Ships
- USS Charles Ausburne (DD-570) Captain from 1 June 1944
Compiled lists give him USS Charles Ausburne (DD-570) from 1 June 1944, with no end date.
The ship is the right one, and the surname and the odd middle name are right. The rank is not. On 1 July 1944, a month after the date the command lists give for the change of command, the Navy Register still lists Howard Weldie Baker as a lieutenant commander, temporary rank 1 July 1943, permanent rank lieutenant (junior grade) from 3 June 1940. The Silver Star later written for an action on 7 January 1945 calls him “Commander [then Lieutenant Commander].” He was not a commander when he took the destroyer, if he took her in the first days of June 1944. “Captain” on the command line is the old word for the officer in command, not the rank. He did become a captain, but not until the 1950s.
The day itself is not settled. The NavSource command list opens the tour on 1 June 1944. Uboat.net opens it on 3 June 1944 and leaves it open. Neither date was read off a deck log or a war diary for this essay. NavSource, crediting the compilations of Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, prints the end of the tour as a question mark. What the citations do prove is that he was commanding officer of Charles Ausburne (DD-570) on 7 January 1945 and from 16 May through 12 August 1945. The June 1944 start is the best date the command lists have, and it is a list date.
He is not Howard Jefferson Baker or Howard Allen Baker, both of whom appear as captains in the same 1967 register, and he is not the Tennessee senator of the same first and last name. The middle name is Weldie in the 1937 Lucky Bag, in the Registers of 1938, 1941, 1942, 1944, and 1955, and in the award citations. It is not corrected here to Weldon or to anything else. No source read for this essay spells it another way.
The ship’s fame is mostly not his. Charles Ausburne was Arleigh Burke’s flagship in Destroyer Squadron 23, the “Little Beavers,” from October 1943 into March 1944, under Commander Luther Kendrick Reynolds, who had commissioned her on 24 November 1942. The night actions in the Solomons, the Presidential Unit Citation the squadron later collected, the scoreboard on the gun director: those belong to Reynolds’s command and to Burke’s pennant. Baker came after that cruise was over. What follows is the cruise that was his, and the life that can be documented around it. Where the record is a list instead of a man, it is left as a list.
Origins
The 1 July 1941 Register, read across the facing columns that carry birth and entry for the same signal numbers, gives him as born 14 June 1914 in Pennsylvania, and as having entered the Naval Academy on 16 June 1933 from California. The alignment is the Register’s own grade numbers: the “785” that marks the next officer, Maurice William Shea, falls on the same row on both pages, and the row two places above Charles Stamps Minter matches Minter’s Virginia birth. A further check, Edward Henry O’Hare’s line, falls on 13 March 1914 and Missouri, which is O’Hare. Baker’s row is the one immediately above Shea’s. The 1 July 1944 Register repeats the dates on his own line, without the states: born 14 June 1914, entered 16 June 1933. Hall of Valor prints the same birth date. The states are the 1941 Register’s, not a family Bible.
The hometown is less tidy. The 1937 Lucky Bag heads his sketch “Howard Weldie Baker” and, where his classmates have a town, prints “At Large.” The Register’s appointing state is California, not “At large.” On 23 December 1936 the Washington Evening Star listed him among thirty-four graduates of Western High School, in the District of Columbia, who were then midshipmen and had put their names on a Christmas card to the school. So a Washington high school claimed him in his first-class year, the yearbook declined to give him a city, and the Register appointed him from California and born in Pennsylvania. All three can be true of a Navy junior or of a boy whose family moved. None of the sources says which, or names a parent. No source read here names a childhood town inside Pennsylvania or a street in Washington.
The yearbook is the only picture of him before the uniform became a rank. It should be read as his classmates’ joke, not as a fitness report. They called him Bake, Stumpy, and Howie. “Although the beds found in Bancroft Hall fall a little short of fitting Stumpy, Navy life suits him to perfection.” The nickname and the beds pull in opposite directions; the sentence says the bunks were short for him, and it does not say how tall he was. “Industrious and cheerful, our Howie has always been a good companion and roommate.” They gave him crew and wrestling, and a vice: “His greatest hobby and worst vice is music (strictly non-classical). He is the guy who can tell you any orchestra’s theme song and how well it is played.” The faults they were willing to print were small ones. “Aside from an occasional tendency to over-sleep and an ear-rending snore, there is no indication that Stumpy will not reach any goal he sets for himself.” They listed two stripes, which in that book is a midshipman’s office in the brigade, not a decoration, and they did not give him a girl, a scandal, or a hometown. That is the whole portrait. Nothing later — no letter, no oral history, no obituary — adds a private sentence to it.
