Ships
- USS Terry (DD-513) Captain from 20 September 1945
Irving Doremus Dewey (1915–2005) was a regular officer of the United States Navy. He was born in New York on 14 June 1915, appointed to the Naval Academy from that state, and graduated with the class of 1939. As a young officer he served in the battleship Idaho and the destroyer Drayton. In the last year of the Pacific war he was executive officer of the new destroyer Harry E. Hubbard on the Okinawa picket line, and after Japan’s surrender he took command of the Fletcher-class destroyer Terry. In the Korean War he was navigating officer of the heavy cruiser Rochester and received the Bronze Star Medal for that duty. He later commanded the destroyer Marshall and the dock landing ship Fort Snelling, rose to captain, and left the active list in 1965. He died on 23 November 2005 and spent his last years at Sun City West, Arizona. He is a different man from Admiral of the Navy George Dewey, from the several other Deweys who appear in the Navy’s mid-century registers, and from the civilian Irving Deweys of the same generation who turn up in newspapers and directories.
The Navy’s Register of Commissioned Officers and the Naval Academy’s Register of Graduates agree on his birth date: 14 June 1915. The graduates’ register, in its wartime editions, gives the place only as New York and records that he was appointed from New York. No contemporary record seen for this article names the city or county of his birth.
His home when he left the Academy was Takoma Park, Maryland, just north of Washington. The Lucky Bag of 1939 prints that town under his name. Local society notes of the late 1930s place his parents there as well. In August 1937 the Washington Evening Star reported that Mr. and Mrs. George I. Dewey of Silver Spring had bought a model house at 107 Anne Street in the Kilmarock section of Takoma Park and would move in on 1 September; “Mr. Dewey is with the Navy Department.” Three years later the Washington Post, covering the wedding of his sister Elizabeth to William E. Night of Syracuse, named the bride’s parents as “Mr. and Mrs. G. Irving Dewey, of Takoma Park, Md.” Online family compilations identify the mother as Ruth Doremus and give the couple further children, including a brother, William Timothy. Those names fit the middle name he carried and the presence of a Leslie Doremus among the wedding guests from New York, but no contemporary document seen here confirms the mother’s given name or the brother’s.
The father worked for the Navy ashore while the son was growing up in the capital’s suburbs. The household that bought the house on Anne Street was close enough to Annapolis for the boy’s classmates later to treat Takoma Park as his home town, even though the Academy’s own graduate register kept New York as his state of birth and of appointment.
He spent a year at Syracuse University before Annapolis. The Lucky Bag sketch of him says so plainly and adds that he remained “vigorous in its defense during football season bull sessions.” He entered the Naval Academy on 20 June 1935, a few days after his twentieth birthday. In the Academy’s annual register for 1936–37 he stands 315th among the third class (the class of 1939) after the first year of the course. He was not a star in academics, and the yearbook does not pretend otherwise.
What the yearbook does record is a quiet, musical midshipman whom classmates called Irv and “Admiral.” “Some fellows spend all their study hours writing letters, and still get along,” the sketch begins. “Admiral is one of those lucky specimens. He writes more letters per night than all the rest of the company.” He dragged (dated) often “but never lets it get him down.” He owned a banjo that he never played “within throwing range of his room.” He was “one of the quietest fellows in the Academy,” a good roommate, and had one habit his classmates marked: saying “fruit” after a tough navigation practical work. The sketch closes with the hope that hung over every Dewey of that generation: “Who knows? Perhaps there will be another Dewey to fly an Admiral’s flag.”
He put his energy into the Mandolin Club. He was a member for four years and its director as a first classman. The yearbook’s musical-clubs pages show him leading the club through arrangements that mixed classical numbers with jazz, smoothing the jam sessions into something that could be put on stage. The Washington Post, writing about the class of 1939 in May of that year, identified him as son of Mr. and Mrs. G. Dewey of Takoma (the father’s middle initial is garbled in the available OCR) and as “director of the Mandolin Club.” The Lucky Bag also credits him with the Musical Club Show in his last two years and with midshipman petty-officer rank.
He was commissioned an ensign on 24 June 1939. The Register of Graduates lists him as number 13678 of the Academy’s alumni and notes that he entered the Navy. The Navy Directory of June 1940 places him as an ensign in the battleship Idaho. In August 1940 the Army and Navy Journal recorded his detachment from Idaho and his orders to the destroyer Drayton. The directories of November 1940 and April 1941 still list him in Drayton, under Commander Jesse H. Carter. Those are the last prewar assignments that can be fixed from the sources found.
Drayton was a Mahan-class destroyer of the Pacific Fleet, home-ported from late 1939 at Pearl Harbor. The ship’s official history places her at sea as plane guard for the carrier Lexington in Task Force 12 on the morning of 7 December 1941, searching afterward for Japanese raiders and returning to Pearl Harbor on the 13th. Whether Dewey was still aboard that morning is not settled by any source found. The April 1941 directory is the last that names him in the ship. What happened to him between that spring and the summer of 1944—whether he stayed in Drayton through her Solomons and New Guinea fighting, or left her earlier for other duty—does not appear in the registers, directories, or newspapers consulted for this article.
He surfaces again with certainty on 22 July 1944, at Staten Island, when the Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer Harry E. Hubbard was commissioned. A shipmates’ compilation of her officers, published by the association that maintains the ship’s memory, lists Lieutenant Commander Irving D. Dewey as executive officer from that commissioning day until 30 July 1945. The same association’s memorial page later gave his postwar address as Sun City West, Arizona, and his death date as 23 November 2005. Those dates and that title of executive officer are the best available for his wartime destroyer service; they have not been checked against the ship’s logs.
