Ships
- USS Worden (DD-352) Captain, 29 February 1936 – 5 June 1936
He is not Brittin and he is not Brookings. Those two dates are a compiled commanding-officer list. They are not a deck log, and the Navy Directory will not keep the ending. The registers support the full name, the navy, a birth date, the Naval Academy entry, and the ranks up through captain. They do not, by themselves, put him on Worden's bridge for ninety-seven days and then send him ashore. What follows is the life the registers, the Navy Directory, the Academy yearbook, one fleet notice, and two days of a Key West newspaper will support. Where they stop, the blank stays in the sentence.
Origins
The Register of 1 July 1944, in the captains' list, prints his birth as 2 September 1893. The Register of 1 July 1945 prints the same day, 2 September 1893, on the line of Henry Bryan Broadfoot. The retired-list readings of 1952, 1956, and 1957 stack the digits 9, 02, 93 under him, which is the same day. None of those books prints a town.
The 1916 Lucky Bag heads his page with Black Mountain, North Carolina, and the names the class used for him: Henry, Broady, Feet. In that book the town under a man's name is the place he came from to Annapolis, not a line from a birth certificate. A family website, broadfoots.com, says he was the fourth child of Major John Barrett Broadfoot and Sarah Frances Bryan Broadfoot, and that the parents kept a boarding house at Black Mountain. It dates him 1893–1980. uboat.net says he was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and died on 6 March 1980 in Beaufort, South Carolina. Neither a birth certificate nor an obituary was opened for this essay. Black Mountain is used as the yearbook's town. Fayetteville, the parents' names, Beaufort, and the death are not narrated as facts.
No register line read here names a wife or a child. No newspaper in the search did either. What he left a household, if he had one, is not in these papers.
The Academy, and the man the class thought he was
He entered the Naval Academy on 10 July 1912. That day is the date of entry on his line in the registers of 1 July 1944 and 1 July 1945. The Lucky Bag of the class of 1916 is the book that shows what the four years felt like to the men who lived them with him. It is classmate prose, written to be remembered, and it should be read that way.
The regiment placed him in the 5th Company of the Second Battalion, a midshipman junior lieutenant. The credit line under the sketch is long for a man the same page calls inclined to the path of least resistance. Two stripes, which in that book is a midshipman's rank, not a commission. Wrestling team in the third-class, second-class, and first-class years, captain of it in the first-class year, and the minor-sport "N" for wrestling. Class football as a plebe and a youngster. Varsity football in the second-class and first-class years, and the football "N." Plebe crew, crew numerals, and the crew squad in the third-class year, which he then left. Class president in the second-class year. President of the Midshipmen's Athletic Association. Chairman of the class German committee. Class committee in the second-class and first-class years.
The sentence they put first is a joke that is also a claim. "The handsomest man in the Class!" They said the reputation had spread, and that it was the smallest part of his renown. As a wrestler he had, in their words, won intercollegiate fame, "being for two years the undefeated champion of an undefeated team." The sketch was written before the 1916 season ended. They thought he would keep the middleweight title. The wrestling chapter later in the same book is less provisional. It calls him Captain Broadfoot, "the peer of his weight," and says he won every bout in three meets. It then tells the meet he did not wrestle. A shoulder was hurt just before the Yale meet. The score was a tie without him. A teammate, Redman, fought the Yale middleweight and lost, and the book calls that the Navy's defeat on the day. The shoulder is the yearbook's story. No medical report was opened.
Football, they said, he could have done more with. He had a record they believed he was capable of bettering, "were he not so inclined to the simple life and the path of least resistance." The "N" came, in their telling, from "a sudden inrush of energy," when he began to upset the Greylegs at Philadelphia in 1915. Greylegs is the Army. The book does not give the score, and this essay does not supply one. Crew he tried "in a thoughtless moment" and then "retired soon afterwards to a life of less exertion."
The class presidency is the part that is not a joke. "Still the same carefree man, he handled the delicate situations which came before him with a diplomacy and a tact that made our voyage smooth instead of stormy." They called him a walking advertisement for Bull Durham, in training or out. He was paired in the book with Richard Jones, "Dick," under the watchword "Broadfoot and Jones against the world." Jones's own sketch returns the compliment and names Henry Broadfoot as one of his two great loyalties. They said Broadfoot was the life of a party and a dangerous man to make a liberty with, and that he worshiped other goddesses than nicotine. The last line is the one they wanted kept: ask anyone, Henry is a mighty fine fellow.
