Ships
- USS Ammen (DD-527) Captain, 11 May 1944 – 14 June 1945
The man who fits that ship and that navy is James Harvey Brown of Chamberlain, South Dakota, Naval Academy class of 1935, file number 75024. On 1 July 1944 the Navy Register still carried him as a lieutenant commander. The citations for Ammen call him commander and print the same file number. He is not the Los Angeles councilman and municipal judge of the same name, born in Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1906, who was a wartime Navy lieutenant on airborne radar and who died in Glendale in 1995. He is not that man's son, also James Harvey Brown, Jr. The register does not call this officer junior. His father was not a James. The "Jr." that later command lists hang on the Ammen captain is not used here.
What follows is the life the register, the Lucky Bag, the ship's histories, the award citations, and his own papers at East Carolina will support. Where they stop, or where they disagree, the blank stays in the sentence.
Origins
The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of 1 July 1944 prints a birth date on his own line, not in a ditto: 17 December 1912. The same line gives his date of entry into the naval service as 19 June 1931. The register does not print a town. Chamberlain, South Dakota, is the home the Lucky Bag of 1935 prints under his name, and it is the birthplace in the biographical note to the papers he later gave East Carolina University. One compilation, uboat.net, moves the town to Chamberlain, South Carolina. There is a Chamberlain in South Dakota, on the Missouri. The yearbook and the papers agree on that state. South Carolina is not used.
The same biographical note names his parents, Matthew A. and Olive M. Gerald Brown, and says he went to high school in Chamberlain and spent a year at Yankton College, in Yankton, South Dakota, before the Academy. Those names and that year of college are the archive's reading of his papers. They were not found on a register line or in the yearbook. A South Dakota archives description of a Matthew Alec Brown collection was not opened. The parents stand as the finding aid gives them, and no further than that.
He had a younger brother, Gerald. The finding aid says the father was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford from 1908 to 1911, and that Gerald was one too. A letter of January 1938 is the date the note attaches to the brother's scholarship. The father, writing homeward in the other direction, told his midshipman son that a Rhodes man at the Naval Academy would have to resign his commission to take the scholarship and go to Oxford. James did not go. Gerald's plans, in the father's letters, ran toward Brasenose College. The finding aid spells it Brazenose. A later gift to the same collection includes letters of a Justice Gerald Brown. The biographical note does not say in so many words that the brother and the justice are the same man. The judgeship is not written into this life.
In October 1930 a grandfather wrote the boy about state elections and about his own return to the South Dakota Supreme Court. The finding aid does not give the grandfather's name. Nothing read here is a birth certificate, a marriage license, or a will.
The wife the collection can name comes late. A clipping filed as her obituary, dated 14 December 2002, from the Franklin Times of Louisburg, North Carolina, is catalogued as Ann Eslinger Brown, Mrs. James Harvey Brown. One folder title in the same box slips and calls her Mrs. James Henry Brown. Harvey is the name everywhere else. The clipping itself was not read, so the day of her death, the place, and who is listed as surviving her are not known from it. What the finding aid does say about a wife in wartime is separate, and thinner: in May 1943 his wife wrote about the shortage of nurses and about her own return to that work, salaries included. The archive does not print a wedding date, and it does not say in a sentence that the nurse of 1943 and Ann Eslinger are the same woman. They are treated here as the wife the papers speak of, under the name the obituary file gives, with that gap left open. No child is named in the biographical note. In 2009 and again in 2015 a Matthew A. Brown of Louisburg gave further papers. The finding aid does not say he was a son. He has the father's name, and he had the papers. That is all.
The death that two compilations print for James Harvey Brown himself is 10 June 2003. The Hall of Valor pairs it with the birth date the register already has. uboat.net adds Louisburg and the age of ninety, and the wrong state for his birth. No obituary of his was opened. He had been living in Louisburg. The place of death is the compilation's, not a certificate's.
What the family letters do give, in the archive's summary, is the texture of the house he left. His father wrote in April 1932 of a man in South Dakota who killed himself because he was bankrupt. The same letters worry at veterans' payments, at whether anyone should have a raise, at the removal of Samuel Insull from a Greek ship. A grandfather's letter, a father's scholarship meetings, a brother's Oxford plans, a flood on the Missouri bottoms in 1952, a bond issue for a fire station in Chamberlain: the place stayed in the correspondence for decades after the son had gone to sea. In 1929, before he was a midshipman, he wrote questions to Count Felix von Luckner about the count's autobiography, and got answers. He was sixteen. The sea, for him, started as something read.
Formation
He was appointed from South Dakota. The papers include his preparation in 1929 and 1930, his nomination in 1930 and 1931, and the correspondence with South Dakota congressmen Charles A. Christopherson and William Williamson, and with Rear Admiral Andrew T. Long. The Academy took him on 19 June 1931. That day is the register's date of entry, and it matches the finding aid.
