Ships
- USS Yarnall (DD-541) Captain from 17 December 1944
James Beattie Denny (1910–2001) was a regular officer of the United States Navy. He came from Lancaster, in Garrard County, Kentucky, graduated from the Naval Academy with the class of 1933, and retired as a captain in 1964 after thirty-one years of commissioned service. In September 1942 he put Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 13, the first squadron of Higgins PT boats, into commission at New Orleans. He worked with the builders to strip weight out of boats that had come off the line too slow, took them on their own bottoms across the Caribbean and up the inside passage to Alaska, and led them through the Aleutian campaign of 1943, including a mock landing at Kiska in which his boats strafed an empty shore. From December 1944 he commanded the Fletcher-class destroyer Yarnall (DD-541) in the screen of the fast carriers. On a dark morning in March 1945 his ship collided with the destroyer Ringgold during a practice attack, and a chief petty officer of his crew was killed. He brought Yarnall back to the war in time for the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. After the war he served in the Naval Academy's Department of Marine Engineering, commanded the fleet oiler Ponchatoula, and served on the staff of the Fifth Naval District at Norfolk. He died at Virginia Beach in November 2001 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in the same grave as his wife and a son who died at the age of seven. He is a different man from the several other Dennys who held commissions in the Navy during his career, among them Harry James Denny, a midshipman of the late 1940s, the later regular officer James Thomas Denny, Jr., and an officer listed in the registers of the late 1960s as James B. Denny III. He is also not the J. B. Denny, Jr., who was a building contractor in the Norfolk area at the end of the 1950s.
The Navy's registers give his birth date as 23 January 1910, and compiled records give the place as Lancaster, the seat of Garrard County in the Bluegrass country south of Lexington. His Naval Academy yearbook also names Lancaster as his home. Family genealogies compiled online name his parents as Marshall Kavanaugh Denny, a Lancaster man born in 1881 who died in 1965, and Elizabeth Morgan Hudson. No contemporary document seen for this article confirms those names or says what his father did for a living.
He went to Lancaster High School and played football there. A local newspaper looking back on his career noted that he was on the 1926 Lancaster team that lost to Danville High School 72 to 0. He then went to Centre College in nearby Danville for what his yearbook calls "a short time." He joined Phi Delta Theta there, was elected vice president of his class, and played on the football team. He also spent time at Kavanaugh School in Lawrenceburg, the cram school for the service academies that its founder, Rhoda C. Kavanaugh, ran from 1904 until after the Second World War. It was known in Kentucky as "Little Annapolis." A state historical marker on Woodford Street in Lawrenceburg lists him among its distinguished naval alumni, as "CAPT (Ret) James Beattie Denny – 1933," along with his Kentucky classmates Charles K. Duncan and James Gilbert Franklin.
His appointment to the Naval Academy made an impression at home, and at least one younger boy never forgot it. Cecil C. Sanders, a younger Kentuckian who later commanded a PT boat in the Mediterranean, began a wartime diary in November 1943 by tracing his own naval career back to the day in high school when he "learned that one of my upper class idols, James Beatty Denny, had received an appointment to the Naval Academy." "From that day," Sanders wrote, "I had a desire to follow in his footsteps and each time he returned on leave, this yearning grew in my mind." Sanders missed an appointment of his own by being a month too old and went to the war through the Naval Reserve instead.
The Naval Academy's register records that Denny was appointed from Kentucky and admitted on 14 June 1929. He was nineteen, a year or two older than many of his classmates, and he had already had some college.
The Lucky Bag of 1933 gives him three nicknames, "Jobo," "Jack" and "Kid," and adds that he was also known simply as "James Beattie." Its sketch of him is the usual mix of teasing and affection, and it describes a recognizable man. "How would you know him? Well, he has an ambling gait, a long drawn out drawl." "A good friend, a good classmate, and a good Southerner, he is amiable to the extreme (we have always thought that the Plebes call him 'Papa Denny')." The joke seems to rest on his being a little older and steadier than the plebes around him.
