Ships
- USS San Francisco (CA-38) Captain, 26 December 1943 – 10 March 1945
Captain Harvey Edward Overesch took command of the heavy cruiser San Francisco on 26 December 1943 and remained her captain until 10 March 1945. She was CA-38 of the New Orleans class, with nine eight-inch guns and a battery of five-inch and lighter weapons for air defense. His time aboard covered the long American advance across the Central Pacific.
The ship already had a hard name in the fleet. On the night of 12–13 November 1942, off Guadalcanal, Rear Admiral Daniel Judson Callaghan directed the American column from San Francisco, and Captain Cassin Young commanded the cruiser. Japanese shells killed both men and riddled the ship. She stayed afloat and reached the United States for rebuilding at Mare Island, helped by officers who fought the flooding and the fires, among them Herbert Emery Schonland. Norman Scott, who had commanded San Francisco earlier in the war, was killed in that same November fighting aboard the light cruiser Atlanta. Overesch came to a ship the yards had put back together.
In the first months of 1944 he took San Francisco into the Marshall Islands. The cruiser bombarded Japanese defenses for the assaults on Kwajalein and Eniwetok, then stayed with the task forces as they worked westward. On that kind of operation a heavy cruiser spent her hours on the gun line before the troops went ashore, and afterward in the screen, where the five-inch guns and the lighter anti-aircraft weapons mattered as much as the eight-inch turrets once enemy planes appeared.
The summer of 1944 brought the Marianas. Under Overesch, San Francisco fired on targets at Saipan and Guam and kept station with the Fifth Fleet through the landings. On 19 and 20 June she was at sea with the fleet during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, while the carriers met the Japanese air groups. Through the rest of the year the cruiser moved on into the Philippines. The work drew in closer to shore, and Japanese pilots began to dive their aircraft into ships, so the watch on the sky became part of every day on the gun line.
In February and early March 1945, San Francisco lay off Iwo Jima and fired in support of the Marines on the island. Overesch was relieved on 10 March 1945. For more than fourteen months he had been captain of a Guadalcanal survivor through the Central Pacific campaign, from the Marshalls to Iwo Jima. His command of her was a long, steady stretch of bombardment and screening across that drive.