Ships
- USS Minneapolis (CA-36) Captain from March 1946 · Relieved on 10 February 1947
Commander Hugh Marion Maples, United States Navy, of the Naval Academy class of 1930, took command of the heavy cruiser Minneapolis in March 1946. He remained her commanding officer until 10 February 1947, the day the ship was decommissioned and he was relieved.
Minneapolis was a New Orleans-class heavy cruiser built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. She was launched on 6 September 1933 and commissioned on 19 May 1934, with Gordon W. Haines in command. Chester H. J. Keppler, Lucien Frank Kimball, and David Irvin Hedrick succeeded him during the peacetime years, when the cruiser served with the Scouting Force on the West Coast and, from 1940, operated from Pearl Harbor. On 7 December 1941 she was at sea for gunnery practice, about twenty miles from the harbor, as the Pacific war began.
Under Frank Jacob Lowry she screened the carriers at the Coral Sea and at Midway in 1942, then joined the campaign off Guadalcanal. On the night of 30 November 1942, with Charles Emery Rosendahl in command, she led a cruiser and destroyer force into the Battle of Tassafaronga and engaged the Japanese ships with her eight-inch guns. Two torpedoes struck her. The bow was carried away back toward the chain pipes, firerooms were opened to the sea, and power was lost. The crew kept her afloat. After repairs she returned to the fleet. Richard Waller Bates, Harry Browning Slocum, and Roy Clare Hudson commanded her through the Gilberts and Marshalls, the Marianas and the Philippine Sea, the Palaus, Leyte Gulf, and the Okinawa campaign. She received sixteen battle stars. After the surrender she served on occupation duty in Korean and Chinese waters, including duty as flagship for the surrender in Korea, patrols in the Yellow Sea, and support of landings on the China coast, and she carried American servicemen home across the Pacific.
Jack Maginnis commanded Minneapolis for a short period at the start of 1946. Maples relieved him in March. For eleven months he had charge of the cruiser while the wartime fleet was being reduced. On 10 February 1947 Minneapolis was decommissioned, and Maples was relieved the same day, closing a commission that had begun in 1934.