Ships
- USS Bennion (DD-662) Captain from 14 December 1943
The initials expand from the Navy's own books and from the men who served with him. The only commander of that name who fits is Joshua Winfred Cooper, Naval Academy class of 1927, file number 61130, the officer the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships calls "Commander J. W. Cooper" when the destroyer Bennion was commissioned, and the officer his gunnery officer, James L. Holloway III, calls "Commander Joshua Cooper."
He is not the next name on the list. Line 119 is Cooper, William Goodwin, a different officer. On the Register of 1 January 1960 William Goodwin Cooper stands at signal number 00032, in the block of vice admirals, and Joshua Winfred Cooper stands later, signal 00143, among the rear admirals. Their names, numbers, and ranks never collapse into one man. He is not Junior Woodrow Cooper, carried in the 1 July 1944 Register index as an ensign. He is not John W. Cooper, the acting pay clerk the Navy Directory of 1 April 1941 places on Nevada. He is not Clifford Steele Cooper of Utah, the diver in the 1927 Lucky Bag, and not Elmer Glenn Cooper of Arkansas, a classmate whose name went onto the destroyer Cooper. That ship's captains were other men. The ship is not this officer.
Origins
He was born on 25 November 1906. The Register of 1 July 1943 prints the date beside his name in the lieutenant commanders' list, signal 2918: 25 November 1906, and a date of entry of 30 July 1923. The Register of 1 January 1960 repeats the birthday as 11 25 06 in the column that, for the officers around him, is date of birth. No register read for this essay gives a birthplace. A compiled awards page says Surry, Virginia. That place is not in the Register, the Navy Directory, or the Lucky Bag, and it is not used here.
What the Academy did record is where he came from as a midshipman and who appointed him. The Register of 1 January 1927 lists him among first-class midshipmen on probation at Annapolis, alphabetically, appointed from Vermont, admitted 30 July 1923. The index of that volume is "Cooper, Joshua W., Mid," page 300. The 1927 Lucky Bag heads his sketch "Salisbury, Maryland," with the nicknames "Jocko," "Coop," and "Josh." Hometown and appointing state are both his. The yearbook does not say why a boy from the Eastern Shore was appointed from Vermont, and nothing read here explains it.
The same sketch says he graduated from Salisbury High School in 1922 and entered St. John's College, and that one year there was enough to turn him from the Army toward the Navy. That is classmate prose, written to be clever, and the jokes should be read as jokes. It says that whenever anything was going on he was among those present, and that when it came to "dope" he was headquarters. It puts him in the 150-pound crew, "right out in front," and says he could always be counted on to help make a thing succeed. The activities line under the sketch is plainer than the prose: Crew, 150-pound, second class and first class; Soccer, class, second class; Swimming, class, first class. It says he rarely missed a hop and usually dragged, and it invents a "mythical little stucco cottage" he was always dreaming of. That cottage is a yearbook joke. It is not evidence of a wife. The last lines are the ones that sound like a forecast and should not be used as one. They say four years at the Academy brought out a willingness to learn, that he looked at difficulties from the bright side and would dismiss a misunderstanding with a smile, and that the fleet would welcome him. The smile is the class talking. The record of what he did with a hard order comes later, from another man, on another night.
Nothing in the registers or the yearbook names a father or a mother. A brother is not proved. The only family that has turned up is later, and it comes from his son's obituary, not from Annapolis.
Formation
On 1 January 1927 he was still a midshipman. The registers of that era print, as a class footnote, that the Naval Academy class of 1927 was commissioned ensign on 2 June 1927. The mark beside his own date of entry does not read cleanly enough, year after year, to pin that day to his line. What is solid is the class and the next rank the Directory actually prints. On 1 April 1928 he is an ensign on the battleship Maryland. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships has Maryland that spring as a ship of the Battle Fleet on the west coast, fresh from years of fleet training, and later in 1928 as the ship that carried President-elect Herbert Hoover on the Pacific leg of a Latin American trip. The Directory's date is 1 April. It does not say he was still aboard when Hoover came aboard, or what an ensign's billet was. A first cruise on a battleship was the ordinary making of an ensign in that decade. The paper gives the ship and the rank and stops.
By 1 July 1930 the Directory has moved him. He is a lieutenant (junior grade) on Perry. He is still on Perry on 1 April 1931. The day he left the ensign's grade sits somewhere between the April 1928 directory and the July 1930 directory. It is not printed as a date of rank in the registers read here, so the day is left open. The ship is not. After a battleship he was on Perry, and he stayed at least from the summer of 1930 into the spring of 1931. His billet is not given.
