Ships
- USS Lardner (DD-487) Captain from 7 June 1945
The Navy's own books are narrower than that label. They know him as James Boyd, 3d, an officer of the Naval Reserve, a line officer, not an aviator. They know the year he was born and the day the Bureau used as the start of his service for pay. They do not know his town, his parents, a wife, a child, a decoration, or the day he died. What follows is that record. Where it stops, the blank stays in the sentence.
Origins
No register read for this essay prints a town beside his name, or a day and month of birth. The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Naval Reserve of 1 April 1951, and the same series of 1 July 1955, put him in the year-of-birth column as 16. That is 1916, and nothing finer. uboat.net also says 1916. The year is the register's. The website adds nothing the books do not already say, and it adds a retirement date the books read here do not confirm.
The same two registers give a pay-entry base date of 21 May 1938, set down as month, day, and year in the column the 1951 volume itself defines. The note at the front of that volume says the date "reflects all service for pay purposes." It is not printed as a commissioning day, and it is not used here as one. A man born in 1916 would have been twenty-one or twenty-two that May. Whether the date is an enlistment, a reserve appointment, or some earlier creditable service is not said. The Navy Directory of 1 June 1940, which lists officers of the Naval Reserve on active duty, has a James A. Boyd and does not have James Boyd, 3d. By 1 November 1940 he is on the active list. The pay date and the first active-duty snapshot are more than two years apart. The books do not say what he did in between.
Nothing read here names a father, a mother, a school, a wife, or a child. That is a blank, not a conclusion that he had no family. He is not the novelist James Boyd of Southern Pines, born in 1888 and dead in February 1944, whose son James Boyd, Jr., was a child of the 1920s and has been described in print as a Coast Guard quartermaster, not as this officer. He is not James Boyd Rutter or James Boyd Rutter, Jr., the Naval Academy man who commanded Philip. He is not James B. Boyd of Langdon, North Dakota, an ensign of the Naval Reserve carried as missing on 11 February 1944. He is not James Abner Boyd of the regular Navy, and he is not James Emory Boyd, the Georgia Tech physicist who also wore a reserve uniform and rose to captain. The "3d" is doing real work. Without it, the name is a crowd.
Formation
The Navy Directory is a list of orders on a date, not a cruise.
On 1 November 1940 he is "Boyd, James, 3d, ens, NR, u s s Ellis." On 1 April 1941 the same line is still there: ensign, Naval Reserve, USS Ellis. Gideon Millard Boyd is on those same pages, an ensign of the regular Navy on McCall. James A. Boyd, another ensign, is on Livermore in April 1941 and was on Hale the June before. James C. Boyd is a lieutenant of the Naval Reserve at an aviation selection board in Albany. None of those lines is this man.
Ellis was DD-154, a Wickes-class destroyer launched in 1918 and recommissioned on 16 October 1939. The ship's history, the standard Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships account as it is reprinted, says that from Charleston and Norfolk she patrolled the east coast with the work concentrated on submarines, and that the Iceland escort, Newport to the occupation transports, ran from 22 June to 21 July 1941. Both directory dates fall before that sailing. They put an ensign of the Reserve on an old destroyer during the neutrality patrol. They do not give him a billet. They do not say he made any particular sweep, or that he asked for destroyers, or that the ship kept him. Two snapshots, five months apart, are all the Directory has. The series itself ends in 1941. After 1 April there is no further station list of that kind to consult.
The Register of the Commissioned Officers of the United States Naval Reserve of 1 July 1941 was searched for him. The optical text of that volume is broken in the ensign pages, and his name was not recovered from it. Absence from a bad reading is not evidence that the Bureau had dropped him. The directories of November and April are the clean evidence, and they still have him.
He was a reserve ensign on somebody else's ship. Ellis was not a new fleet destroyer. She was a four-stacker from the last war, recommissioned because the Navy needed hulls. The books do not say whether he had come from a college program, a midshipman school, or a direct appointment. The pay-entry date of May 1938 sits in the background of that question and does not answer it.
The war, as the paper has it
From 1 April 1941 until 7 June 1945, no station, no ship, and no rank was found for him in a source that can be quoted as fact. The Navy Directory had stopped. The wartime registers of the regular Navy that were searched list other Boyds and do not list James Boyd, 3d, which is what one would expect if he remained a reserve officer and those volumes were not the reserve register. The reserve register of 31 July 1944 exists, and its tabular pages did not yield a readable line for him. That failure is recorded. It is not a claim that he was ashore, or at sea, or promoted on any particular day.
Lieutenant Commander James Boyd took command of Lardner on 7 June 1945. Two secondary compilations say the same thing and add the rest of the name and the end of the tour: NavSource, in a commanding-officer list credited to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and uboat.net, which calls him James Boyd, III, USNR, and runs the command from 7 June 1945 to 16 May 1946. A 1945 photograph of Lardner's officers on NavSource is captioned with "LtCmdr James Boyd III" in the group. The caption is a compiler's label on a crew photograph. It was not treated as a signed log.