A gag page of prize awards gives "The Gold-Mounted Mark III Titivator — for Excellence in Seamanship — to Henry Broadfoot." That page is a joke list. It is not a seamanship grade. It is worth one sentence because the class chose to hang a sailor's compliment on him, even in fun, beside the wrestling and the cigarettes.
He was commissioned with the class of 1916. The later registers do not, on the lines read cleanly, reprint the day of the ensign's commission in a private column. uboat.net prints 3 June 1916. That day was not copied out of a register opened here, and it is not used. The Register of 1 January 1918 contains a line that the optical text reads as Henry Bryan Broadfoot, signal 2017, but the rank word and the duty are smashed into the sea-service columns. The name is his. The billet of the first war is not recovered from that page. No ship of 1917 or 1918 was tied to him in any directory in the set that was read. The class of 1916 went to sea in the middle of a world war. His own first cruise is a blank.
The long apprenticeship
The first shore duty the directories will date is the Naval Academy itself. The Academy's annual register for 1922–1923 lists Lieutenant Henry B. Broadfoot among the instructors in the Department of Marine Engineering and Naval Construction, under Commander Henry G. S. Wallace. The Navy Directory of 1 November 1923 has him a lieutenant at the Naval Academy. The Directory of 1 January 1924 still has him there. The directories do not name the course. The yearbook's wrestler had come back as a lieutenant to teach in the engineering department of the school that had made him. Nothing read here says whether he asked for it.
By 1 January 1925 the Directory had moved him. Lieutenant Henry B. Broadfoot, USS Flusser, executive officer. On 1 January 1926 he was still the executive officer of Flusser. The directory prints no hull number. The later Flusser (DD-368) was not commissioned until 1936, so these two entries are not that ship. No log was opened. The only fact is the billet: for two New Years he was the second in command of a destroyer, not yet her captain.
On 1 January 1927 he was a lieutenant on USS New York. The directory gives no billet and no hull number. He was not her captain. New York's earlier war is not his story. He is a name on her officer list for that winter, and then he is gone.
On 1 January 1928 he was a lieutenant commander in the Bureau of Navigation, Navy Department, Washington. The Directory of 1 January 1929 still has him there. The promotion falls between the January 1927 book, which calls him lieutenant, and the January 1928 book, which calls him lieutenant commander. uboat.net prints 2 June 1927 for the lieutenant commander's rank. That day was not read off his own line in a register opened here. The directories are what date the change, to the year. Bureau duty is a desk. The books do not say what papers crossed it.
On 1 January 1930 he was a lieutenant commander on USS Salt Lake City, and the ship's officer list calls him first lieutenant. The Directory of 1 October 1930 and the Directory of 1 January 1931 say the same: first lieutenant of Salt Lake City. On 1 January 1932 the ship's list calls him the gunnery officer. The directory prints no hull number. He was a department head on a cruiser, first the deck, then the guns. He did not command her. Her later war is not retold here.
The next dated shore job is smaller, and it is his to run. The Directory whose cover reads 1 April 1933 has Lieutenant Commander Henry B. Broadfoot in charge of the Navy recruiting station at Houston, Texas. The Directory of 1 April 1934 still has him there. Two Aprils in a federal building, signing up other men's sons, a long way from a destroyer's bridge. No recruiting report and no Houston newspaper were opened. The station is the duty. The manner of it is not known.
By 1 January 1935 he was back at sea, a lieutenant commander on USS Melville. The Directory of 1 October 1935 still has him on Melville. Neither book prints a billet. Melville in those years was a tender, not a destroyer he could be said to command, and the directory does not say he commanded her. The January 1936 directory's ship index is too broken to read a duty for him. An optical token that may be his name sits near Melville, and another Broadfoot sits near Arizona. George Carroll Broadfoot, a chief electrician and a different man, is the Arizona name in the directories of 1934 and 1935. Henry is not given Arizona.
Worden, and a date the books will not keep
The compiled lists agree with each other and disagree with the Directory. The veterans' roster adds a next duty, Northwestern University, Evanston, NROTC, and it prints the file number 9668, which is his. It also calls him commander. He was not a commander in February 1936. The registers put that rank on 1 June 1937.