On 1 January 1933 the Directory has him a lieutenant (junior grade) on Milwaukee. Then there is a gap. No directory between that January and the autumn of 1934 was read. On 1 October 1934 he is back at Annapolis, still a lieutenant (junior grade), at the Naval Academy. The directories of 1 January 1935 and 1 January 1936 say the same, and the 1936 book adds the word the others imply: instructor. He had come off cruising ships onto the faculty while he was still a junior lieutenant. How long the teaching lasted, and what he taught, the directories do not say.
The Register of 1 January 1941, in the lieutenants' list, gives his date of rank as a ditto of the officer above him, Harry Marsden Denty, whose date is printed out: 1 July 1936. His special courses on that page are 18, 18-a, 24-a, and 31. The course key was not clean enough to translate those numbers without guessing, and they are left as numbers. The rank date is the fact that matters. On 1 January 1936 the Directory still had him a lieutenant (junior grade). On 1 July 1936 he became a lieutenant. The July 1936 Register index still calls him a lieutenant (junior grade), which can be true of a book set in type before the promotions of that day. The 1941 date-of-rank column is the one used here.
By 1 April 1937 the Directory has him a lieutenant on Northampton. The OCR of that page spells it Northhampton. The directories of 1 January 1938 and 1 January 1939 spell it Northampton and still have him there, still a lieutenant. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships describes Northampton (CA-26) as a heavy cruiser that from 1932 operated primarily in the Pacific, homeported at San Pedro and later at Pearl Harbor. A lieutenant on her across those three directories was on a Pacific cruiser in the years before the war. The books do not say whether he was in a turret, on the bridge, or in engineering, or whether he made every cruise between the dates the Directory closed. They do say he was no longer the instructor at Annapolis. Sometime between January 1936 and April 1937 he had gone back to sea, and he stayed on that cruiser at least until the start of 1939.
The next directory that names him is 1 November 1940. He is a lieutenant, "conn NROTC," Harvard University. On 1 April 1941, the last Navy Directory before the series stopped, the line is the same: lieutenant, connected with the NROTC unit at Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The abbreviation is the Directory's. It does not spell out a title such as professor of naval science, and it is not rewritten here as one. He had come off a heavy cruiser onto a college campus while the country was still formally at peace. His own next move is the gap. From 1 April 1941 until a new destroyer commissioned in December 1943, the registers drop the station column, and no letter, fitness report, or deck-log signature from those months was found.
He was a lieutenant commander by 1 July 1942. The Register of that date opens the lieutenant commanders' list with a date of temporary rank of 1 January 1942, and every officer down through his line, signal 3016, is a ditto of that date and of the permanent status "lieutenant commander." His courses are again 18, 18-a, 24-a, 31. The index calls him lieutenant commander and gives page 116. On 1 July 1944 the index calls him commander, signal 2718, file number 61130. The body of that register has him in the commanders' list. The date he made commander did not survive the column breaks of the copy read here. On 1 July 1945 he is in the captains' list, signal 2332, still file 61130. The temporary-rank date at the head of that list is 20 March 1945, dittoed down through his line. The permanent rank dittoed with it is still lieutenant commander. The Navy had made him a captain for the war and had not yet made the rank permanent. The index of the same volume prints him as captain. Both are true of the system he was in.
War years as lived
Compiled lists of commanding officers give him the old destroyer Palmer, redesignated the minesweeper DMS-5, from 21 February 1942 to 12 November 1942. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships tells Palmer's war without naming him: Atlantic and Caribbean escort, then the North African landing off Fedala in November 1942, where she seized a French trawler and engaged a shore battery. Those lists are compilations, not deck logs. DANFS does not put him on her. The Fedala days are not narrated here as his cruise. If the compiled dates were right he would have had her for the start of that landing and left her a month later. That is a possibility the paper does not confirm. What the registers do confirm is only the rank he held in the middle of 1942. They do not say where he stood.
The command that is documented begins at the Boston Navy Yard on 14 December 1943. Bennion (DD-662), a Fletcher-class destroyer named for the captain of West Virginia killed at Pearl Harbor, was commissioned that day with Commander J. W. Cooper in command. The ship's history never says he was relieved. The next sentence that names him as her captain is not in that history. It is in the Navy Cross citation transcribed from Commander, Seventh Fleet, serial 0647 of 9 February 1945, which calls him commanding officer of Bennion on the night of 24–25 October 1944, and in Holloway's account of the same night. Between the commissioning and that night, the ship's history is the cruise he took her on, unless a relief that nobody printed took him off her. No such relief was found.
