Ships
- USS Mississippi (BB-41) Captain from 26 April 1944 · Relieved on 18 July 1945
Heman Judd Redfield, Jr., was born on 4 January 1893 and made his home in Montclair, New Jersey. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1916 and remained in the Navy. On 1 February 1937 he was promoted to commander.
In July 1940 he took command of the fleet oiler Cimarron. He was still in that ship when the United States entered the Second World War. On 1 January 1942 he became a temporary captain. He left Cimarron in February 1942, and on 30 June 1942 his rank of captain was made permanent.
On 26 April 1944 Redfield became captain of the battleship Mississippi. In the first year of the Pacific war the ship had been commanded by Walden Lee Ainsworth, and from November 1942 by Lunsford Lomax Hunter, whom Redfield succeeded. Mississippi was a New Mexico-class battleship, armed with twelve 14-inch guns, and already a veteran of the island campaigns. Under Redfield she returned to the western Pacific for the fight to retake the Philippines.
She sailed from Manus in October 1944. On 19 October her heavy guns worked over the east coast of Leyte ahead of the landings. On the night of 24–25 October she took her place in Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf’s battle line in Surigao Strait. With the other battleships, the cruisers, and the destroyers of that force, she helped break up the Japanese southern force trying to enter Leyte Gulf. The destruction of those ships was the work of the whole force. Mississippi fired the last heavy-gun salvo of the battleship action.
Redfield kept her on bombardment duty through 18 November 1944. He brought her back to the islands from 28 December 1944 to 10 February 1945, shelling positions off Leyte and along the Luzon coast while troops went ashore, including the landings in Lingayen Gulf. Japanese aircraft struck at the ship through those weeks and damaged her. He held her to the gun line. For his conduct from 17 October to 18 November 1944 and from 28 December 1944 to 10 February 1945, he received the Silver Star.
He remained captain of Mississippi until 18 July 1945, when John Francis Crowe, Jr. relieved him. Redfield later retired as a rear admiral. He died on 15 September 1977, at the age of eighty-four.