He entered with the class of 1937 on 16 June 1933. The class was commissioned ensign on 3 June 1937; the 1 July 1941 Register prints that as a footnote on the pages of this class, and his own lieutenant (junior grade) date of rank, three years later to the day, is the ordinary peacetime step. He was twenty-two. His twenty-third birthday fell on 14 June, eleven days after the class was commissioned. The Lucky Bag’s confidence that he would reach any goal he set is a classmate’s blessing. The Register is what the Navy actually did with him.
Formation
The first ship was a battleship, and he stayed in her. The Navy Directory of 1 January 1938 has Ensign Howard W. Baker in USS Oklahoma. The Register of 1 July 1938 still has him there, ensign, signal number 6154. The Directory of 1 January 1939 has him there again. The directories do not print a hull number. Oklahoma in those years was the battleship Oklahoma. The 1 July 1941 Register’s column for “date of present shore duty, leave, or commencement of cruise” reads 28 June 1937, and the column for expiration of his last cruise reads August 1936. August 1936 is the end of a midshipman’s summer, not a commissioned cruise. 28 June 1937 is three weeks after the class was commissioned. The Register does not say the June date is the day he reported to Oklahoma. It does say that, as of 1 July 1941, the Navy was still dating his then-current sea cruise from 28 June 1937, which fits a youngster who went to sea that June and had not yet been sent ashore. He was on Oklahoma’s books at the start of 1938 and at the start of 1939. How many of those months he actually spent in her, and on which cruise, the directories do not say. A battleship ensign’s education is watches, gunnery drills, and the hierarchy of a battleship’s company. No report card of his survives from it.
By 1 June 1940 the Directory has moved him. He is still an ensign, now in USS Helena. The Directory of 1 June is dated two days before the 3 June 1940 date of rank the later Register gives him as lieutenant (junior grade), and it still calls him ensign, which is what a directory compiled to 1 June would do. On 1 November 1940 he is a lieutenant (junior grade) in Helena. On 1 April 1941 he is still a lieutenant (junior grade) in Helena. The 1 July 1941 Register confirms the rank and the 3 June 1940 date, signal 5724, number in grade 785, and still shows no shore duty since 1937. Helena in those years was the light cruiser Helena. The Directory does not print CL-50.
The April 1941 directory is the last station list before the war that was found. It does not say he was still in Helena on 7 December 1941, when that cruiser was at Pearl Harbor, and it must not be stretched into a claim that he was. From 1 April 1941 until the summer of 1944 the duty stations go dark. Rank does not. The Register of 1 July 1942 lists him a lieutenant, signal 5577, temporary rank 2 January 1942 by ditto from the explicit date at the head of his block, permanent rank still lieutenant (junior grade) from 3 June 1940. The special-course column on that line is blank. Classmates next to him carry submarine qualifications. He does not. A stray digit printed against his name in the 1941 OCR, in a place where the course column sits for other men, is not read here as the submarine-command qualification. Nothing in the registers makes him an aviator, an engineer-only officer, or a linguist. He was an unrestricted line officer who had learned his trade in a battleship and a cruiser.
One compilation puts a command into the dark year. Uboat.net and NavSource both list him as commanding officer of USS Lamberton (DMS-2), a flush-deck destroyer converted to a minesweeper, from 1 August 1942 to 1 December 1942, as a lieutenant. The July 1942 Register’s temporary lieutenant rank is compatible with that. No directory, no register, and no deck log read for this essay places him in her. Lamberton’s own wartime movements — Aleutian patrol, Attu, then target towing — are the ship’s, and they are not told here as his. Four months in a minesweeper, if the list is right, would have been his first command, taken and given up inside a single season, with no citation attached. Until a log or a directory turns up, it stays a list.
