Ships
- USS Dyson (DD-572) Captain, 12 March 1944 – 14 September 1944
In the mid-1930s the Navy Directory and the Navy Register have Richard Edward Babb as an ensign in Pensacola while James Dunnington Babb was in Barry and then Vincennes.
The ship is Dyson, and the dates repeated by the NavSource destroyer index and by uboat.net’s commander list are 12 March 1944 to 14 September 1944. Both of those are compilations, not deck logs, and the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships never names him. By the time those dates say he took Dyson, the Navy Register had him as a temporary commander, permanent rank still lieutenant. The word captain on a command line is the billet, not the grade. He did become a captain, but not until 1 July 1953, long after the destroyer.
He is not the James Gilbert Babb who appears in the Hall of Valor as a lieutenant (junior grade) naval aviator decorated for Okinawa flights in 1945. That is another man.
Origins
The Navy Register is firm about two dates and quiet about everything around them. In the 1944 and 1945 registers, and again in the register of 1 January 1960, James Dunnington Babb was born on 30 July 1911. The same registers give 20 June 1930 as his date of entry into the naval service, the day a midshipman’s appointment usually began. They do not give a town. The Social Security Death Index later matches a James Babb born that same day, with a number issued in the West Virginia series, but an index entry without a middle name is a match, not a birth certificate.
What the classmates put in the 1934 Lucky Bag is a hometown, not a vital record: Philippi, West Virginia, and the nicknames Von, Jim, and Babbo. The sketch says that before he came to the Academy he had wandered the mountains of West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, and then “decided to try the seashore.” That is yearbook prose. It is the only account of his boyhood that turned up, and it names no parents. A plebe roll in the Naval Academy annual register for 1930–31 lists “Babb, James Dunnington” among the fourth class, the class of 1934, but the appointed-from column did not survive the OCR in an order that can be trusted line for line, so this essay does not claim a congressional district.
The yearbook’s picture of him at Annapolis is specific enough to be worth quoting as what other midshipmen chose to say, and no more than that. They called his demerit record “as spotless as a Skipper’s Inspection collar.” They put him in the 150-pound crew all four years and marked him a petty officer. They described a quiet man who wanted a book, a pipe, and a bunk, who drew, and who wrote sketches, stories, and poems he hoped might amount to something, more often settling for The Saturday Evening Post. “Versatile, he is possessed of the happy faculty of accomplishing the maximum with effort at a minimum.” One sentence has to be read carefully. They wrote that his modest temper was “a check on a temperamental wife,” and in the same breath that he had “made an ideal roommate.” In a Lucky Bag sketch that is the old roommate joke, not a marriage. The paragraph does not name the roommate, and it is not evidence that he had a wife in 1934. They also wrote that military life was something “to which he has never been partial,” and that a vivid imagination, “far-away places and strange lands,” was what made it endurable. If that portrait is even half true, the sea was not a calling he arrived with. It was a bargain he had already started to keep.
No parents, no brothers or sisters of his own generation, and no wife of the 1930s have turned up in a record that names them. The family that can be described comes later, from his son’s obituary, and even that document never prints the father’s name.
Formation
The 1960 Navy Register, which explains its own codes, lists him with source code 01, Naval Academy, and service-date year 34. By the register’s note, that service date is 30 June of the year shown, the date from which commissioned service was reckoned. uboat.net gives the ensign’s commission as 31 May 1934, the ordinary Academy graduation day. Both can be true — a class graduated at the end of May and a pay-and-lineal date set at 30 June — but the commencement date itself was not rechecked against a program. The 1935 Navy Register simply has him among the ensigns. In that register’s ship column, beside his name, is Barry.
The Navy Directory, which the Register does not try to be, follows the junior officer from ship to ship. The 1935 and 1936 directories list Ensign James D. Babb in Barry. By the first 1937 directory he was still an ensign, now in Vincennes; by the later 1937 directory he was a lieutenant (junior grade) in the same cruiser. uboat.net dates that step 31 May 1937, three years after graduation, which fits the change between those two issues. The 1938 directory and the earlier 1939 directory still have Lieutenant (junior grade) Babb in Vincennes. A later 1939 directory moves him ashore: Fifth Naval District, Norfolk, Virginia. The 1940 directory and the 1941 directory put him back at sea, still a lieutenant (junior grade), in Wyoming. The 1941 directory’s alphabetical line is badly read by the scanner — “Babb Janies J.” — but the duty is Wyoming, and the index of the 1941 Navy Register already calls him a lieutenant, signal number 4901. The registers of 1944 and 1945 settle the permanent rank: lieutenant, date of rank 1 July 1941.
