Ships
- USS Beale (DD-471) Captain from 23 December 1942
The surname on the list is the spelling the printed Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships used for the officer who commissioned Beale. Every Navy Register consulted, and the Naval Academy yearbook, spell the man Cochran. The Lucky Bag index enters him as Cochran, J. B., and the sketch names him Joe Brice Cochran of Huntersville, North Carolina. That is the expansion of the initials. Nothing in the registers supports a second line officer of those initials spelled Cockran.
Origins
The Register of 1 July 1945 gives his date of birth as 6 February 1904 and his date of entry as 3 July 1922. It does not give a birthplace. The class book of 1926, which is where the name Joe Brice Cochran is tied to the initials J. B., prints his home as Huntersville, North Carolina, and his nickname as Joe. An awards compilation later puts the birth at New Hope, North Carolina, and the death on 25 May 1976. Neither claim is in the registers or the yearbook, and no obituary that could be opened confirmed the town of birth or the day of death. Huntersville is the home the Academy recorded while he was still a midshipman. The rest of the childhood is not in the sources used here.
What the classmates wrote, in the jokebook way of the Lucky Bag, is the earliest portrait that survives. They opened on a deck where someone called “Hey, Joe” and asked for a match, and Joe was the man who always had one. The academics pressed him. Plebe semi-annuals nearly sent him home; luck, they said, stood by. Second-class year mathematics had him again, movies gone, working to hold a 1.50 and keep his hash marks. Asked what he was out for, he answered that it was the Academics, and that the Math Department had the top side until he could pull a satisfactory. They called him a Red Mike. He broke away two or three times in youngster year. In Crabtown he claimed no conquests. Letters, and boxes from home, said more about the effect a Southern midshipman had on the belles of North Carolina. Under the name the book lists only the Sub-Squad. The volume uses that squad, in a neighbor’s sketch, for the pool and a last swimming test. It does not say in his own paragraph that he failed one.
He was commissioned ensign on 3 June 1926. That date is the footnote the 1 July 1942 register prints on the lieutenant-commander pages that contain his name, the class block running across those sheets as “Commissioned ensign June 3, 1926.” The 1 January 1952 alphabetical index repeats file number 060224 beside COCHRAN JOE BRICE and, in the date columns of that index line, 6 03 26.
Formation
The sea that formed him, on the evidence of the registers, was first a submarine sea. On 1 January 1933 he was a lieutenant (junior grade). The date of rank on his line is a ditto of 3 June 1929, unbroken on that page back to the explicit date at the head of the class block, and it breaks only after his name, at another officer’s 3 December 1929. His station is R-2. His qualification numbers are 7, 18, and 30: qualified in submarines, the Naval War College correspondence course in strategy and tactics, and the course in submarine instruction. He was not marked as commanding. The column is duty or station. R-2 is where the Navy had placed him.
By 1 July 1936 the same man was a lieutenant. The date of rank is 30 June 1936, carried as a ditto from the explicit “30 June 36” at the top of that lieutenant block, and marked (Y), subject to examination and confirmation. The station is Bonita. The qualification numbers have changed to 1, 18, and 22-f: qualified for command of submarines, the same War College correspondence course, and a postgraduate course in naval engineering, operating. Command qualification is not the same thing as command. The register says Bonita, not “commanding Bonita,” and on the same page it does say “commanding” when that is what it means. He had been taught to take a submarine, and he was serving in one. The registers do not say which boats he had between R-2 and Bonita, or whether he ever took either to sea as captain.
On 1 July 1940 the (Y) is gone and the lieutenant’s date of rank is still 30 June 1936. The qualifications are now 1, 18, 22-f, and 30, so the submarine-instruction course is listed again alongside command qualification and the engineering postgraduate course. The duty line has left the boats. It reads “Duty connection Plunkett.” That is the register’s phrase for an officer assigned to a ship not yet, or not simply, his to command. It is not a statement that he commanded Plunkett. The book is silent on how a qualified submarine officer came to a destroyer detail in the summer of 1940. The later war shows only the result: when the fighting started he was a destroyer captain, and the submarine qualification numbers stayed on his line through 1945 as a record of what he had already become.
On 1 July 1942 he was a lieutenant commander. The temporary rank on the page is lieutenant commander, dittoed from the first man in that class block, and the date of rank is 1 May 1941, dittoed from Wallace Joseph Miller’s explicit date two lines above him. Signal number 2704. The wartime register does not name a ship. The Silver Star citation, for Joe Brice Cochran, file number matching the later index entry 060224, says that by 7 August 1942 he was commanding officer of the destroyer Southard (DD-207).
