Ships
- USS Missouri (BB-63) Captain, 24 February 1948 – 5 February 1949
Captain James H. Thach, Jr., of the United States Navy, commanded the battleship Missouri from 24 February 1948 to 5 February 1949. He came aboard in the years after the Second World War, when the ship was still in full commission and her work had turned from combat to the routines of a peacetime fleet.
Missouri had entered service in June 1944 under her first commanding officer, William M. Callaghan, and had gone to the Pacific for the last year of the fighting. With the fast carrier forces she screened the flattops and used her heavy guns against shore targets as the fleet closed on Japan.
On 2 September 1945 the formal Japanese surrender was signed on her weather decks in Tokyo Bay. Stuart S. Murray was captain that day. Chester William Nimitz signed the document for the United States, and William Frederick Halsey, Jr. was among the senior officers present. Any later captain of Missouri, Thach included, had charge of a ship the public already tied to the end of the war.
She stayed active while much of the wartime fleet went into reserve. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, one of the captains before Thach, left her for intelligence duty in Washington. By February 1948 Missouri was serving with the Atlantic Fleet. For just under a year Thach's work was the steady business of a large battleship in peace: training the crew, gunnery and engineering drills, upkeep, and the cruises that kept the ship ready for sea.
He gave up command on 5 February 1949. The grounding that put Missouri back in the headlines, on a shoal in Chesapeake Bay on 17 January 1950, came in the tour of William D. Brown. Thach's own stretch on board was the quieter year between the surrender ceremony and that accident, and the dates of his command fix it there.