. The Academy's own Annual Register for the academic year 1938–39 lists "Lt. Howard G. Corey" among the student officers of the Postgraduate School. The course caught up with him on the wartime registers. From the register of 1 July 1942 onward his special-course code is 22-f. The key in the 1943 register, and the same key printed for 1941, reads: completed postgraduate course in naval engineering (operating). The engineer who had been the junior engineer of a China destroyer had been sent back to school to become one by training. The registers do not say whether he finished the course in 1939 or later, only that the Navy recorded it as completed by 1 July 1942, and that in 1938–39 he was at Annapolis as a student officer rather than as a ship's engineer.
On 1 June 1940 the directory puts the lieutenant back at sea, on the destroyer Henley, engineering. On 1 April 1941, the last Navy Directory before the series stopped, he is still Henley's engineer. The organization page of that book places the ship as flagship of Destroyer Division 7, Destroyers, Battle Force. The commanding officer on the page is Lieutenant Commander R. H. Smith. Corey is the fourth name, "Lt. H. G. Corey, eng," under the executive officer and above the gunnery officer. He was not her captain. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships says Henley left San Diego on 14 April 1941 to join the fleet at Pearl Harbor, and that on the morning of 7 December both her commanding officer and her executive officer were ashore. It does not name the engineer. The directory is eight months older than the attack. Whether he sailed with her in April, whether he was aboard in December, and whether he was one of the officers ashore, are not in the sources read here. The ship's morning at Pearl Harbor is not told as his.
War years as lived
From 1 April 1941 until the commissioning of Killen on 4 May 1944, the official books go thin. The register of 1 July 1942 lists him a lieutenant commander. The register of 1 July 1943 still lists him a lieutenant commander. The register of 1 July 1944 lists him a commander, file number 63132. The permanent date of the lieutenant commander's rank, as the 1 July 1947 register prints it on his line and on the lines of his classmates, is 30 June 1942. The commander's rank of 1944 and 1945 was the temporary rank of the war. A compiled commanding-officer list, the one Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves gave to NavSource and that uboat.net repeats, gives him Mugford from 5 December 1942 to 16 January 1944 and styles him a temporary commander for that command. The 1 July 1943 register is still calling him a lieutenant commander a year and a half after that list starts the command. No deck log, no war diary, and no Navy Directory names him on Mugford. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships for Mugford does not name him. The claim is left as a compilation. Her cruise in those thirteen months is not narrated here as his life. If the list is right, he spent a year of the Solomons war in command of a destroyer and the paper used here does not show it. If the list is wrong, the blank is even blanker. Either way, this essay will not invent the cruise to fill it.
What is nailed down begins at Bremerton's product, not at Bremerton's ceremony. Killen, a Fletcher-class destroyer, was launched at the Puget Sound Navy Yard on 10 January 1943. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships says she was commissioned on 4 May 1944, "Comdr. H. G. Corey in command." It does not say in which yard the commissioning took place. The same ship's commanding-officer list dates his command from 4 May 1944. uboat.net's ship page says 3 May. The Dictionary's date is the one used here. He was a commander by the July register, and the Dictionary's "Comdr." on 4 May fits that rank. He had been an engineer of other men's destroyers for years. This was the first command the Navy's own ship history gives him.
The Dictionary tells the cruise without naming him again, and the citations pick him up at the end of it. After shakedown, Killen cleared Port Angeles, Washington, on 19 August 1944, escorted a convoy from Pearl Harbor, and arrived at Manus, in the Admiralties, on 14 September. After training she left Hollandia on 12 October with the Central Philippine Attack Force and arrived off San Pedro Bay on the 20th. For five days she gave day and night fire support to troops on Leyte. In one thirty-minute period on the 21st she silenced three enemy artillery positions. Those are the ship's facts for the months in which he was the only commanding officer the Dictionary has named. They are not a diary of his decisions. They are what the ship did while the record says he had her.
On the night of 24–25 October 1944 the Japanese southern force came through Surigao Strait, and Killen was in the destroyer attack. The Dictionary's sentence is specific and narrow. At 0325 on the morning of 25 October she launched five torpedoes toward the battleship Yamashiro. One hit, and slowed her to five knots, "enabled other American destroyers to maneuver for the kill." The Navy Cross citation, as printed by the Hall of Valor from Commander, Seventh Fleet, serial 0191 of 9 January 1945, is wider and more ceremonial. It awards the cross to Captain (then Commander) Howard Grant Corey, service number 0-63132, commanding officer of Killen, for the night action against major units of the Japanese fleet. It says he took the ship in, maneuvered in a congested seaway, directed the gun and torpedo batteries, and "scored numerous hits on the powerful enemy ships," which, with the fire of the battleships and cruisers, "resulted in the enemy's eventual destruction." The citation's "numerous hits" and the Dictionary's one torpedo hit on Yamashiro are not the same sentence. The cross was for the night, for command of the ship in the strait, not for a tally this essay can audit. The register of 1 July 1945, which records distinctions issued and recorded through 1 May 1945, prints "(B)" after his name. In that book's key, (B) is the Navy Cross. The cross was in the official book before the summer of 1945.