The war as he lived it
Charles Ausburne was a Fletcher-class destroyer, commissioned at Orange, Texas, on 24 November 1942, Commander Luther Kendrick Reynolds in command. Through the Solomons she was the flagship of a squadron that got famous on purpose. Burke left her on 27 March 1944 to be Mitscher’s chief of staff. She went on with the fast carriers into the Palaus, Hollandia, and Truk, still under Reynolds. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the text carried on the ship’s Wikipedia page after the Naval History and Heritage Command’s own page returned an error, says she was at sea with Task Force 58 from 6 June to 6 July 1944, screening carriers striking Tinian, Saipan, Pagan, Guam, and Iwo Jima, bombarding Guam, and screening Essex. Then “after overhaul on the west coast” she was back at Ulithi on 5 November 1944.
If Baker relieved Reynolds on 1 or 3 June 1944, he inherited her on the pier or at sea in the week the Marianas cruise began, and the bombardment of Guam and the carrier screen were his first weeks in command of anything the records solidly show. The place of the relief is not in any source read here. NavSource’s photograph captions, credited to a different Baker, say she was in overhaul at Mare Island from 17 August to 29 September 1944. That is a caption, not a log, and it sits inside the west-coast overhaul DANFS describes. If he had been aboard since the first of June, he took a new ship through a fleet action he had not trained her for, then into the yard, then back across the Pacific by early November. The citations do not mention the Marianas or the yard. They start later. The gap between a command-list date and a citation is where a captain’s war actually happens, and for those five months there is the ship’s history and not his.
What the ship did next, still with no second commanding officer named anywhere in the lists, is in DANFS. Through the rest of November she guarded carriers covering convoys to Leyte. From 19 to 24 December she led the first resupply convoy from San Pedro Bay to Mindoro. On 21 December the screening destroyers took four air raids, one of them with kamikazes, and more raids while the convoy unloaded. On 4 January 1945 she sailed from San Pedro Bay screening transports north for Lingayen Gulf.
On 7 January the same account says the escort fought off an air attack and then Charles Ausburne, with three other destroyers, ran down a radar contact. It was the Japanese destroyer Hinoki, “quickly sunk with all hands by effective fire of the four American ships.” A secondary tabular record, the combinedfleet.com “Long Lancers” page for Hinoki, names the four as Charles Ausburne, Braine, Russell, and Shaw, and puts the sinking in the outer approaches to Manila Bay. It also says the dead included the commander of the Japanese destroyer division. That page is a compilation, not an action report. DANFS does not name the other three American ships and does not name Baker. The Silver Star does not name Hinoki.
The citation, Commander Seventh Fleet serial 01755 of 27 April 1945, as Hall of Valor prints it, is the document that puts him on the bridge that night:
The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star to Commander [then Lieutenant Commander] Howard Weldie Baker (NSN: 0-78678), United States Navy, for gallantry and intrepidity while serving as Commanding Officer of the Destroyer U.S.S. CHARLES AUSBURNE (DD-570), in action against enemy Japanese forces during the invasion of Lingayen, Luzon, Philippine Islands, on 7 January 1945. When an enemy destroyer attempted to attack the disposition of which his ship was a member, Commander Baker boldly closed the hostile vessel and directed his gun batteries in delivering accurate fire which contributed to its destruction.
“Contributed” is the verb that matters. Four ships’ fire, in the ship history; his batteries’ accurate fire, in the citation. The Navy did not claim he sank her alone, and this essay does not. “Boldly closed” is citation language. It is also more than the citation actually shows. The paper does not say how close he went, or what the other ship still had left to fire. What he said on the bridge, who gave the first radar range, whether he hesitated, is not in the citation. The Japanese ship went down with everyone in her. That is the fact the ship history is willing to state, and it is the heaviest fact of his war. He lived. The Register of 1 July 1945, whose distinctions are those recorded through 1 May 1945, prints his name in the class block with no Silver Star mark beside it, while the man next to him carries two. A citation dated 27 April might simply not have been posted in the Bureau by 1 May. The absence is noted. It is not a second opinion that the award was not given.
