Ships
- USS Ammen (DD-527) Captain, 22 April 1943 – 11 May 1944
Henry Williams was born in Washington, D.C., on 8 June 1910. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1931 and received a commission in the Navy. He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 July 1939 and to lieutenant commander on 15 June 1942. Wartime Navy lists style him Henry Williams Jr.
On 22 April 1943 he became captain of Ammen, a Fletcher-class destroyer, DD-527. Bethlehem Steel had built the ship in San Francisco. She was launched on 17 September 1942 and commissioned in March 1943 under John Cheshire Daniel. Williams relieved Daniel at San Pedro, California, after Ammen had finished shakedown training at San Diego.
The destroyer sailed the next day for Alaska in the screen of Task Force 51. On 11 May 1943 she guarded the ships putting troops ashore at Attu, watching for submarines and aircraft. After that landing she turned to escorting convoys bound for Alaska and to patrols through the Aleutian Islands. In October she was at Pearl Harbor. On 11 October she left there with the destroyer Bush, reached Adak again on 16 October, and spent the next six weeks on patrol among the islands.
On 26 November 1943 Ammen left the Aleutians for the Southwest Pacific and duty with the Seventh Fleet. The months that followed were spent on the operations along the north coast of New Guinea. From late December 1943 into late January 1944 she served in the cruiser bombardment group under Rear Admiral V. A. C. Crutchley of the Royal Navy during the landings at Cape Gloucester, on the western end of New Britain. She screened the heavier ships, fired on targets ashore, and carried wounded men off the beach.
Williams remained captain of Ammen through the spring of 1944 while that New Guinea campaign continued. On 11 May 1944 he turned the ship over to James Harvey Brown. Ammen stayed in the Pacific under Brown and, from 14 June 1945, under George Van Rogers. Williams died on 15 April 2000.