He was liked, and he was trusted. "His popularity and ability to lead were soon found out at the Academy," the sketch says, "and he was elected president of his class." In his final year the class made him its secretary and treasurer, and the yearbook prints a short valedictory over his name: "In retrospect, these four years which brought so many trials, seem now only too fleeting. As the setting sun passes beyond the horizon to encounter new worlds, so do we take our departure from this institution with a feeling of both expectancy and regret." He sat on the class ring committee and the council of the Naval Academy Christian Association, and the summary under his sketch appears to credit him with two stripes as a midshipman officer.
He was not a scholar, and his classmates said so plainly: "Never a scintillating star in academics he has confined his starring to the football field. Though not the best football player the Navy has had there was never a more conscientious one." He appears in the varsity squad photograph in the same yearbook. Next to football he liked tennis and track. As for girls, "he's very indifferent to them although Kentucky seems to hold some especial line that keeps him close to his home town during leave." "His ambitions are not known," the writer concluded, "but he probably dreams of retiring in Kentucky. Whether in the Navy or on the outside he will prove himself a good man and a loyal friend."
There is one other trace of his standing in the class. A newspaper report on a postwar Navy inquiry into the "Green Bowlers," a secret society of Naval Academy midshipmen that critics had accused of helping its members up the promotion ladder, printed what it said were the names of the society's members by class. The inquiry cleared the society of the charges. In the available text of that report, "J. B. Denny" appears among the names of the class of 1933. Contemporary accounts described the society as drawn from the leading men of each class, and his inclusion fits what his yearbook says about him. That text is badly jumbled, though, and his place in the list should be read with that caution.
He was commissioned an ensign on 1 June 1933. The quarterly Navy Directory places him from October 1934 through January 1937 in the new heavy cruiser New Orleans, one of more than twenty junior officers in a ship commanded in early 1937 by Captain J. B. Earle. He was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) on 1 June 1936. The directory of April 1937 lists him at the Sixteenth Naval District, Cavite, in the Philippines, the base of the Asiatic Fleet. Those of January 1938 and January 1939 list him in the heavy cruiser Augusta, the Asiatic Fleet flagship, commanded in early 1938 by Captain H. V. McKittrick. Those were eventful years for the ship. From August 1937 into January 1938 she lay off the Bund at Shanghai while Chinese and Japanese armies fought for the city. The survivors of the gunboat Panay, sunk by Japanese aircraft on the Yangtze in December 1937, spent Christmas aboard her. Through 1938 she divided her time between Shanghai, the North China coast and the Philippines. The directories do not say when he joined her or what his duties were, so it cannot be said whether he was aboard during the fighting at Shanghai in 1937. It is clear only that he served in her during the first years of that war.
He married Margaret Foulkes, who was born on 14 June 1912; a family genealogy gives her birthplace as Dover, Maine. Arlington National Cemetery's records give her name as Margaret Foulkes Denny. The genealogy, together with the cemetery records, gives them a son, David Marshall Denny, born on 10 December 1938, and a daughter, Elizabeth, born in July 1941. No marriage record or announcement was found, and nothing seen says where the boy was born while his father was on the Asiatic Station.
In June 1940 the directory lists him as a lieutenant (junior grade) in the old flush-deck destroyer Rathburne at San Diego. She was the flagship of Destroyer Division 50, whose commander was also in charge of the West Coast Sound School, where the fleet trained its antisubmarine listeners. In April 1941 the directory names him as her gunnery officer. He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 April 1941. Where he spent the months between that spring and the autumn of 1942 is not recorded in the sources found.
On 18 September 1942, at New Orleans, Lieutenant Denny became the commander of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 13, newly commissioned. It was the first squadron made up of PT boats built by Andrew Higgins's yards in that city. The Navy's official history of its PT boats, At Close Quarters, by Robert J. Bulkley, Jr., records that the first boats "were far from satisfactory, particularly in the matter of speed." Denny worked with Lieutenant Richard J. Dressling, the officer in charge of the PT commissioning detail at New Orleans, and together they "made many recommendations for removal of excess weight, and redesign and relocation of items of equipment." The Bureau of Ships approved the changes, and "thereafter [they] were incorporated into the standard design of the Higgins boats." The work delayed the squadron. The first six boats did not leave New Orleans until 30 November and the second six until 17 December. The changes outlasted his command, because they became part of the standard Higgins design.