War years as lived
The citation is the only close account of how he fought in the Solomons. It calls him lieutenant commander, which agrees with the register of 1 July 1942, and it dates the actions to 7 August and to 7–15 September 1942. Southard went in with the first attack as a screening and minesweeping vessel. She came back. Under his command she repeatedly re-entered the Guadalcanal–Tulagi area, the citation says, against persistent Japanese aircraft, to escort and protect the ships carrying reinforcements and supplies to the Marines ashore. The Navy Unit Commendation later given to Southard covers the ship from 7 August 1942 all the way to 17 May 1944, including a submarine sunk on 10 November 1942 and landings far past any date this officer can be shown to have had her. That ribbon belongs to the company who were aboard across those months. It is not a biography of his cruise, and the November sinking is not claimed here as his.
Between the September days in the citation and the end of 1942 he changed ships and, on the printed record, rank. The 1 July 1942 register still has him a lieutenant commander. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the Naval History Division text transcribed at HyperWar, says the second Beale (DD-471), a Fletcher-class destroyer, was launched on 24 August 1942 at Bethlehem Steel, Staten Island, sponsored by Miss Nancy Beale, a great-grandniece of Lieutenant Beale, and commissioned on 23 December 1942 with Commander J. B. Cockran in command. The rank “commander” is new since July. The spelling Cockran is the list’s spelling and the dictionary’s. It is not the spelling of his Academy book or of any register year read for this essay. A later private retelling of the ship’s history expands the commissioning officer to “Commander Joe B. Cochran” and places the ceremony at the New York Navy Yard. That expansion is the same identification made here; it is not an independent official text that could be opened at the Naval History and Heritage Command, whose pages returned nothing usable.
If that commissioning officer is Joe Brice Cochran, and the awards that carry his file number are the reason to think so, then the next two years are his in a particular way. The short DANFS history does not describe the shakedown or the passage out. It says Beale reported to the Pacific Fleet and then lists what she did: Cape Gloucester, New Britain, 2–28 December 1943 and again 23 January–1 February 1944; Saidor, New Guinea, 2–22 January; a bombardment of Sio on 8 January; the Admiralty Islands, 27 February–8 March; bombardment off Wewak, 1–19 March; Hollandia, 22 April; Wakde–Toem, 17 May; Biak, 27 May–9 June, and a night destroyer action off Biak on 8–9 June; Noemfoor, 2 July; Wewak–Aitape, 16–24 July; Cape Sansapor, 30 July; Peleliu, 15 September; Okinawa, 1–24 April 1945; then the Third Fleet’s strikes on the Japanese home islands, 26 July–7 August 1945. The ship’s battle stars and her occupation duty into November 1945 are the ship’s. They are not automatically his.
The Legion of Merit citation, again to Captain Joe Brice Cochran, 060224, is the document that puts him in that advance as commanding officer of “a destroyer,” not named, from 20 December 1943 to 20 September 1944. It says he put the ship’s gunfire on the landings at Cape Gloucester, the Admiralties, Hollandia, Wakde, Bink, Noemfoor, and Morotai; that the fire helped break the enemy’s power to resist; that he then covered the invasion operations, often under air attack. The places through Noemfoor are the places DANFS gives Beale in those months. “Bink” is the citation’s word, as copied by the awards site. Beale’s history says Biak, including the night action of 8–9 June 1944, which falls inside the citation’s dates and is not separately described in the medal text. Morotai is in the citation and not in the short DANFS paragraph. Peleliu, 15 September 1944, is in DANFS and not in the citation. Okinawa and the July 1945 strikes on Japan fall after 20 September 1944, and a different citation has him elsewhere by January 1945. They are not narrated here as his.
What the Legion text does say is the shape of the command: gunfire for soldiers going ashore, then the ship kept on the covering station while aircraft came at her. The night of 8–9 June off Biak is the one moment DANFS isolates as a destroyer action rather than a landing. No action report signed by him was found, so there is no account here of ranges, of who turned first, or of what he ordered. The dictionary’s bare phrase is the whole of it.
