Ships
- USS Idaho (BB-42) Captain from 2 August 1944 · Relieved on 16 August 1945
Herbert John Grassie was born on 12 December 1894 in Cohasset, Massachusetts, a small South Shore town near Cape Cod. He was one of three children of a lobster fisherman whose father had come from the Azores to Massachusetts in the 1850s. Grassie finished first in his high school class, entered the United States Naval Academy in 1912, and graduated with the Class of 1916. His first sea orders sent him to the battleship Pennsylvania as a junior gunnery officer, and he served through the First World War.
His career eventually covered fifteen ships and six commands. Along the way he attended the Naval War College and taught at the Naval Academy. Before the Second World War he was executive officer of the battleship Nevada at Pearl Harbor, and he left that ship in the fall of 1941. In the first year of the Pacific war he commanded the transport J. Franklin Bell, a converted passenger liner, during the campaign in the Aleutian Islands. From 19 November 1942 to 14 June 1944 he worked in Washington as officer in charge of the Progress Section in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Material, duty for which he received the Legion of Merit. He was promoted to captain in 1942.
Grassie took command of the battleship Idaho on 2 August 1944. The New Mexico-class ship carried twelve 14-inch guns and, by then, a well-practiced role as a heavy bombardment vessel for amphibious landings. In September 1944 she shelled Peleliu in the Palau Islands. In October she stood off Leyte and covered the landings that opened the campaign to retake the Philippines, and she continued in that campaign through the winter.
In February 1945 Idaho bombarded Iwo Jima. Late in March she joined the gunfire ships off Okinawa and remained in that exposed anchorage through the opening weeks of the invasion, under repeated Japanese air attack. Grassie received the Silver Star for his command of Idaho off Okinawa from 22 March to 20 April 1945. The ship left on 20 April, completed repairs at Guam, and was back on the Okinawa line on 22 May. She stayed until 20 June, then steamed to Leyte Gulf for training.
Hostilities ended on 15 August 1945, when Japan accepted the Allied surrender. Grassie was relieved as commanding officer of Idaho the next day, 16 August 1945. He also received the Bronze Star and a Gold Star in lieu of a second Bronze Star for his service in the war.
With the fighting over, he was sent to command the Naval Training Center at Great Lakes, Illinois, and held flag rank in that post. He retired in June 1949 as a rear admiral after thirty-seven years in the Navy. On 1 September 1949 he became chancellor of Lewis College of Science and Technology at Lockport, Illinois.