Pacific ships

USN · Lieutenant Commander

Maginnis, Jack

All captains
JM

Ships

Jack Maginnis was born on 2 February 1904. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1927 and spent his early commissioned years at sea as a gunnery officer. In 1934 he was aboard the restored frigate Constitution when she sailed from the West Coast to Boston.

He was promoted to lieutenant on 30 June 1936 and to lieutenant commander on 1 July 1941. On 1 September 1942 he received the temporary rank of commander. The following spring the Navy gave him a new destroyer.

Maginnis became captain of Black on 21 May 1943, the day the Fletcher-class ship was commissioned at Kearny, New Jersey. Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company had launched her that March. Trials in Long Island Sound came first. Black then worked up in Puerto Rican waters and at Guantanamo Bay, and in late June went north to Casco Bay, where she was accepted as ready for service. From mid-July into August she lay at the New York Navy Yard while extra antiaircraft guns were fitted. When that work ended, Maginnis took her out as escort for the heavy cruiser Boston on a run to Trinidad, and soon afterward she sailed to Philadelphia with the light carrier Monterey and the destroyer Walker.

In the autumn of 1943 Black passed through the Panama Canal and reported at Pearl Harbor on 15 November. Maginnis then took her to Tarawa. Into late January 1944 she screened the entrance to the lagoon and at times escorted transports out toward the 180th meridian. On 15 January, about fifty miles south of Jaluit, she picked up twenty-two men from two patrol planes that had gone down. From 29 January to 8 February she was in combat for the first time, during the seizure of Majuro in the Marshalls. Maginnis was relieved on 18 March 1944.

On 20 March 1945 he was advanced to the temporary rank of captain. In January 1946 he became captain of the heavy cruiser Minneapolis. The tour was short. He was relieved in March 1946.

He stayed in the Navy through the Korean War. From 9 May to 8 July 1953 he commanded Destroyer Squadron 24 and received the Legion of Merit with Combat "V" for that service. He retired as a captain. On 25 February 1977 he died of a heart attack at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, at the age of 73.