Ships
- USS McGowan (DD-678) Captain from 20 December 1943
Commander James B. Weiler of the United States Navy became captain of the destroyer McGowan (DD-678) on 20 December 1943. He took command on the day the ship was commissioned, and he was her first commanding officer.
McGowan was a Fletcher-class destroyer, the large fleet destroyer built in quantity for the Second World War. Ships of the class were a little over 376 feet long and carried five 5-inch guns, torpedoes, depth charges, and a heavy battery of automatic anti-aircraft guns. They screened fast carriers, guarded convoys and invasion groups, hunted submarines, and fired on shore targets.
Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company at Kearny, New Jersey, built McGowan. The ship was named for Rear Admiral Samuel McGowan, a former Paymaster General of the Navy. Launched in November 1943, she went into commission the next month with Weiler in command, one of the new destroyers sent from the building yards into the fleet as the Navy prepared the next series of Pacific landings.
The weeks after commissioning were a training cruise in all but name. A new hull and a new crew had to learn formation steaming, gunnery, fueling at sea, and damage control before they were fit for a task force, and that work belonged to her first captain. McGowan finished her shakedown and went on to the Pacific, where destroyers were being gathered for the campaigns of 1944.
The destroyer Weiler commissioned spent the rest of the war with the Pacific Fleet. McGowan screened fast carriers in the Marianas and in the Philippines campaign, and she served in the assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where ships on the screen fought aircraft day after day. His command of her dates from 20 December 1943, when he accepted the new destroyer and took her to sea.