The Register of 1 July 1936 is a lieutenant commanders' page. Signal 974, Henry Bryan Broadfoot, duty "Commanding Worden." That book was published as of a day three and a half weeks after the compiled lists say he had already left. A register can lag. A lag of three weeks is possible. A lag of ten months is not how these books were used.
The Navy Directory of 1 January 1937 lists him a lieutenant commander, USS Worden, commanding. The ship's officer list in that book has him as commanding officer, with M. J. Malanaphy as executive officer. The Directory of 1 April 1937 says the same thing in plainer words: Lieutenant Commander Henry B. Broadfoot, commanding USS Worden. The April book is ten months after 5 June 1936. It is not a stale line that nobody corrected. It is a second official printing, in a new year, that he was still the captain of that destroyer.
The Directory of 1 September 1937 is the first book that moves him. By then he is a commander, commanding the NROTC unit at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. The registers of 1944 and 1945 give his permanent rank as commander from 1 June 1937, with the present rank, captain, dated later. The June date sits between the April directory, which still has a lieutenant commander on Worden, and the September directory, which has a commander in Evanston. The promotion and the transfer belong to the summer of 1937. They do not belong to June 1936.
The next officer on the compiled Worden list is Julian DuBois Wilson, from 5 June 1936. If the Directory of April 1937 is right, Wilson was not yet in command on that day, whatever the compiled list says. His dates are not used here. No deck log of Worden was opened, so the day Broadfoot actually took her, and the day he was relieved, are not known to the day. What is known is the bracket. He was not on her in any clean entry of 1935. He is "Commanding Worden" on 1 July 1936, 1 January 1937, and 1 April 1937. He is in Evanston on 1 September 1937.
No cruise of Worden for 1936 and 1937 was taken from a deck log or from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships in this search. The HyperWar page for the ship did not return. Peacetime destroyer duty is not invented to fill the months. He had a ship. The books do not say where he took her, or what broke, or whom he recommended. The classmates had said he could make a voyage smooth.
Northwestern, then the old destroyers
He was at Northwestern as commanding officer of the naval reserve officer training unit on 1 September 1937, on 1 January 1938, and on 1 January 1939. Three directories, one duty. The university's own NROTC records were not opened. No photograph of him with a class of midshipmen was found. The duty is the fact: a commander who had just left a destroyer, set to make officers on a lake, in a city that is not a fleet base. He had done this kind of work before, at Annapolis in the engineering department, and at Houston on the recruiting station. The sea kept taking him back.
The directories do not show the day he left Evanston. The next official snapshot is 1 June 1940, and by then the war in Europe was already nine months old and the United States was not in it. Commander Henry B. Broadfoot, commander of Destroyer Division 65, also commanding USS Aaron Ward.
Aaron Ward (DD-132) is an old Wickes-class destroyer, and the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships tells her end of American service without naming him. She was out of commission at San Diego from April 1937 to September 1939. She was recommissioned for the last time on 30 September 1939 and served as flagship of Destroyer Division 85, Pacific Fleet, until she arrived at Key West on 11 December, to operate on Neutrality Patrol in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. DANFS does not say 11 December of which year in so many words. The recommissioning sentence is 1939, and the arrival is the next date in the paragraph. On 9 September 1940 she was decommissioned at Halifax, Nova Scotia, transferred to Britain in the destroyers-for-bases exchange, and renamed HMS Castleton. What Castleton did in the North Atlantic is the Royal Navy's story. He did not go with her. It is not told here as his cruise.
DANFS does not say he commanded Destroyer Division 85, and this essay does not give him that division. The division number that has his name on it is 65.
The Key West Citizen of Monday, 25 March 1940, is a contemporary paper, read here in a later transcription. It says two more destroyers had arrived over the weekend for the Key West neutrality patrol, Aaron Ward and Buchanan, and that Captain Arthur S. Carpender had announced them. "Aaron Ward is commanded by Commander Henry B. Broadfoot, who is also commanding officer of the 65th destroyer division of the 32nd squadron." The same article lists the rest of the local patrol as the flagship Lea, Philip, Evans, Hale, Twiggs, Crowninshield, Wickes, and Williams. One of them, Williams, was in the Bahamas with a survey party. The paper's spelling of Buchanan wobbles. The Wednesday paper fixes it.
