Ships
- USS Gwin (DD-433) Captain from 15 January 1941
J. M. Higgins was John Martin Higgins, born in Madison, Wisconsin, on 15 August 1899. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1922. Before the Second World War he served in battleships and destroyers, with periods of shore duty between sea assignments.
On 15 January 1941 he took command of the new destroyer USS Gwin (DD-433) as a lieutenant commander, at her commissioning at the Boston Navy Yard. The ship carried the name of Lieutenant Commander William Gwin, a Civil War officer mortally wounded in 1862 while commanding the gunboat Benton on the Yazoo River. Gwin finished shakedown in April 1941, completed final work at Boston, and joined the neutrality patrol. She worked the Caribbean through the summer. From 28 September 1941 she did the same duty in the North Atlantic from Hvalfjordur, Iceland, as flagship of a division that also included Meredith, Grayson, and Monssen. In January 1942, still operating from Iceland toward the Denmark Strait, she took aboard survivors of the Coast Guard cutter Alexander Hamilton after a submarine torpedoed that ship off Reykjavik.
Gwin then returned to the East Coast. She passed the Panama Canal and reached San Francisco. On 3 April 1942 she sailed in the screen of the carrier Hornet, which had sixteen Army B-25 bombers spotted on her flight deck. The force met Enterprise off Midway. On the morning of 18 April, about 600 miles east of Tokyo, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle’s bombers left Hornet for the raid on Japan, and the ships withdrew to Pearl Harbor. On 30 April they started south in hope of joining the carriers already fighting in the Coral Sea. The battle ended before they arrived, and Gwin was back at Pearl Harbor on 21 May. She sailed again on 23 May with Marine reinforcements for Midway and returned on 1 June. In the closing days of the Battle of Midway she was with the forces on hand when the damaged carrier Yorktown went down.
In July 1942 Gwin moved to the South Pacific. Early in August she screened carriers covering the landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and she stayed in that campaign while Higgins remained in command. He had been promoted to commander by the time he left the ship. On 24 October 1942 he turned Gwin over to a new commanding officer.
He then led destroyer units in the Central Solomons, including Destroyer Division 23, and he used Gwin as his flagship during the New Georgia operations. On the night of 12–13 July 1943 the division fought a night gun and torpedo action in the Battle of Kolombangara. Gwin was struck by a torpedo. Two officers and fifty-nine enlisted men were killed. Survivors were taken off by Ralph Talbot, and Gwin was scuttled. Lieutenant Commander John B. Fellows, Jr., was her commanding officer. Higgins was aboard as commander of the division. For his conduct in the New Georgia campaign and in that night battle he received the Navy Cross.
His other decorations included the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star, and the Legion of Merit twice. Through the rest of the Pacific war he commanded destroyer forces in operations off Iwo Jima and Okinawa and in raids against Japan.
After the war he commanded the battleship Wisconsin, Cruiser Division 5, and the Mine Force of the Pacific Fleet. His service continued through the Korean War. He retired in 1961 as a rear admiral and died on 7 December 1973.