Ships
- USS Watts (DD-567) Captain from 23 December 1945
James Francis Maynard, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, became captain of the destroyer Watts (DD-567) on 23 December 1945. His command opened after the fighting in the Pacific had ended and while the ship was still in her first commission.
Watts was a Fletcher-class destroyer built at Seattle by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation. Her keel was laid in March 1943, she went down the ways on the last day of that year, and she entered service on 29 April 1944 with Joseph Benedict Maher as her first commanding officer. Late in July she called at Pearl Harbor, and within a few days she sailed north with Destroyer Division 113. On 8 August 1944 she brought the division into Adak, Alaska, and for months afterward she operated with the North Pacific Force in Aleutian waters.
By the early summer of 1945 the destroyer was working with the main fleet farther south. On 7 June, and again on 4 July, Watts went alongside the battleship Iowa for fuel while Charles Samuel Hart was her commanding officer, in company with other destroyers of the task group. Maynard's turn in command came later, on 23 December 1945, after Hart's tour and after Japan had surrendered.
The ship's first active life closed on the Atlantic coast. In the middle of March 1946 she moved to the Charleston Naval Shipyard, and on 12 April 1946 she was placed out of commission and laid up in reserve. Maynard's recorded command of Watts belongs to that short postwar interval, beginning on 23 December 1945 as a lieutenant commander, between the end of combat and the laying-up of the ship.