On Wednesday, 27 March 1940, the Citizen reported that four destroyers of the 65th division had left that day for New York on a regular overhaul: Aaron Ward, Buchanan, Hale, and Crowninshield. They were expected back with the squadron within three weeks. The organization the paper prints, from Captain Carpender, squadron commander, is Commander L. K. Swenson for Division 64, Commander H. B. Broadfoot for Division 65, and Commander M. Y. Cohen for Division 70. Under the ships and their commanding officers it prints "U.S.S. Aaron Ward, Commander Broadfoot." He was not only the division commander with a flag on someone else's ship. The Key West paper and the June directory both make him the captain of Aaron Ward and the commander of the division at the same time.
That is the neutrality patrol as it can be put on him. Old destroyers, Key West, a weekend arrival, a Wednesday sailing for a yard, his name on the division and on one of the four ships that left. The paper expected them back in three weeks. No later Key West issue was opened to see whether they came. DANFS does not mention the New York overhaul. The compiled commanding-officer list, again Hechler and Reeves on NavSource, and uboat.net after it, give him Aaron Ward from 30 September 1939, the recommissioning day, to 9 September 1940, the Halifax day. The June directory proves the command on 1 June 1940. The March paper proves it in Key West. The September 1939 beginning is the ship's date assigned to him by a compiled list, not a log that was read. The Halifax ending is the same kind of list, lined up with the day DANFS decommissions her. Between 1 June and the next directory he changes ships. Whether he stood on her deck at Halifax is not in a document opened here.
On 15 October 1940, at Long Beach, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet issued Fleet Notice 47N-40, the fleet organization for the second quarter of fiscal year 1941, to take effect on 1 November. In the list of division commanders, signal 659 is Commander H. B. Broadfoot, Destroyer Division Fifty-three. That signal number is his in the register whose index uses 659. The register of 1 July 1940 gave him a new signal, 642, effective for calendar 1941. The April 1941 directory uses 642. The October notice and the later directory are the same man on either side of a signal-number change.
Destroyer Division 53, in that notice, is Badger (DD-126) as flagship, Babbitt, Leary, and Schenck, under the destroyers of the Patrol Force. The Navy Directory of 1 November 1940 puts him there in so many words: Commander Henry B. Broadfoot, commander of Destroyer Division 53, USS Badger. On Badger's own officer list the commanding officer is Lieutenant Commander W. E. Hennigar. Broadfoot is the division commander embarked. He is not Badger's captain. The four ships are the division he was given on the date of that notice. Their later fates are not his unless a later book still has him in the division. None read here does.
The last directory in the set is 1 April 1941. Commander Henry B. Broadfoot, commander of Destroyer Division 21, USS Livermore. On Livermore's officer list the commanding officer is Lieutenant Commander V. Huber. Again he is the division commander, not the ship's captain. The directory prints no hull number and no list of the other ships.
A squadron history of Destroyer Squadron 11 gives Destroyer Division 21, as of 1 October 1941, as Livermore (DD-429), flag, Eberle, Kearny, and Ericsson. It says the squadron was on the North Atlantic neutrality patrol, and that on 17 October 1941, south of Iceland, Kearny was torpedoed by a German submarine and survived, the first United States warship torpedoed in that war. The same pages follow Division 21 through North Africa in November 1942, Brazil and the Caribbean in 1943, Anzio and southern France in 1944, and on to the Pacific in 1945. That history does not name Broadfoot. It does not name the division commander at all. The April directory is six months before Kearny was hit. A division commander can be relieved in six months. He can also still be there. No order, no war diary, and no later directory was opened to decide which. The torpedoing is not narrated as his night. The Mediterranean and the rest are not narrated as his cruise.
What the war will show, and what it will not
The United States entered the war eight months after that April directory. From there the station list goes dark. Wartime registers often dropped the ship. The Register of 1 July 1942 still indexes him as a commander. The Register of 1 July 1943 indexes him as a captain. The registers of 1 July 1944 and 1 July 1945 place him in the captains, and both give the date of his present rank as 14 June 1942. The permanent rank on those lines is commander, dated 1 June 1937. The 14 June 1942 date is two weeks before the 1 July 1942 book, which had not yet moved him in the index that was read. The later books are followed for the rank. He became a captain, temporary, in the middle of the war. The books do not say on what staff, in what ship, or in what ocean.
He was forty-eight when that rank was dated. The midshipman who had been the class president, and the lieutenant commander who had had Worden, and the commander who had taken an old division out of Key West, was a captain on a list that no longer printed where he slept. No award citation for him was found. No decoration was read on his line in the registers that were opened cleanly. The absence of a citation in the search is not proof he received nothing. It is proof that none was in the sources opened. Aaron Ward's later life as Castleton, and Kearny's damage, and Leary's later loss, are not his medals and are not told as his battles.