The Lucky Bag of 1935 puts him on page 232. The optical text of the nickname line is broken, and the reading is the ordinary one: Brownie, Senator, Jimmy, from Chamberlain, South Dakota. The sketch is classmate prose, written to be clever. They gave him the floor. "Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker! The senator from South Dakota has the floor." He would rather read Time and keep up with the world than learn to sketch and describe steam pumps and recoil mechanisms. He liked arguments on the questions of the day, and his frankness in them sometimes put him in a tight place. For the rest he did staff work on the literary organizations, and a brief turn on the sub squad. Water interested him, whether to drink, to swim in, or to sail on, and in a stiff breeze they expected to find Jimmy heeling her over on the bay. The activity line under the sketch reads Lucky Bag staff in second and first class years, Trident staff for three years, Reef Points staff in second and first, and the letters M. P. O. Those letters are not expanded here. The finding aid says his letters from the Academy mention the Lucky Bag and Reef Points staffs, his courses and grades, his class rank, a Morse set he built in order to learn the code, and a trip to the Bethlehem plant at Sparrows Point. The number of his class rank is not in the note.
The practice cruises are in the same letters, as the archive summarizes them. In 1932 he went to the Caribbean in Wyoming. In 1934 he went to Europe in Arkansas and Wyoming. Before that cruise he and his father both wrote to Sir Francis Wylie to arrange time at Oxford while the midshipman was free in England. He did not stay. June Week and graduation were 1935. The finding aid says he was commissioned an ensign on graduating. The day of the commission is not on the 1944 register line, which for an Academy man prints entry, not the ensign's oath. A compilation's 6 June 1935 is not used.
While he was still a midshipman the depression reached the gate. Letters in the papers, as summarized, note that in May 1933, for the first time in many years, not all of the Academy's graduates were to be commissioned, and that Roosevelt came to graduation that June. A bill the next spring provided for commissioning the whole class. His own class walked out in 1935 into a navy that had just decided it would take them. He wrote the Navy League in 1931 about a proposed building program. The argument he liked, the one the yearbook mocked him for, was already about what kind of fleet the country meant to have.
The sea duty that can be dated before the war comes from the finding aid to his papers, not from a run of Navy Directories. Those directories were not opened for him. The archive's summary is a reading of orders and letters, and it is used as that.
From 1935 to 1937 he was in Astoria, out of San Pedro, with gunnery to do. The letters of those two years, in the finding aid's account, take in shore duty, cruises up the East Coast and to Hawaii, and a stay in the hospital. In September and October 1936 he had his appendix out and convalesced at the Portsmouth naval hospital. The finding aid also has him, in those same San Diego years, going to symphony concerts, Otto Klemperer conducting, and buying classical records. In December 1936 he wrote home about a punch for sharpening the fiber needles of his phonograph. The gunnery officer kept a machine for playing music.
In July 1937 he went to Reuben James, out of San Diego, and the finding aid calls the billet chief engineer. He was a very junior officer for that title. The papers include a roster, promotion-exam questions for 1938, and the wardroom paper. In December 1937 he wrote about the Japanese bombing of Panay on the Yangtze. He was not on the river. He was on a flush-deck destroyer on the West Coast, reading the war that was coming. The finding aid says he was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) in 1938. The day was not read in a register.
The Asiatic Fleet came next. The biographical note says 1938 to 1940 in Augusta, flagship, with navigation, gunnery, and engineering to do. The scope note narrows the letters to May 1939 through 1940. Both spans are the archive's. Neither was checked against a directory. What he wrote, in the finding aid's paraphrase, was the China coast as an ensign's or a jaygee's eye saw it: Japanese aggression, the hold on trade at Tsingtao, anti-British propaganda, the need for British and French marines to police the International Settlement at Amoy after Japanese troops landed, short-range gunnery, the British station at Chefoo, a typhoon between Tsingtao and Chefoo in September 1939. In August 1939 he wrote his father a description of Rear Admiral Harry Yarnell, commander in chief of the Asiatic Fleet, and of how much of the admiral's work was diplomatic. In November 1940 he wrote about the navy's expansion and the shortage of officers, retired men and reservists coming back. The papers hold an Augusta roster, an Asiatic Fleet roster, a cruise map, and the ship paper. An oversize file has the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury for Navy Day 1938, with pages on Augusta. He was a watch-stander on a flagship in a harbor war, not a captain, and not yet in a battle of his own.
In January 1941 he was ordered to Shaw. The finding aid says the ship visited New Zealand and then docked at Pearl Harbor. A schedule for the squadron at Auckland in March 1941 is in the file. In August 1941 the correspondence takes up a truck accident in which men from Shaw were hurt, and an investigation, and the overhaul of a machinery plant. He was the engineering officer. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships has Shaw back in Hawaiian waters by the middle of February 1941, operating there until November, and then in the yard, in the floating drydock YFD-2. It does not name him. The ship's history and his papers meet on the morning of 7 December.
