Ships
- USS Lamson (DD-367) Captain, 21 October 1936 – 1 June 1937
Hubert Esterly Paddock was born in Charlevoix, Michigan, on 9 April 1892. He entered the United States Naval Academy, graduated in 1915, and was commissioned an ensign. In the First World War he served in the destroyer Dyer. After the armistice his duty carried him into the Caribbean.
Between the wars he served as an officer in the battleship West Virginia and the heavy cruiser Pensacola. He was promoted to commander on 1 October 1935. Sea duty in those years was broken by tours ashore, including time at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and charge of the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps unit at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
On 21 October 1936 he became the first commanding officer of USS Lamson (DD-367), a new Mahan-class destroyer, and he held that command until 1 June 1937. Bath Iron Works had launched her on 17 June 1936. She was named for Roswell Hawkes Lamson, a Navy officer of the Civil War. Commander Paddock commissioned her at Bath, Maine, and took her through shakedown in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, a cruise that included a call at Buenos Aires in January 1937.
Lamson afterward went to the Pacific and, in the Second World War, served from Hawaiian waters through the Solomons, New Guinea, and the Philippines, earning five battle stars. Officers who commanded her after Paddock included Byron Hall Hanlon, Perley Earl Pendleton, Preston Vigginius Mercer, Phillip Henry Fitzgerald, and Joseph Russell Rubins. Walter Terry Jenkins had a brief tour as officer in charge in June 1942. In July 1946 the ship was sunk at Bikini Atoll during the Operation Crossroads atomic tests.
By July 1941 Paddock was commanding officer of the destroyer tender Dobbin. On 7 December 1941 she lay at Pearl Harbor as flagship for a nest of destroyers, and the tender and the ships alongside came through the attack with comparatively light damage. The formation was soon ordered on to Australia. He was promoted to captain on 1 January 1942 and remained in Dobbin until September of that year.
He was then sent back to the West Coast to open the Seabee base at Port Hueneme, California, and he served as its first commandant. Near the end of the war he commanded a flotilla of landing craft being prepared for the invasion of Japan. The war ended in August 1945. He left active duty the following year, after thirty-one years in the Navy. Captain Paddock died on 3 August 1980, at the age of eighty-eight. His funeral was held in Charlevoix.