Ships
- USS Porter (DD-800) Captain, 24 June 1944 – 5 December 1945
Howard Riche Prince was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and raised in Georgia. He enlisted in the United States Navy and entered the Naval Academy, graduating in 1932. His career covered the peacetime fleet, the Second World War, and the years that followed. He served in more than ten ships and held shore duty at the Naval Academy and at the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington. He retired in 1962 as a captain.
By the middle of the war he was a commander, after promotion to lieutenant in August 1939, to temporary lieutenant commander in June 1942, and to temporary commander in November 1942. From 16 June 1943 to 13 March 1944 he commanded the high-speed minesweeper Boggs. That spring he went to a new destroyer taking shape at the Todd Pacific yard in Seattle.
On 24 June 1944 he commissioned Porter (DD-800), a Fletcher-class destroyer, and he remained her captain until 5 December 1945. The ship was named for Commodore David Porter and for his son, Admiral David Dixon Porter. After shakedown off San Diego she sailed on 16 September 1944 for the Aleutians and began operating from Adak. For the next year Prince's command lay in the rough weather of the North Pacific, against Japanese positions in the Kurile Islands.
With Task Force 92, Porter swept the Kuriles on 21 November 1944 and shelled military installations on Matsuwa. She made a further strike at the Japanese naval base in Suribachi Wan on Paramushiru. On 15 May 1945 she joined the first extensive surface sweep into the Sea of Okhotsk and fired on Suribachi Wan again as the force withdrew. She bombarded Matsuwa on 10 and 11 June. On 25 June, during another sweep of that sea, she met a small convoy and sank a Japanese merchant ship of about 2,000 tons with gunfire.
On the ship's first anniversary, 24 June 1945, Prince spoke to the officers and crew. He recalled a disordered commissioning day in Seattle and the work that had turned Porter into a ship ready to fight. He thanked them for their support through a year he likened to a school in Aleutian weather, a year in which the destroyer had stayed in fighting trim and had carried out several bombardments in the Kuriles. The order he had given them when he took command still framed the day: all hands turn to. His word for the year was well done.
Japan's surrender found Porter in overhaul at Portland, Oregon, where she remained until 1 September 1945. Prince then escorted the carrier Enterprise from Seattle to San Francisco. After refresher training at San Diego the destroyer steamed for the East Coast. On 5 December 1945 he turned her over to John Haydon Parker.
Prince was credited with devising the hammerlock moor, a way of anchoring a ship in rough weather when the berth was tight. In retirement he taught mathematics at Norfolk Academy in Virginia. He and his wife lived at times in Washington and in Norfolk, and in 1959 their daughter, Marion Catron Prince, became engaged to Lieutenant (junior grade) William H. Moore IV. Prince spent his last years in the Ginger Cove section of Annapolis. He died of a stroke in March 2000 at Anne Arundel Medical Center, and a service was held at St. Andrew's Chapel at the Naval Academy. He was a life member of the Naval Academy Alumni Association and of Lions Club International.