By early 1945 the citations have him off the single ship. The Bronze Star, to the same officer as captain, is for 9–20 January 1945 as commander of a destroyer division, the division not numbered, in the South China Sea. The work named is fueling. He is credited with a series of fueling operations in support of the Third Fleet’s attacks, and with judgment and cooperation that kept the command efficient. The 1 July 1945 register, which records distinctions issued through 1 May 1945, already marks him (D), (E), and (H-1): Legion of Merit, Silver Star, and the commendation ribbon that came with a special letter of commendation. It does not yet mark a Bronze Star. The January operation was inside that cutoff; the medal, if the citation’s date of action is right, was approved later than the register’s award deadline. On that same 1 July 1945 page he stands in the captains’ list, signal 2037, permanent rank still lieutenant commander from 1 May 1941, birth and entry as already given. The date of his temporary captain’s rank is not printed on his own line. It is a ditto running back to John Patrick Fitzsimmons’s explicit 1 August 1943. The 1 January 1952 lineal list later prints captain and 1 August 1943 on Cochran’s own line, beside 6 February 1904.
The 1 July 1944 register is the awkward sheet. There he is still among the commanders, signal 2366, qualifications 1, 18, 22-f, 30, the rank dates on his line only dittos, the OCR too broken to recover a clean date of rank from the neighbors. A man whose captain’s date was truly 1 August 1943 should have stood with the captains eleven months later. He did not, on that book’s evidence. The captain’s date is real on the 1952 page. How it relates to the summer of 1944 is not settled.
Cost
Nothing found says he was wounded, or that a letter of his described fear, or that a board blamed him. The cost that can be written is the cost the citations describe him carrying, and the narrower cost of what cannot be known.
At Guadalcanal the price of the minesweeping and the escort work was paid in repeated returns to an anchorage the aircraft were hunting. The citation’s language is the Navy’s, “gallant fortitude,” and it does not count the planes or name the men who died on Southard while he had her. Those numbers are not invented here to make the week look heavier. At Cape Gloucester and along the New Guinea coast the Legion citation puts him under hostile air attack while the gunfire was going ashore. Again no tally of bombs or of his own casualties was in the citation. The night off Biak is a blank beyond the fact that Beale was in a destroyer action. If he was the commanding officer the Legion text still has in the ship that month, the action was his to fight, and the sources used here do not preserve how he fought it.
The January 1945 award is a different kind of pressure. Fueling a fleet at sea in the South China Sea, while that fleet was striking, is not a lesser job than a night action. It is the job that decides whether the strikes happen the next morning. The citation praises judgment and cooperation. It does not say a hose parted, a ship was hit alongside, or a decision of his went wrong. There is no record in these sources of a costly choice in the sense of a mistake he had to live with. There is a record of a man whose early record was nearly losing the Academy to mathematics, and whose wartime record, as the Navy chose to decorate it, was staying on station: back into Tulagi, on the gunline, then on the oiler rendezvous.
What he gave up personally is not written down. The class book’s North Carolina letters are 1926, not 1944. No wartime letter, no wife’s name from those years, no child born during the war, appears in the naval sources. The family that can be named comes from a son’s obituary decades later.
After
On 1 January 1952 and again on 1 January 1956 the register still lists Joe Brice Cochran as a captain, file 060224, line designator 1100, date of rank 1 August 1943. Neither alphabetical entry used here gives a duty station, so the postwar billets are a blank. On 1 January 1957 the alphabetical index lists COCHRAN JOE B, same file number, as rear admiral, retired. The 1 January 1958 index says the same. He left the active captains’ list between those Januarys. The day, and the billet from which he retired, are not on the lines that could be read. A compilation’s date of 1 July 1956 falls inside the window and is not confirmed by the register text.
A son’s obituary supplies the household the Navy Register never did. Joe Brice Cochran II, born 28 May 1952 in Washington, D.C., and dead 2 January 2022, is described as the son of Joe Brice Cochran and Phyllis Ayers Cochran. The obituary names a surviving sister, Susan Nickens, and says he was preceded in death by his two brothers and by two of his sisters. It does not call the father an admiral, does not give the father’s death, and does not sort which of those children belonged to the naval officer beyond the plain statement that those were the parents. The name is uncommon enough, and the file of the officer is clear enough, that the parents’ names are used here as his wife and his children. The obituary is not a naval biography.
Hall of Valor gives his death as 25 May 1976 and calls the home Huntersville. That is the same town the Lucky Bag gave him at twenty-two. No grave record and no 1976 newspaper notice were recovered to test the date. If the date is right, he died at seventy-two, a retired rear admiral, nineteen years after the register first placed him on the retired list. What survived in print is the class joke about matches and mathematics, three citations, a misspelled line in a ship dictionary, and a son who carried the name.