Hubbard was flagship of Destroyer Squadron 64. She trained precommissioning crews and then sailed for Hawaii in January 1945. She served as a training ship out of Pearl Harbor until mid-April, then went west to the war. She arrived off Okinawa on 8 May 1945 to take her station as a picket destroyer against the day-and-night raids and kamikaze runs that were then trying to stop the American advance. The official history records that for nearly two months she fought off the raiders, shooting down four suicide planes that tried to crash her. When the picket destroyers Evans and Hugh W. Hadley were badly damaged in their stand against some fifty suicide planes on 11 May, Hubbard was first to arrive and went alongside Evans to give fire-fighting, damage-control and medical help. She gave similar aid to the destroyer Barry on 24–25 May, shooting down two suicide planes as she escorted Barry into Kerama Retto, one of them “disintegrated by Harry E. Hubbard’s gunners a bare 50 yards from the ship.” She remained off Okinawa until 24 July 1945. Dewey’s tour as executive officer ended six days later. The sources found do not say what share of those decisions or of that gunfire fell to him; they say only that he was second-in-command of the ship through the picket months and left her at the end of July.
On 20 September 1945, according to compiled command lists, he took command of Terry (DD-513), another Fletcher-class destroyer. Terry had been hit by a shore battery at Iwo Jima on 1 March, had been repaired at Mare Island, and had screened the fast carriers in the final raids on the Japanese home islands. In the months after the surrender she operated in Japanese waters on patrol and as a courier for the occupation forces. She sailed for home on 1 November and reached San Diego on the 20th. For just over a year she remained active with the Pacific Fleet out of San Diego. Dewey’s compiled dates keep him in her until 13 August 1946. The ship’s official history does not name him. She was placed out of commission in January 1947 and spent the rest of her career in reserve.
What the war had cost him personally, or how he bore the months on the Okinawa picket line, the record does not say. No award citation for the Pacific war was found in his name.
In the academic year 1946–47 the Naval Academy’s annual register listed him as a lieutenant commander in the Department of Mathematics. The next year’s register moved him to the Department of Marine Engineering, still a lieutenant commander. In May 1949 the Army and Navy Journal printed his orders from the Naval Academy to the heavy cruiser Rochester (CA-124).
Rochester had shifted her home port to Long Beach and, in the spring of 1950, was in the western Pacific when the Korean War began. She was operating with Carrier Task Force 77 on 3 July 1950 when the first United Nations air raids against North Korean forces were launched. She supported the Army landings at Pohang Dong in July, served with the carriers until late August, and on 13 September put her guns behind the Inchon landings. Through the autumn she stayed on the Korean coast for eighty-one continuous days, giving gunfire support, serving as a mobile helicopter base for the minesweeping of Changjon, Koje, Wonsan, Hungnam and Songjin, and controlling naval air operations at Wonsan before the landing force arrived. In 198 days of Korean operations she steamed more than 25,000 miles and fired thousands of eight-inch and five-inch rounds. She headed home in January 1951.
Dewey was her navigating officer through that first wartime cruise. In June 1952 All Hands, the Navy’s magazine, published among the Bronze Star awards a citation for “Dewey, Irving D., CDR, USN: Navigating officer of USS Rochester (CA-124) during operations against enemy forces in Korea from 26 June 1950 to 17 Jan 1951.” That is the only decoration for him found in the sources used here. The Register of 1955 gives his permanent date of rank as commander as 1 July 1949.
Compiled command lists place him in command of the Fletcher-class destroyer Marshall (DD-676) when she recommissioned on 27 April 1951. Marshall went that August to the Sea of Japan with Task Force 77, screened carriers, served with the Formosa Strait patrol and with the United Nations blockade and escort force, and returned to San Diego in March 1952. Those lists give no firm end date for his command; the next named captain appears in mid-1952. The lists themselves are secondary compilations and have not been checked against the ship’s logs.
By the autumn of 1959 he was a captain. The Army, Navy, Air Force Journal of 24 October 1959 reported that “Capt. Irving D. Dewey has succeeded Capt. Robert S. Brookings, 2d, as Commanding Officer of the Fort Snelling (LSD-30) at the Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, Va.” Captain Brookings was ordered on. “Captain Dewey, USNA ’39, had been on the Staff of CinC, Atlantic Fleet. He is married to the former Ruth Evelyn Fide of Seattle. They have one child, Deidre Jean Dewey.” The wife’s maiden surname appears in the OCR of that notice as “Fide”; the original typesetting was not re-examined for this article, and the spelling should be treated with caution. Their daughter Deidre appears in the 1963 yearbook of Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, which fits a family living near the Norfolk–Little Creek amphibious base while he had the Fort Snelling.
He was promoted to captain from 1 September 1958. He remained on the active list of captains in the register of 1 January 1965 and is gone from the register of 1 January 1966. He retired in 1965, after roughly twenty-six years in commission.
In May 1977 a Federal Election Commission audit of the John Hemenway for Congress Committee, then based in Seattle and later in Washington, D.C., named “Captain Irving D. Dewey” as the committee’s chairman from 16 May 1977. That is the last public office found under his name. The shipmates’ memorial for Harry E. Hubbard places him at Sun City West, Arizona, at the end of his life. Social Security records compiled online give the same death date, 23 November 2005, and the same Arizona postal code. No full obituary was found, and nothing seen says how he died or where he is buried. He was ninety years old.