DANFS sends her out of Philadelphia on 3 March 1944, escorting the light carrier Bataan to the Pacific. She reached Pearl Harbor on 22 March and trained and patrolled in Hawaiian waters until 29 May. Then she went west as a fighter-director and radar-picket ship. The history gives the employment in blocks, not in his orders: the seizure of Saipan, 15 June to 24 July 1944; the occupation of Tinian, 24 July to 2 August; the Palaus, 2 to 29 September; the Leyte invasion, 18 October to 18 November, "during which she was slightly damaged by a shore battery." Holloway, who was her gunnery officer and twenty-two that autumn, remembers the same run from inside the Mark 37 director: Saipan, Tinian, Guam, and Peleliu. DANFS does not name Guam. It does put her in the Palaus through September, and Holloway says that at Peleliu she emptied her magazines three times in one week. The two accounts are the same cruise told at different altitudes. One is the ship's official summary. The other is a man who had stood in a hot steel box eight hours a day for seven months. Where they disagree on an island, the ship's history is the one that does not depend on memory.
The shore battery is where they meet. DANFS says the ship was slightly damaged by one during the Leyte invasion and does not say who was hurt. Holloway dates it two days before the night action in Surigao Strait, so about 23 October 1944. A shell struck close aboard. Splinters wounded the pointer in the director and Holloway's assistant, Lieutenant (junior grade) Robertson, whom he calls Robbie. Holloway was standing inches from them and was not hit. Robertson lost his right arm at the shoulder. He lived. The ship the official history calls slightly damaged had a wardroom that was now the dressing station, and a man on the table under morphine, and the captain still had to take her into the strait.
On the morning of 24 October, Holloway writes, Bennion was on picket station in the eastern approaches to Leyte Gulf. Cooper called him down from the director during morning general quarters and showed him a message. The southern Japanese force was moving in a way that suggested it would come through Surigao Strait. Cooper thought they would be in a night action within twenty-four hours. Holloway went back up and counted the five-inch ammunition, and he told the torpedo officer to make sure the torpedoes were ready for a war shot. They had not been exercised since shakedown. That afternoon the plan came in. Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf had six old battleships, eight cruisers, and twenty-six destroyers across the top of the strait. Thirty-nine PT boats were already down the channel. Holloway had watched them pass on 23 October, loud and wrapped in their own exhaust, and had not been impressed.
Bennion was one of nine Fletchers in Destroyer Squadron 56 under Captain Roland Smoot, three divisions of three. Smoot's plan, as Holloway remembers it, sent one division at the eastern flank of the Japanese column, one at the head, and the third, Bennion's, at the western flank. Each ship would fire five torpedoes and hold five. Oldendorf had ordered that limit. Torpedo reloads were scarce in the western Pacific. Smoot also ordered the five-inch guns silent during the run-in, so the flashes would not give the Japanese a point of aim. Bennion was last in the third division. She would be among the last to fire, and the range would still be closing while the column turned.
They were under air attack on the way to the rendezvous. Holloway says the five-inch battery brought down a Val and the automatic guns a Zeke close aboard. By 1800 they were in the attack disposition. The crew ate bologna sandwiches in relays. A little after 0300 on 25 October the blowers went up to a whine and the bridge rang for full power. Holloway, in the director hatch, had the second battleship in the crosshairs. He reported a fire-control solution. The captain's answer, over the 21MC, is the nearest thing to Cooper's voice that anybody wrote down. Holloway remembered it as clear and businesslike. The PT boats, the "Martinis," were reporting two battleships, a cruiser, and at least three destroyers through the narrows. The target was the second battleship. "Let me know when you have a fire-control solution on the Big Boy. Have the gun battery ready but don't shoot unless I specifically tell you to. We have been directed to make a torpedo attack with five fish." Then, when plot was tracking: "Very well. Train out the tubes but don't launch or shoot until I give the order."
The division turned south, made black smoke, and came out of the land shadow into Japanese gunfire. Holloway describes 14-inch and 8-inch splashes close enough to wet the weather decks, and star shells, and the American battle line opening across the north so that tracers passed over the destroyers' heads. At the firing point the first ship of the division had the enemy at about 6,000 yards. Each ship in succession turned hard to starboard and launched five torpedoes with the target on the port beam. When it was Bennion's turn the bridge called "Launch torpedoes." Holloway fired. He writes that the battleship Yamashiro filled the glass, that plot had a good solution, and that all five ran hot and straight. The formation broke up in the retirement. Bennion headed out at thirty knots, still making smoke.
