Ships
- USS Stack (DD-406) Captain, 20 November 1939 – 2 August 1940
Isaiah Olch was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on 10 May 1899. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1922 and served in armored cruisers, heavy cruisers, battleships, and destroyers. The Navy promoted him to lieutenant commander on 1 June 1938.
In that rank he became the first commanding officer of the new Benham-class destroyer Stack (DD-406). The Norfolk Navy Yard at Portsmouth, Virginia, laid the ship down on 25 June 1937 and launched her on 5 May 1938, with Miss Mary Teresa Stack as sponsor. The name honored Edward Stack, a Marine who had served under John Paul Jones when Bonhomme Richard fought HMS Serapis in 1779. Olch commissioned Stack at the yard on 20 November 1939.
He had her for the shakedown cruise, which ran until 4 April 1940 and took the destroyer through the West Indies to Rio de Janeiro. Stack then crossed to the west coast and went on to Pearl Harbor for duty with the Pacific Fleet, and Olch was still in command when that service began. On 2 August 1940 he turned the ship over to Alvord John Greenacre.
Command afterward passed from Greenacre to Roy Arthur Newton, then to Philip Kingsland Sherman, Robert Edward Wheeler, and Sam Johnston Caldwell. Under those captains Stack moved from the Atlantic Neutrality Patrol into the Pacific war, from the Guadalcanal landings through the Solomons and on to the Philippines and Okinawa. Olch’s tour had closed in August 1940, during the ship’s peacetime work with the Pacific Fleet. After the war she was a target ship at the Bikini atomic tests and was sunk by gunfire off Kwajalein on 24 April 1948.
Olch remained in the Navy. He was promoted to commander on 30 June 1942 and to temporary captain on 1 April 1943. Late in the war he wrote for the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: a November 1944 essay on naval policy after the fighting, and a December 1945 essay on rank titles once wartime growth had restored the grade of commodore. He died in Nice, France, on 22 May 1985.