DANFS continues, and if he was still in command — no relief is recorded — it is still his cruise. On 9 and 10 January Ausburne shielded the Lingayen landings and fired five-inch shells inshore. She was back at San Pedro Bay on 15 January and spent about two months on convoy escort to Lingayen and around the bay. In late March and April she screened landings at Panay and Negros and furnished night illumination and call fire at Negros and at Parang on Mindanao. On 13 May she left San Pedro Bay for the Fifth Fleet. On 16 May she reached the Hagushi anchorage at Okinawa.
The Bronze Star covers that arrival through 12 August. Hall of Valor’s text:
The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V” to Commander Howard Weldie Baker (NSN: 0-78678), United States Navy, for meritorious service as Commanding Officer of the Destroyer U.S.S. CHARLES AUSBURNE (DD-570), during the Capture and Defense of Okinawa, from 16 May to 12 August 1945. Participating in fire support, screening and radar picket duties and often under attack by enemy aircraft on suicide, torpedo and bombing missions, Commander Baker skillfully maneuvered his ship to fight off attacking planes without sustaining material or personnel casualties while furnishing timely warning to our shipping concentrations.
DANFS is barer and agrees on the outcome. After a period of antisubmarine patrol, “during which she twice drove off enemy air attack,” she protected landings at Aguni Shima, and on 23 June “received her first assignment to the inferno of radar picket duty, which she survived without damage.” She stayed on patrol off Okinawa through the end of the war. The citation’s “without sustaining material or personnel casualties” is a claim about his ship across those three months, not a diary of each raid. Radar picket off Okinawa was where destroyers were expended. His was not. Whether that was luck, station, or the ship-handling the citation praises, the papers do not separate. They do say the ship came off the line intact, and that the Navy thought the commanding officer was part of why.
She left Okinawa on 10 September 1945 and reached Washington on 17 October to receive the Presidential Unit Citation earned by the squadron for the Solomons, under other men. Nothing read here says Baker was still in command for that trip, or that he stood on the platform. NavSource never closes his tour. The last date the citations tie him to the ship is 12 August 1945. Between that day and the decommissioning at Charleston on 18 April 1946, the commanding officer is unnamed in the sources used here.
The bracket in the Silver Star is the only promotion inside the cruise that a document states. On 7 January he was a lieutenant commander. By the time the citation was cast he was being called commander, and the Bronze Star for May through August calls him commander without the bracket. Uboat.net dates the temporary commander rank at 20 July 1945. That day was not found on a register page opened here. The 1 July 1945 Register’s name list, split by the OCR from its date columns, did not yield a clean rank line for him. He finished the shooting part of the war one grade higher than he had started the Lingayen night, and the Navy’s two medals are the record of what it thought the grade had been used for.
The cost
No source says he was wounded. No source names a man killed on Ausburne while he had her. The Bronze Star’s point is the opposite: no material damage and no personnel casualties through a summer of suicide attacks and a turn on the picket line. The cost that can be written down is on the other side of the 7 January action, and it is total. Hinoki was sunk with all hands. Baker’s citation claims a share of the gunfire, not a private burden he is known to have described. There is no letter home, no remark to a junior officer that anyone wrote down, no court of inquiry. The institution’s answer was a Silver Star for that night and a Bronze Star for bringing the same ship through Okinawa unhurt.
The other cost is the one the timetable imposed and then forgot. He was a lieutenant commander given, if the June date holds, a famous destroyer at the moment her famous captain left, with the Marianas sailing in the same week. He then disappeared, as a person, into the ship’s history. The Solomons cruise is in every history of the ship. His cruise is a paragraph in DANFS that does not say his name, plus two citations that do not say what the ship did on the other three hundred days. That is a real erasure, and it is in the sources, not in a mood imputed to him. Whether he wanted the command, whether he measured himself against Reynolds and Burke, whether the empty casualty report felt like success or like a debt, is not knowable from anything found. The Lucky Bag’s “any goal he sets for himself” is not evidence of what the goal was in 1945.