The squadron's next achievement was a voyage. Rather than going as deck cargo, its boats were the first to run under their own power to the PT base at Taboga, in the Bay of Panama. They went by way of Pensacola, Tampa, Key West, Cuba, Grand Cayman, Jamaica and Colombia to the Canal Zone, nearly 2,500 miles. The trip showed what the Higgins boats could and could not do. They stood up well to heavy seas, but at low speed they tended to nose under and drench their crews. After the leg from Pensacola to Tampa, Denny wrote to his executive officer, Lieutenant James A. Danver, who was still at New Orleans: "I am surprised and pleased. These little ships ride like destroyers. However, most of this run we made at periscope depth." These are the only words of his own from the war in the sources found, and they sound like the drawling midshipman of the yearbook: dry, pleased with his boats, and honest about how wet they were. The first division reached Taboga on 20 December and the second on 16 January. The voyage went well enough that afterward every Higgins squadron bound for the Pacific, and later the Elco squadrons too, made the run to Taboga under its own power.
The squadron was not sent to the South Pacific. It was sent north. The boats were shipped from Panama to Seattle, and Denny, now a lieutenant commander, left Seattle on 28 February 1943 with PT 73, 74, 75 and 76. He took them under their own power up the coast of British Columbia and the Alaskan panhandle and out along the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian chain: Hardy Bay, Bella Bella, Ketchikan, Juneau, Yakutat, Cordova, Kodiak, Sand Point, King Cove, Dutch Harbor and Atka. He reached Adak on 31 March. These were seventy-eight-foot plywood boats burning high-octane gasoline, and he was running them at the end of winter into what Bulkley's history calls the worst weather in the world. It describes the western Aleutians as a place where squalls called williwaws built to gale force in half an hour, winds of 100 knots were not uncommon, and fog and wind could persist together for days. The boats that had come before his squadron had been battered almost to pieces. One had been wrecked on a reef, and their crews had lived in hulls rimed inside with frost. His boats were newer and sturdier and carried motor-driven heaters. At first the heaters leaked exhaust into the air they circulated, and they knocked the whole crew of PT 80 into a stupor before the fault was found and corrected.
For the invasion of Attu in May 1943 the PT boats were given the job of guarding Amchitka against a Japanese counterstroke and patrolling the passes to keep reinforcements from reaching Kiska. On 3 May Denny took four boats to Constantine Harbor, Amchitka, to start an operating base with men and equipment from PT Base 5, and his boats patrolled Oglala Pass and Rat Island Pass without meeting the enemy. After Attu fell he took four boats to Casco Cove in Massacre Bay on 3 June. There they escorted ships through the fog to Shemya, where an airstrip was being built, and carried senior officers between the anchorages. Only two of the boats had radar, and Bulkley thought it "remarkable how accurately the boats were able to find their way through the fog." That summer boats from Amchitka stood by as a crash-boat service for Army bombers attacking Kiska, waiting at Bird Cape to pick up crews shot down. They were needed only once, but officers of the Eleventh Air Force believed the boats made the bombing more effective, because the crews knew they had a good chance of rescue if they came down.
The squadron's one moment of apparent combat came at Kiska. The island was believed to hold four to seven thousand Japanese troops. For the landings on 15 August 1943, five PT boats were to join a group of transports in a feint at Vega Point, on the southeastern end of the island, to draw the defenders away from the real beaches in the north. Their crews tacked plywood cutouts to the gunwales, shaped like the sides of landing barges and topped with rows of soldiers' heads. Denny rode in PT 81 and led four other boats out of Bird Cape at 0330. They entered Vega Bay ahead of the transports at 0715, closed to within 100 yards of the shore in heavy haze, and strafed the beach on and off until 1100. In the afternoon they made several strafing runs in Gertrude Cove. "No matter how close to shore they went, they drew no return fire." The Japanese had evacuated Kiska weeks before, secretly and completely, and the whole elaborate landing came ashore on an empty island. For Denny's squadron that was the end of the campaign. The rest of its Aleutian service was training, frequently canceled by weather, and in the spring of 1944 an antisubmarine patrol that sighted nothing.