That is a young officer’s decade, and it is almost all the Navy was willing to write down about him. Barry was the first ship. Vincennes was the long one, a new heavy cruiser he served in peacetime, from 1937 into 1939. He was gone from her well before she was lost off Savo Island in August 1942. Norfolk was a shore tour. Wyoming, in the last directories before the war, was the training ship. None of those assignments comes with a fitness report, a letter, or a story. The directories are duty lines. They do not say whether the man who had not been partial to military life had made his peace with it.
There is a private date in those years that the Navy Register ignores. James Dunnington Babb Jr. was born in Boston on 29 August 1937, according to his own obituary in 2016. The father is not named in that obituary. The identification rests on the “Jr.,” on a name that is not a common one, on a birth that falls in the first sea tour of the only James Dunnington Babb the registers know, and on the obituary’s later statement that the boy moved to Kodiak in 1946 “when his father was stationed there as a Naval officer.” That is strong, and it is not a birth certificate or a Navy dependent record. If it is the right family, then by the late summer of 1937, while he was a lieutenant (junior grade) in Vincennes, he had a son in Boston. The mother’s name is not in any source found for this essay. The son’s obituary, written when the parents were long dead, does not list them.
Between the 1941 directory and March 1944 the paper trail of stations stops. The Navy Directory itself stopped. The registers keep only rank. On 1 March 1943, in a block of the 1944 register whose temporary-rank date is carried down the page by ditto marks, he was a temporary lieutenant commander, permanent rank still lieutenant from 1 July 1941. His file number in the index of that register is 73596; his signal number there is 4723. The special-qualifications column beside his name is blank in the OCR where his neighbors have course codes, so this essay does not assign him a school. Where he was serving when the temporary half-stripe came — a ship, a staff, a schoolhouse — is not in these books.
The war, as the paper allows it to be lived
On 1 February 1944 the 1945 register’s commander block gives him temporary rank as commander. The permanent rank beside it is still lieutenant, 1 July 1941. The 1947 register’s crushed print shows the same pair of dates. uboat.net’s rank table matches the registers on every date that could be checked. For the six months that matter here, lieutenant commander is behind the Navy’s own book.
The command itself is the thin place. NavSource, crediting Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and uboat.net, which draws on the same kind of compiled command list, say Temporary Commander James Dunnington Babb had Dyson (DD-572) from 12 March 1944 to 14 September 1944, relieving Commander Roy A. Gano, who had commissioned her on 30 December 1942, and relieved in turn by Lawrence Ernest Ruff. DANFS, in the 1963 volume, tells Dyson’s war without a single change of command after Gano. Until a deck log or a war diary is read, those two dates are the best public statement of when the ship was his, and they are not an official narrative.
What must not be given to him is the year that made the ship famous. Through 1943 Dyson was one of Arleigh Burke’s “Little Beavers,” Destroyer Squadron 23: the night of 3–4 September off Choiseul, Empress Augusta Bay on 1 November, the bombardment of Buka, Cape St. George on 24–25 November. In February 1944, still before the compiled relief date, she was in the Green Island covering force and on two sweeps off New Ireland. On 22 February the destroyers sank two cargo ships, a destroyer-minelayer, a patrol craft, and two barges, and Dyson took 31 of the 73 prisoners removed from Claudia Maru. On 23 February she fired on Duke of York Island. All of that, on DANFS’s own dating, sits before 12 March 1944. He inherited a ship with a scoreboard. He did not paint it.
If 12 March is right, the first operation that falls inside his window is the one DANFS puts in March and then leaves: Dyson joined Task Force 31 to cover the invasion of Emirau, and on 25 March 1944 she joined Task Force 58. From that day the history is a screen around the fast carriers, not a destroyer night action. DANFS sends her with the carriers to Palau, Yap, Ulithi, and Woleai from 30 March to 1 April; to the Hollandia landings from 21 to 23 April; and to the strikes on Truk, Satawan, and Ponape from 29 April to 1 May. She replenished at Majuro. In June she sortied again for the strikes on Saipan and Pagan and the diversionary raids on the Bonins, screened the carriers in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and then worked the Marianas directly: Japanese shipping off Guam and Rota, gun emplacements, barges. The history gives no range, no expenditure, no casualty, and no decision of his. It gives the geometry of a Fletcher-class destroyer on the edge of Mitscher’s carriers through the spring and summer of 1944, which is the whole of the war this essay can honestly put in his hands.
The compiled end date is 14 September 1944. DANFS’s next sentence is a west-coast overhaul, and then, in November, Task Force 38 at Ulithi, the strikes on Luzon, Formosa, the China coast, and the Nansei Shoto, the Philippines in 1945, Corregidor, the mining of Saunter, Okinawa from 16 May. Those are Ruff’s months if the compilations are right, and they are not Babb’s. On 19 October 1945, at Washington, Secretary Forrestal gave Destroyer Squadron 23 the Presidential Unit Citation for the Solomons in 1943–44. DANFS does not print the citation’s inclusive dates. Most of the fighting that earned it was over, or nearly over, before he took the ship. This essay does not award him the citation, and it does not divide the ship’s eleven battle stars into his and someone else’s. The stars belong to Dyson.