Then a large ship loomed on the port bow and opened fire on Albert W. Grant, a squadron mate already hit, some of it by American cruisers, and drifting without power in the strait. The salvos were ripple fire. Holloway shouted down to the captain, who was on the port wing one level below, that the ship was Japanese. Plot had a solution. Holloway recommended the five torpedoes they had been told to keep. He writes that Cooper agreed at once, knowing, as Holloway knew, that Oldendorf had told the squadron to spend only five. "Without hesitation," is Holloway's phrase. The captain repeated the order to fire all five at the close target. The spread went out at about 3,000 yards, set deep. Bennion heeled as Cooper ordered full right rudder and flank speed and swung north, toward the rendezvous. Holloway's reading of that order is that Cooper did not mean to stay in the water where Grant was dying. The citation later said he had taken the ship through intense and prolonged gunfire, launched the attack, and retired without damage. It did not mention a second spread, or a decision to ignore the admiral's limit. That decision lives in the gunnery officer's memory, not in the medal.
By 0430 the squadron had reformed north of the strait. At first light the destroyers were sent south after what was left. Holloway counted six fires. Men in the water called out. There was no time to stop. The Japanese destroyer Asagumo was limping south, damaged and on fire, and still dangerous if she had torpedoes left. Bennion was ordered to finish her. Holloway says they opened with the five-inch battery at 10,000 yards, hit on the third salvo, went to rapid fire at 6,000, and watched her go down bow first at about 2,000 yards, screws still turning. A Zero came out of the clouds on the way back. A no-deflection shot blew it up. The crew had been up since 0400 the day before, when they took five-inch ammunition from a Liberty ship off Tacloban under an air fight, and they had been at general quarters more than twelve hours.
The Navy Cross, as Military Times prints the Seventh Fleet serial of 9 February 1945, is narrower than that night and does not depend on Holloway. It awards the cross to Captain, then Commander, Joshua Winfred Cooper for extraordinary heroism as commanding officer of Bennion against Japanese forces at Surigao Strait on the night of 24–25 October 1944. He took part in a night torpedo attack on a column of enemy battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, directed the ship through intense and prolonged gunfire, launched the attack, and retired without damage. The original serial was not in hand. The transcription is what was opened. It does not say a torpedo hit. Holloway, writing in 2010, says that in 1944 the ship's own evidence was thin: Torpedoman First Class Tom Bowen timed the runs and reported one explosion at the expected moment, and sonar heard an underwater blast at the same time, and nobody could say whether it belonged to the first spread or the second. Samuel Eliot Morison's Leyte, as Holloway summarizes it, gave the squadron a single hit, from Newcomb, and did not mention Bennion's second salvo. Holloway later found the Naval War College's 1958 analysis of Surigao Strait, then declassified, and quotes it as saying Yamashiro was hit at 0405 by a torpedo from Bennion, from a second salvo of five fired at 0359. That volume was not opened for this essay. The hit is Holloway's quotation of a study, set against Morison's silence and against a citation that does not claim one. It is not narrated here as a settled fact.
About a week after the battle Holloway left the ship for flight training. He writes that he said goodbye to Cooper, "a splendid gentleman and captain," and that Cooper was sorry to see him leave the destroyer Navy. The words Holloway gives himself in reply are a young officer's inventory: four shore batteries silenced, three planes, a destroyer by gunfire, a close torpedo hit that helped sink a battleship. The inventory is his, including the hit. What it does establish is that Cooper was still the captain when the gunnery officer walked off, early in November 1944. DANFS carries the ship on, without naming a captain, through the Mindoro landings of 13–17 December, Lingayen Gulf in January 1945, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, where a suicide plane's near miss did slight damage and the ship earned a Presidential Unit Citation for 1 April to 1 June 1945, and the Third Fleet raids on Japan in July. She came back to Puget Sound on 27 October 1945 and went out of commission at Long Beach on 20 June 1946. Eight battle stars. Compiled lists end Cooper's command on 24 December 1944. That date is not a log. Mindoro falls before it and Lingayen after it, and neither is claimed here as his. The war he is known to have lived in command is the commissioning, the passage west, the picket and fire-support work through Leyte, the night in the strait, and at least the week after.