His war in the Aleutians was mostly a war against the sea, and its achievements were the kind that leave little record: boats that did not founder, crews that did not freeze, convoys that found their way through fog. In November 1943, Cecil Sanders noted from Sardinia that his boyhood hero was "now a Lt. Comdr., . . . in PT Ron 13, as C.O.," and that he himself had missed going to that squadron from the training center at Melville "by a hair." Denny had needed lieutenants (junior grade), and Sanders was still an ensign.
He gave up the squadron on 8 June 1944, as its boats were coming down from Adak to Seattle for overhaul and shipment to the Southwest Pacific. It went on to fight at Mios Woendi, Mindoro and Brunei Bay without him. He had been promoted to commander, a temporary rank, from 1 January 1944. From 15 July to 27 September 1944 he commanded Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 4, the training squadron of the PT force, based at the training center at Melville, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay. It was the largest squadron in the service and was then growing toward twenty-eight boats.
Then he was given a destroyer. Compiled command lists date his command of Yarnall (DD-541) from 17 December 1944. She was a Fletcher-class destroyer a year in commission, already a veteran of Saipan, the Philippine Sea, the Formosa air battle and Leyte Gulf, and she was screening the carriers of Task Group 38.1. The date is a difficult one. On 17 December 1944 Yarnall was at sea east of the Philippines in Typhoon Cobra, the storm that sank three destroyers of Admiral Halsey's fleet. One of her electrician's mates later recalled that the storm broke while she was trying to fuel from the carrier Wasp, and that both hoses parted. She reached Ulithi on 24 December. Whether Denny was on board for the typhoon or took command at the anchorage afterward, and the date in the lists simply records the paperwork, is not settled by the sources found.
What followed is recorded in the ship's official history as the routine of the fast carrier screen. She sailed from Ulithi with Task Group 38.1 on 1 January 1945 and screened the carriers through strikes on Formosa and Luzon in support of the Lingayen landings. She went with them through Bashi Channel into the South China Sea for raids on Camranh Bay, Saigon, Hong Kong, Hainan and Canton, and then back past Formosa to strike Okinawa on 22 January. In February she screened the carriers in the first strikes on Tokyo since the Doolittle raid, on 16 and 17 February. She protected them off Iwo Jima during the landings, went north again for a second strike on Tokyo on the 25th, and was in the screen for the strike on Okinawa on 1 March. The crewman who remembered the typhoon also remembered going in close to Iwo Jima, along the sterns of the tank landing ships unloading on the beach, and night after night of general quarters as Japanese aircraft came over in the small hours. For a destroyer captain in the screen, that kind of steaming meant months of station-keeping at high speed among dozens of darkened ships, with sleep taken in pieces.
On 3 March Yarnall was ordered from Task Group 58.2 to Task Group 59.6 for a practice attack on the main body of Task Force 59. While she was closing her objective in the darkness, she collided with the destroyer Ringgold. The sources do not agree on the exact time. The official history places it on the night of 4–5 March. A compiled caption to the Navy's photographs puts it at 0508 on 4 March, during torpedo maneuvering exercises, as the ships were nearing the fleet anchorage at Ulithi. Ringgold's bow was sheared off. Yarnall's bow was badly damaged. Her crewman wrote that it was left "swaying back and forth." According to the official history, Yarnall had one man killed and six injured. He was a chief petty officer. The crewman remembered that his body was sewn into canvas with two five-inch projectiles for weight and buried at sea with the Protestant prayer for a comrade "fallen in battle," and that when he and a shipmate cleared out the chief's locker to send his things home to his wife, they found a photograph of a little daughter born while he was at sea, whom he never saw. His name is not given in any source found.