No action report, no letter, and no decoration citation in his name turned up. Hall of Valor, searched under the name, returns the aviator, not the destroyer commander. The classmate who had written that imagination would carry him has no wartime sequel in the public record. Six months on a screened carrier flank, including the largest carrier battle of the war, is not a small thing. It is also not a portrait. Whatever he was like when the formation closed up, or when the combat air patrol failed, or when the relief came in September, the documents used here do not say.
The cost
The cost that can be counted is mostly absence, and absence of evidence is not itself a story about what he felt.
He had been at sea or under orders, on the directories’ showing, from Barry in the middle of the 1930s through Wyoming in 1941, with one recorded stretch in the Fifth Naval District. A son was born in Boston in August 1937. Then the directories go dark, the war begins for the United States, and the next time a document puts him on a named ship it is Dyson in March 1944, as a temporary commander whose permanent rank was still lieutenant. The years between — 1942 and 1943, the years when destroyer command was being learned by other men of his class in the Solomons — are a blank. He did not command the famous ship during the famous nights. He commanded her when the job was the carrier screen, and he had her for half a year. If there was a cost in being the man who came after Gano, or in leaving before the Philippines and Okinawa, no letter says so.
The family cost is inferred from two dates in the son’s life and should be labeled as inference. The boy was born in Boston in 1937. In 1946, the obituary says, he moved to Kodiak, Alaska, because his father was stationed there as a naval officer. Between those years the war had run. The obituary also names, as the son’s survivors in 2016, a sister, Regan Morse, and a brother, Roger (Rocky) Babb. If the father is this officer, those are his other children, and they were alive seventy years after the war. The obituary does not say when they were born, or where, or who their mother was. It does not say whether anyone waited in Boston, or Norfolk, or a Navy housing area at Kodiak. The wife’s name is a blank. So is any account of what he wrote to them, or whether the man who filled notebooks at the Academy ever published a line.
He was not killed. He was not, in any record found, wounded or cited for gallantry. The cost that shows is a career that left almost no personal trace, and a command short enough that the ship’s legend belongs to the captains on either side of him.
After
Kodiak in 1946 is the one postwar station with a witness, and the witness is the son, decades later: the father was there as a naval officer, and the boy, then about nine, moved with that assignment. The Navy Directory was no longer being published, and the registers do not list duty stations, so the obituary is the only source for Alaska. What billet he held at Kodiak — a ship, the naval operating base, a staff — is not said.
The registers pick him up again as a captain. On the active list of 1 January 1960 he is in the captains’ block, lineal number 00870-00, source 01, service-date year 34, designator 1100, the unrestricted line. The date in the present-rank column is 1 July 1953, which is the date uboat.net gives for captain and which the whole cluster of Naval Academy 1934 captains around him shares. The birth column is again 30 July 1911. He is not in the active register of 1 January 1961. uboat.net says he retired in July 1960. The month is that site’s, not a retirement order read for this essay. What the two registers support is narrower and solid: still on active duty at the start of 1960, off the active list by the start of 1961, a captain since the summer of 1953.
Nothing found describes a civilian trade, a house, a church, or a cause. The Social Security Death Index, as republished in a surname listing of Babbs born in 1911, has a James Babb born 30 July 1911, died in December 1983, last residence Stonington, New London County, Connecticut, ZIP 06378. The index prints the death as 1 December 1983, which in that index often means the month rather than the day. It does not print a middle name. Set beside the Navy Register’s birth date, the West Virginia number series, and uboat.net’s “December 1983,” it is the right death until a certificate says otherwise. No obituary for the captain himself was found, and no grave. He would have been seventy-two.
What he left, if the 2016 obituary is his son’s, was at least three children: James Dunnington Babb Jr., Regan Morse, and Roger Babb. The son served in the Navy from 1955 to 1958, took a degree at George Washington and a law degree at the University of Puget Sound, worked for the CIA, edited and wrote in Alaska, shared in the Anchorage Daily News Pulitzer of 1976, practiced law in Anchorage until 2014, and died there on 4 June 2016. He had a wife of fifty-four years, Bonny Lynn Redhead, and children of his own, including a son named Dunnington. None of that is the captain’s life. It is evidence that the name and, on the son’s own telling, a habit of reading went one generation further. The captain’s wife, if she outlived him or died before him, is not in the son’s funeral notice. Parents are simply omitted.
The midshipman who wanted far-away places got them: a destroyer, a cruiser, a training battleship, and a carrier screen across the central Pacific, then Alaska, and at the end a ZIP code on the Connecticut coast. The record does not say whether that was enough, or whether he ever finished the short story the Lucky Bag thought might make his name. The Navy remembered him as a line of dates. The ship histories remembered the ship.