What he did to other people is narrower than a transport-division captain’s and sharper. He did not lift regiments onto a beach. On the night the citation remembers, he took a destroyer in on a contact and his guns helped kill a ship’s company. On the Okinawa line he kept his own company alive. Both are in the documents. Only one of them has names on the far side, and those names are not in his citation.
After
On 1 January 1955 the Register still lists him, Howard Weldie Baker, a commander. On 1 January 1956 it lists him a commander again, designator 1100, the unrestricted line, and in the date column where his Naval Academy classmates show 1 August 1955 his own figures read 1 September 1955. The column header was not on the same stretch of OCR, so “date of rank” is the ordinary meaning of that column and not a caption read above his name. If that reading is right, the Navy’s permanent commander date for him fell on 1 September 1955, years after the wartime temporary grades. Uboat.net instead calls 1 September 1955 the date he became a captain. The 1 January 1956 Register, which would have had four months to absorb a September promotion, still prints CDR. The captain date on that secondary page is not used here.
By 1 January 1960 the same class block sits under a header the OCR does read: “LINE CAPTAINS.” His name is there, misspelled by the scanner as WELDRE, with the birth date 14 June 1914 still in the row and the 1 September 1955 figures still in it. He was a line captain by the first day of 1960. The surviving 1955 date does not, by itself, prove the promotion happened on that day; a date of an earlier rank can sit in a row after the rank has changed, and the 1956 register is the obstacle to reading it as his captain date. The day he actually put on a captain’s stripes was not recovered.
The Register of 1 January 1967 still has him. In the alphabetical list the scanner makes him “BAKER HOWARD WELDl,” captain, designator 1100. On the neighboring line, “BAKER HOWARD JEFFE,” also a captain, the number 078678 appears — the service number Hall of Valor prints as 0-78678 on Weldie Baker’s citations. The 1 July 1944 index prints the file number after “Baker, Howard W., Lt. Cd” as 87678, one digit off either by the typesetter’s century or by the scanner. Which captain owned 078678 in 1967 cannot be settled from the column order of that OCR. The wartime identity does not depend on it. The citations, the Academy class, the birth date, and the destroyer command are the same man either way.
The Register of 1 January 1968, searched for the name and for the near-misspellings that caught him in 1960 and 1967, did not yield him. Uboat.net says he retired in July 1967. That month fits the gap between the two registers and was not read off a retirement order. Hall of Valor says he retired a captain, which the 1967 list supports, and gives a death date of 13 October 1976. No obituary, no cemetery, no widow, and no child turned up in the searches made for this essay. The Lucky Bag’s unnamed roommate stories never become a marriage. What he left a family cannot be written, because the family is not in the record. That is the largest human gap, and it stays a gap.
No postwar ship, squadron, or shore bureau was found. The registers of the 1950s and 1960s used here are lineal lists, not directories. They give rank and a designator. They do not give a desk or a bridge. Between Charleston in 1946, if he was even still in Ausburne then, and a captain’s name on a 1967 list, the work of twenty years is missing. He may have had other commands. Nothing opened here names one.
What the record will support
He was a Pennsylvania-born, California-appointed midshipman who had gone to high school in Washington, cheerful enough that his classmates bothered to say so, tall enough or long enough that the joke was about the bed. The Navy put him in Oklahoma for at least a year and a half and in Helena into the spring of 1941, and then the station lists stop. When they pick him up again he is the second commanding officer of a destroyer that had already had its famous war. He took her, on the dates the lists and the citations overlap, through the end of the Marianas operation only if the June relief is real, through a west-coast yard, through the Mindoro convoy and the Lingayen night, through the Philippine fire-support spring, and through Okinawa without losing a man the citation is willing to count. The Navy paid for that with a Silver Star and a Bronze Star and, sometime between January 1956 and January 1960, a captain’s rank. It did not, in any source found, leave his own account of any of it. He drops out of the active register between January 1967 and January 1968, and a compilation’s death date ten years later has no obituary under it.
He is remembered because of Charles Ausburne. The honest scope of that is not the Little Beavers. It is a lieutenant commander given a Fletcher in the summer of 1944, a night surface action in which his guns were one of four, and a picket line he brought the crew off of. The rest of the life is ranks, two ships before the war, and silence.