He lived through the war. The Register of 1 July 1945 still has him on the active list, a captain, birth 2 September 1893, entry 10 July 1912, present rank 14 June 1942, permanent rank commander from 1 June 1937. The class of 1916 had been at sea, in one form or another, since Woodrow Wilson's last year of peace. His own war, the part a reader would want, the nights and the choices, is the part the open record does not contain.
What it cost
The choice that is actually on paper is a series of leavings, and none of them is explained.
He left the wrestling mat with a shoulder the yearbook says cost the Navy a meet. That is a boy's injury, told by classmates. It is the only bodily cost any source names, and it is twenty-five years before the war that put him on this list.
He left the destroyer Flusser, where he had been executive officer, for a battleship, and the battleship for a bureau desk. He left the desk for a cruiser's deck and then her gunnery department. He left the cruiser for a recruiting station in Houston, two years of it. He left Houston for a tender. He left the tender for Worden. The compiled list would have him leave Worden in June 1936, almost as soon as he got her. The Directory says he kept her into the spring of 1937 and then left her for Northwestern. Whichever date is nearer the truth, the pattern is the same. The Navy gave him a command and then gave him a school. He had already done schools. He was forty-three when the September 1937 directory puts him in Evanston, a new commander, off a ship.
He came back. By March 1940 he had an old destroyer and a division of old destroyers on a patrol that was not yet a war, in a harbor town that printed his name because the ships were the local news. On 27 March he took four of them north for a yard. On 9 September 1940 the ship the compiled list still gives him was handed to Britain. If he was her captain to that day, the cost is concrete and ordinary: he commissioned, or inherited, a ship the Navy had already retired once, used her for a year of neutrality work, and then stood, or did not stand, at Halifax while she became someone else's. The record will not say which. By November the flag was in Badger, and he was no longer a ship's captain. By April 1941 the flag was in Livermore, a new destroyer, and another man was her commanding officer. The last command the directories give him is a division, not a ship. Then they stop.
If there was a night in 1942 or 1944 that marked him, it is not in a letter, a citation, or a newspaper opened here. The retirement code discussed below may be a cost. It may be a bureaucratic letter. The book does not say.
No wife is named. No child is named. The family the yearbook implies, the goddesses and the liberty, is a midshipman's sketch. It is not a household. The parents a family website names were not confirmed in a census or a deed opened here. What he left them, or what they left him, is not a sentence this record can finish.
After
The Register of 1 July 1947 indexes him as a captain, retired. The file number printed with him in later indexes is 9668, the same number the Worden veterans' roster used, and the same number the 1944 register prints beside the name. George Carroll Broadfoot is on the same index pages, a different man, with a different rank and a different number. He is not this captain.
The retired lines in the registers of 1952, 1956, and 1957 repeat the captain's date, 14 June 1942, and the birth date, 2 September 1893. They also carry a retirement figure in 1947. In the 1952 and 1957 optical text a 1 stands with the 47. Read against the way those books print a month, a day, and a year, that sequence is 1 January 1947, or the first of a month in 1947 with the month not cleanly separate from the year. It is not a retirement order. It fits inside the fact already established by the 1 July 1947 register, which already has him retired. uboat.net prints 1 January 1947. That site is not the source. The digits are.
On the 1952 retired line the letter I stands in the column where the next officer, James P. Compton, carries a different code. The legend of that register says I means retired for physical disability, under the act of 24 July 1941 or the act of 12 October 1949. The 1956 text shows an "i" in the same neighborhood of his dates. The columns are broken, and a single letter in an optical dump is not a medical board. If the letter is really his, the Navy retired him for a disability and did not, in this book, say what it was, or whether the war had anything to do with it. He is not described as wounded in any report read here. The code is the only hint, and it is marked as a reading.
The index of the 1959 register still prints Broadfoot, Henry Br., the last letters clipped by the optical text, captain, retired, file 009668. That is the last official book opened. It does not say he was alive. It says the retired list still carried him.
No obituary was found. No will was found. The death date and the death place that the compiled websites print are not used. What survived of him in the records is the rank, the file number, the yearbook's carefree man who could settle a class, and the destroyers the directories will still put under his name.