After
On 1 July 1945 he was already a temporary captain, permanent rank still lieutenant commander. The stations of the later 1940s were not in the registers read closely enough to name a desk or a ship. The next command that is printed in a Navy periodical is a battleship, in a war the United States called a police action.
All Hands for November 1953, in its list of Legion of Merit awards, has the line: Cooper, Joshua W., captain, U.S. Navy, commanding officer of Iowa (BB-61) and commander of task elements of Fast Carrier Task Force 77, from 29 July to 13 October 1952. Combat "V" authorized. The boilerplate above the list is the medal's own: exceptionally meritorious conduct in outstanding services. The dates are the period of the award, not a proved day of assuming command or a proved day of relief. A photograph in the Naval Institute's archive identifies Captain Joshua W. Cooper as commanding officer of Iowa beside the commanding officer of New Jersey and two rear admirals of the Atlantic battleship force. The print carries no date. It is evidence of the title, not of a month.
The Register of 1 January 1957 still lists him as a captain, designator 1100, the surface line, with a date of rank that reads 1 August 1955, birth 25 November 1906, class of 1927. On 1 January 1960 the same man is in the rear admirals' list, signal 00143, designator still 1100. The date-of-rank digits beside him still look like 1 August 1955, which was his captain's date three years earlier, so they are not read here as the day he broke his flag. The rank is the fact. Sometime between New Year's Day 1957 and New Year's Day 1960 he became a rear admiral.
On 8 March 1960 he was at Fort Lewis, Washington, for Exercise Bay Island. An Army photograph in the Harry S. Truman Library shows him with Major General Louis W. Truman. The caption calls him Rear Admiral Joshua W. Cooper, Commander of Amphibious Group Three. Another frame from the same day puts him in the second row of officers at the 91st Memorial Saturday, between other flag officers, during the national anthem. The library's name authority dates him 1906–1998 and gives the full name Joshua Winfred. He was fifty-three, a flag officer in command of an amphibious group, standing in a memorial formation for a war that was not his first.
He left active duty sometime after that March and before February 1965. The history of the Seacoast Shipyard Association, written from the Portsmouth–Kittery side of a long fight over the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, says that in February 1965 the association retained Rear Admiral Joshua W. Cooper of Alexandria, Virginia, "who had recently retired from active naval service," as its full-time man in Washington. The job, as that history states it, was to work for the benefit of the yard. The same pages credit his "behind the scenes efforts" with the rescinding of a closure order in 1971 and with President Nixon's reaffirmation of the yard in the spring of 1973, and with years of pushing military-construction projects. That is the association speaking about its own advocate. It is not a Navy citation, and it is not treated here as proof that the yard's survival was his doing. What it does fix is the work he chose, or accepted, when the Navy was done with him: twenty years as a lobbyist for one shipyard, resident in Alexandria, on the payroll of a committee of seacoast towns. In September 1985, the history says, he retired from that post after more than twenty years. He would have been seventy-eight.
The family the Navy never printed is in his son's obituary. The Connection newspapers of Alexandria, on 4 March 2009, reported that Thomas Joshua Cooper, sixty-five, of Alexandria, had died on 27 February 2009 of cancer. He was the son of the late Rear Admiral Joshua W. and Rena McIntosh Cooper of Alexandria. He had been educated in the United States and in Europe, had graduated from Dreux American High School in France, and had come back to Washington in 1962. The France years fit a flag officer's family more easily than they fit a fact about any particular tour. The obituary does not say when the admiral was stationed there. Thomas served as an Air Force captain in the Vietnam War, became a lawyer, and worked in Congress, at the Federal Election Commission, at the Commerce Department, and at a Washington firm. He was to be buried with full military honors with his parents at the Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis. A sister, Sara Cooper Masterson of Alexandria, survived him, and an uncle, Philip C. Cooper. The uncle's surname is Cooper. The obituary does not say whether he was Joshua's brother or some other Cooper. The age, sixty-five in February 2009, puts Thomas's birth in 1943 or 1944, in the years when his father was either in the Harvard gap, or on the way to Bennion, or already her captain. The obituary gives no birthday, and none is invented.
The Truman Library's dates close his life in 1998. He would have been ninety-one. Hall of Valor prints 21 February 1998. No newspaper obituary of the admiral himself was opened, and the day is not in a register. The son's notice, four years after the library's closing year, is enough to show that both parents were already dead, and that the family meant them to lie at Annapolis, where he had been a midshipman seventy years before.