Sixteen May 1946 is also the day the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships gives for Lardner's decommissioning. The match is why the secondary lists are plausible. It is not a deck log. No change-of-command entry, no war diary page, and no orders were found. The end date is the lists alone. Until a log is read, the honest statement is that he is recorded as taking her on 7 June 1945, and that the same unofficial lists keep him in command until the day she went out of commission.
Lardner (DD-487) had been in commission since 13 May 1942, Lieutenant Commander Willard M. Sweeter in command. That is the spelling in the fighting-ship history; the secondary lists spell him Sweetser. Either way he is not Boyd. By June 1945 the ship had already been through the Guadalcanal campaign, the Solomons, the Marianas, the Philippines, a grounding in January 1945, and the spring escort work. None of that is his command. The history does not attach his name to any of it, and this account does not move him backward into it.
If the 7 June date is right, he came aboard while the ship, in the fighting-ship history's words for May and June, was operating with a support force of escort carriers against the chain of Japanese island bases from Okinawa to Formosa, Okinawa still being secured. How much of June was already past when he relieved is not said. The history then has her, through July and August, continuously at sea off the east coast of Japan, supplying the Third Fleet during the attacks on the home islands. After the surrender she escorted the damaged Borie to Saipan on 17 August, went on to Okinawa, arrived in Sagami Wan on 27 August, and entered Tokyo Bay on 29 August escorting South Dakota, the flagship of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. She took part in bringing several hundred prisoners of war off southern Honshu, stayed on occupation duty until 15 October, and left Honshu with Task Group 50.5. The way home in that account touched Singapore, Ceylon, Cape Town, and Saldanha Bay, and ended at New York on 7 December 1945. She remained there until 9 February 1946, sailed to Charleston, and decommissioned on 16 May 1946.
That paragraph is the ship's history for the months the secondary lists assign to him. It is not a diary. It does not say he was on the bridge at Sagami Wan, or that he chose the route home, or what he thought of a surrender anchorage after a war he had entered, on the paper, as an ensign on a neutrality-patrol destroyer. No letter, no oral history, and no award citation were found that would let those sentences be written about him rather than about the hull. uboat.net's decoration field for him is empty. No Navy Cross, Silver Star, or Legion of Merit turned up under this name in the compilations that do list those awards for other officers.
The Pacific war on Lardner had been fought by the time a reserve lieutenant commander, invisible in the station lists since the spring of 1941, was given the ship. What remained, if he kept her, was the last logistics of the Third Fleet's strikes, the entry into Tokyo Bay, the prisoner lift, and a long passage back to the Atlantic to put the destroyer away. That is a command. It is not the command of a ship in a night action. The record does not say he had asked for it, or that he had been passed over for something else, or that he resented the timing. It says the date.
After
On 1 April 1951 the Naval Reserve register still has him, and it has more of him than the wartime paper does. File number 080789. Name, Boyd James 3rd. Present rank, commander. Designator 1105. Date of rank, 22 July 1948. Year of birth, 1916. Pay-entry base date, 21 May 1938. Register number, in that edition, 4917. The volume's own table of designators says that 110 means an unrestricted line officer who is not a member of the aeronautic organization, and that the fourth digit 5 means an officer of the Naval Reserve whose permanent grade is ensign or above. He was not, in 1951, an aviator's designator, and he was not on the retired-list digit. He was a commander of the line, in the Reserve, with a date of rank almost three years after Lardner went out of commission.
The 1 July 1955 reserve register repeats the file number, the name, the rank of commander, the designator 1105, the date of rank 22 July 1948, the birth year 16, and the pay-entry date 21 May 1938. He had not been promoted again in the four years between those books. The registers do not say whether he was drilling, or on active duty, or only still carried. They say the Bureau still accounted for him as a commander.
He is not in the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps and Reserve Officers on Active Duty of 1 January 1962, and he is not in the same series of 1 January 1963. Those books list other men named James Boyd. They do not list James Boyd, 3d, or file number 080789. By the first day of 1962 he was off the active-duty list those volumes print. uboat.net says he retired on 1 June 1962. That date was not found in a register read for this essay. It is not used. A retirement on the first of June 1962 would fit the absence from the 1963 active list and would not, by itself, explain the absence from the 1 January 1962 list, which is five months earlier. Both facts can be true if he had already left active duty before the formal retirement date. The books do not say so. They only show that he is gone from the active list by New Year's Day 1962, and that a website later attached a June date to him.
No obituary, no death date, and no grave record were tied to file number 080789 or to the Lardner commander. What he left a family, if he had one, is not in this paper. The thing the Navy still had in 1955 was a commander's date of rank from the summer of 1948, a 1916 birth year, and a pay date from 1938. Then the active lists go quiet.