The fleet tugs Molala and Sioux came out from Ulithi and Molala took Yarnall in tow. The official history says she reached the anchorage on 7 March and that on the 8th her bow broke off and sank. The photograph caption says the bow went down at sea at 1841 on 5 March. At Ulithi she was fitted with a false bow. She sailed on 5 April by way of Pearl Harbor for the Mare Island Navy Yard, where she was rebuilt until early July. A navy yard photograph taken on 11 June shows her there.
No record of an inquiry into the collision, or of its findings, was found. What the record does show is that he was not relieved. The command lists keep him in Yarnall until May 1946. The sources say nothing of how he bore the death of one of his own crew. Nor do they say how the blame for the collision was divided between the two destroyers.
Yarnall went back to Pearl Harbor in July 1945 and was training in Hawaiian waters when the fighting ended. Two days after the cease-fire she sailed for Japan. Her crewman recalled being sent with a minesweeper, a hospital ship and a transport to Sendai to bring out American prisoners of war, and he remembered that the freed men wanted to know who had won the World Series in 1942, 1943 and 1944. According to the official history she was in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 when the Japanese signed the instrument of surrender on board Missouri, and she stayed in the Far East supporting minesweeping until the end of October. On 31 October she sailed for San Diego, where she was put in an inactive status while still in commission. He turned her over to Lieutenant Commander George E. Clapp on 5 May 1946, according to the compiled lists.
A month later his son died. David Marshall Denny died on 5 June 1946, at the age of seven. No obituary or record seen gives the cause or the place. His father had been away for much of the boy's short life: with the Asiatic Fleet when he was born, and then in the Aleutians and the western Pacific.
In June 1946 the Naval Academy's annual register listed Commander James B. Denny among the officers of its Department of Marine Engineering, and he appears there again in the registers for the academic years 1947–48 and 1948–49. He was back at Annapolis, where his yearbook had said he was never a star in academics, now posted to the department that taught midshipmen engineering. Among the officers of the same department were two of his classmates, the submarine captains Joseph F. Enright and Roy M. Davenport. He is not listed in the register of 1949–50.
His assignments in the years that followed have not been traced. The registers show that he was promoted to captain from 1 July 1952. On 23 January 1957 he took command of the new fleet oiler Ponchatoula (AO-148), a fast replenishment ship of the Pacific Fleet that served the carriers of the Seventh Fleet in the western Pacific, and he held her until March 1958. That was the year she shifted her home port to Pearl Harbor. In May 1960 a Kentucky newspaper reported that "Captain James B. Denny of Norfolk, Virginia, who was deputy chief of staff of the 5th Naval District," had come home to speak at the dedication of a new Naval Reserve electronics training building on the campus of Centre College. The paper described him as a Centre alumnus and a graduate of Lancaster High School. "This building actually becomes a part of the overall sea power of our nation," he told the audience. "I can assure you that your Navy has been and is being vigilant in protecting this country."
He was still on the active list of captains in January 1964 and was gone from it by January 1965. He retired in 1964, after thirty-one years in commission. The yearbook had guessed that he dreamed of retiring to Kentucky. He died instead in Tidewater Virginia, near Norfolk, where he had been serving in 1960.
His wife died on 5 December 1978 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on 8 December. The cemetery's records show that their son's remains were placed in the same grave on 4 March 1999. James Beattie Denny died at Virginia Beach on 4 November 2001, at the age of ninety-one, and was buried with them at Arlington on 14 December 2001, in Section 60, grave 4911. The records found say nothing more about the daughter, Elizabeth.
In the 1960s a television comedy, McHale's Navy, gave its fictional PT boat the number 73. The real PT 73 had been one of the four boats he led up the inside passage to Adak in the spring of 1943. On 15 January 1945, long after he had left the squadron, she was destroyed in the Philippines to prevent her capture. Compiled accounts say she had run aground.