Ships
- USS John Rodgers (DD-574) Captain, 8 August 1944 – 31 December 1945
James Gilbert Franklin was born in Kentucky on 18 July 1911. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1933 and was commissioned an ensign on 1 June 1933. He became a lieutenant (junior grade) in June 1936 and a lieutenant in July 1940. On 1 October 1942 he was made a temporary lieutenant commander, and on 1 January 1944 he was advanced to the temporary rank of commander.
On 8 August 1944 Franklin took command of the Fletcher-class destroyer John Rodgers (DD-574). He relieved Herman Oliff Parish, who had commanded the ship from her commissioning in February 1943. John Rodgers was already flagship of Destroyer Squadron 25, with the squadron staff embarked, and she was a veteran of the Central Pacific campaign when Franklin came aboard.
His first large operation in command was the return to the Philippines. The destroyer was at Hollandia, New Guinea, on 2 October 1944, sailed for Leyte on 13 October, and arrived on 20 October as the landings began. John Rodgers screened the ships carrying General Douglas MacArthur and the assault troops, fired in support while soldiers pushed inland and took the airfields, and patrolled off the beachhead. On 30 October she left for Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California. The overhaul ran from 24 November 1944 to 10 January 1945, and the ship was in drydock from 2 to 15 December.
In the new year John Rodgers headed west and joined Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s Task Force 58 on 7 February 1945. She screened the fast carriers for strikes on the Japanese home islands that opened on 16 February, then covered those carriers off Iwo Jima when the assault began on 19 February. The same duty carried her into the battle for Okinawa. From the landings on 1 April until the island was secured on 21 June, she stayed with the carriers through repeated air attack, and her record credits her with two kamikaze planes shot down in that campaign. On 14 May, east of Kyushu, a kamikaze exploded above the ship and fell into the sea.
Franklin kept John Rodgers with the fast carriers through the summer raids on Japan. In late July the squadron, with the destroyer as its flagship, made an anti-shipping sweep into Suruga Wan on the coast of Honshu. The ships ran about thirty miles into the bay and closed to roughly a mile and a half of the shore, the deepest entry into Japanese home waters by Allied surface forces during the war. Screening the carriers also meant taking downed aviators from the sea. John Rodgers came through her Pacific service without losing a member of the crew, and that record held through the kamikaze months of Franklin’s command.
He was still commanding officer when Japan surrendered. The months under his hand covered Leyte, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the final carrier raids on Japan, part of the service for which John Rodgers received twelve battle stars. On 31 December 1945 he turned the ship over to Lieutenant Commander Robert Larue Tully. Franklin died on 25 April 1976.