The ship was not done, and neither was he. The Dictionary says Killen went back to the antiaircraft screen. On patrol off Leyte on 1 November she was attacked by seven aircraft. She splashed four. A bomb from one of the others hit her port side and killed fifteen men. Temporary repairs were made at San Pedro Bay and at Manus. The Silver Star citation, Hall of Valor again, from Commander, Seventh Fleet, serial 01660 of 23 April 1945, covers 29 October to 17 November 1944 and names him still the commanding officer. It says that under air attack, while screening, he maneuvered the ship, that the gunfire damaged five planes and downed four, and that when a bomb struck he "skillfully controlled the ensuing fire and flooding, thereby saving the vessel from complete destruction." The four planes are the Dictionary's four. The fifteen dead are the Dictionary's, not the citation's. The citation does not say the bomb fell on 1 November. The Dictionary does not say he directed the damage control. Together they are the same week, and they are the week the record actually shows him under the kind of pressure a destroyer captain was there to take. The register of 1 July 1945 shows the Navy Cross and does not show the Silver Star, whose serial date is 23 April 1945, inside the book's cutoff of 1 May and still absent from the printed distinctions. The star may have been slow to reach the register. It is not in that book.
The compiled list ends his command on 3 March 1945 and gives the ship next to James Lardner Semmes. No log of the relief was found. The Dictionary, still not naming a captain, has Killen at Hunter's Point, California, on 15 January 1945 for overhaul, back at Manus on 9 May, and then at Brunei Bay and Balikpapan. If the 3 March date is right, the passage to the yard is inside his command and the Borneo landings are not. The yard arrival is the ship's movement. It is not narrated here as a decision of his, and the later cruise is not his to tell. uboat.net's personal page gives the Killen dates as 3 May 1944 to 3 March 1945, one day early at the start against the Dictionary. The end date remains a compilation.
What the war record supports, without the Mugford claim, is an engineer of long training who was given a new destroyer in May 1944, took her from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Leyte Gulf, fought her in Surigao Strait, and four or five days later had a bomb in the port side, fifteen men dead, and a ship that did not sink. The Navy Cross and the Silver Star are the Navy's words for those two nights and the days between them. They are citations, with the citations' habit of courage and devotion. The facts under the habit are the torpedo attack, the bomb, the dead, and the ship saved.
After
The temporary rank did not survive the peace in the form the wartime registers had given it. On 1 July 1947 the register lists him a lieutenant commander again. The permanent date of rank on his line is 30 June 1942. The temporary date of rank on the same line, and on the lines of the class around him, is 15 November 1945. The wartime commander's rank is simply not the rank the 1947 book prints. The climb back is in the next books. The register of 1 January 1950 lists him a commander with date of rank 1 May 1949, birth still 22 May 1907, pay entry still 5 June 1930. The lineal list of 1 January 1952 also lists him a commander, with the same 1 May 1949 in the date-of-rank place and 22 May 1907 in the birth place. The alphabetical index of that same 1952 volume prints "CAPT" beside the name and the designator 1100. The body and the index do not agree. By 1 January 1956 the lineal list itself says captain, designator 1100, and a date group that still reads 1 May 1949 sits where a date of rank would sit. That date has already been used, in the 1950 book, as the date of rank of a commander. It is not treated here as the day he became a captain. The registers of 1 January 1957, 1 January 1958, and 1 January 1959 still call him a captain. None of the volumes read here gives a clean captain's date of rank, and none of them says what duty he held as a captain. The postwar sea duty, if there was any, is a blank.
The register of 1 January 1960 is the change. The index entry is "COREY HOWARD GRANT," "RADM," "RET," file number 063132. Between 1 January 1959 and 1 January 1960 he left the active list as a rear admiral. The book does not give the day, and it does not say whether the star was a selection or the promotion that came with retirement. The Honolulu Advertiser in 1987 called him "a rear admiral retired from the U.S. Navy." That is the title he died with. It was not his rank at Surigao Strait, and the citation's "Captain [then Commander]" is the rank of the award as later printed, not a wartime captaincy. The 1 July 1945 register still has him a commander.
He died in Honolulu on 3 August 1987. The Advertiser of 6 August said Howard "Steve" Grant Corey, eighty, of Honolulu, born in Chattanooga, a retired rear admiral. It named two survivors: his wife, Hope G. Corey, and a daughter, Candace C. Charlot. Services were private, on the mainland. Borthwick Mortuary made the arrangements. The obituary does not name a son, a parent, or a ship. Six years later the Honolulu papers noticed the wife. Hope G. Corey, eighty-three, died on 10 April 1993 at the Good Samaritan Center in Nelson, Nebraska. A sister, Iva L. Steele, is the survivor the notice gives her. A memorial for both of them was set for St. Andrew's Cathedral in Honolulu, and the notice again calls him a retired rear admiral who had died in Honolulu on 3 August 1987, and again names the daughter Candace C. Charlot. Hope's maiden name, the date of the marriage, and where they lived between the Navy and Honolulu are not in those notices. A family-tree page gives parents, a wedding in Everett, Washington, in 1938, and a son. None of that is in the registers, the yearbook, or the obituaries, and it is not used here as fact.
What survived, on the paper, is a small set of hard things. A Tennessee birth and a California boyhood. An engineer's education and an engineer's billets, Peary and Henley, before anyone gave him a ship of his own. One destroyer the Navy's history is willing to put in his name, and two nights off Leyte in which that ship fired her torpedoes and then took a bomb. A rank that the war inflated and the peace reduced, and a retired rear admiral's title at the end. A wife named Hope and a daughter named Candace. The rest — the parents, the missing war year, the question of Mugford, the captain's duty after 1945, the day he retired — is not in the record used here.