War years
Shaw was still in the dock. DANFS says she took three hits: two bombs through the forward machine-gun platform, one through the port wing of the bridge. Fires ran through her. By 0925 the firefighting water was gone, and the order was given to abandon. Flooding the dock only partly worked. Shortly after 0930 the forward magazine blew. The photograph of that explosion is one of the pictures of the attack. The East Carolina exhibit built from his papers catalogs a letter he wrote his parents on 11 December, telling them he had survived, and a claim for personal property lost. The letter was not read. The finding aid says he was not hurt. A short note on the oral-history interviews says Shaw was sunk that morning. She was not. DANFS follows her out of the yard, across the Pacific, and through the rest of the war, and decommissions her in October 1945. The oral-history summary is wrong on that word. What is right is that he was in her when the magazine went, and that he lived.
Temporary repairs were made at Pearl Harbor in December and January. On 9 February 1942 DANFS has her sailing for San Francisco, where a new bow was finished by the end of June. The finding aid says that as engineering officer he was assigned to the reconditioning at the Mare Island Navy Yard. DANFS says San Francisco and does not say Mare Island. Mare Island is the yard on that bay. The two accounts are left side by side. They agree that the wreck was rebuilt. They do not agree on the name of the yard, and they do not say whether he sailed in her again.
He is not given her later war. DANFS takes Shaw back to Pearl Harbor on 31 August 1942, into the Santa Cruz fight in October, where she took off Porter's crew and sank the disabled destroyer, then onto Guadalcanal escorts, a grounding at Nouméa, New Guinea, Cape Gloucester, Saipan, Guam, Leyte, Lingayen, and Manila Bay. Eleven battle stars belong to the ship. Nothing in his papers, as the finding aid describes them, puts him on her bridge or in her engine room for any of that. The next ship in the papers is Abner Read.
Abner Read was commissioned on 5 February 1943, Commander T. Burrowes in command. The finding aid says Brown was assigned to her in 1942, which would be the pre-commissioning months, and that he served as executive officer through the invasion of Kiska and later in the South Pacific. He had been promoted to lieutenant by then, in the archive's sequence, and to lieutenant commander in 1943. The register of 1 July 1944 is the date that can be checked. He is in the lieutenant commanders' list, signal number 4929. The name in the optical text is "James Harvey Brown," with the letters scrambled and still readable. His special-course mark is 33. In the key of that register, 33 is a completed short course in optics. The date of his temporary rank is a ditto. It runs back, through an unbroken chain of dittos on the page, to "1 May 43" printed on signal 4891. The permanent rank and the date of that rank are dittos back to the same line: lieutenant, from 1 January 1942. Birth and entry, as already said, are his own. A compilation's date for temporary commander, 1 March 1944, is not used. On 1 July 1944 the Navy still had him a lieutenant commander.
DANFS sends Abner Read to the Aleutians in the spring of 1943. She shelled Attu on 11 May and again on the 16th, went south, and was back in Alaskan waters in June. On 22 July she was in a heavy bombardment of Kiska. Between 12 and 15 August she shelled the island again, for the landings. On the 17th the troops found that the Japanese had already gone. That night, patrolling off the island, she was shaken by an explosion aft at 0150. The cause was not known at once. It was later thought she had struck a mine. The stern tore open. Smoke tanks ruptured. Men asleep aft took the smoke. Some fell through the deck into the oil. The stern broke away and sank. Ute took her in tow at 0355 and brought her to Adak. Seventy men were killed or missing. Forty-seven were wounded. The oral-history note says he was on destroyer duty in the Aleutians, and that Abner Read was the ship, and that she was mined. It does not say where he was standing, or whether he was one of the wounded. The finding aid says the files hold reports of the Attu assault and of damage to the ship. The damage reports it dates are 1944, in the South Pacific, not the mine report of 1943. His part in the hour after 0150 was not read. He was the executive officer, if the finding aid's title is right, on a ship that lost her stern and seventy men in the dark, and he was not her captain. Burrowes is the only commanding officer DANFS names, and only at the commissioning. Who had the deck that night is not in the history.
She was towed to Bremerton, laid up on 7 October, and back in the water with a new stern on 21 December 1943. In 1944 DANFS has her at Hollandia, Humboldt Bay, Wakde, Wewak, Arara, Biak, Noemfoor, Morotai, and then Leyte. On 1 November 1944 a Val crashed her in Leyte Gulf. A bomb went down a stack. She lost pressure, burned, blew up inside, and sank. Twenty-two of her crew were not saved. Brown was not aboard her for that. By the end of October he was commanding officer of Ammen. The Silver Star says so for the days from 29 October. The sister ship he had been executive officer of, and the ship he now commanded, were both in the gulf that afternoon. One sank. One was hit and stayed.
The day he left Abner Read, and the day he took Ammen, were not found in a deck log or in DANFS. DANFS never prints his name. The project's stub, and the command lists that repeat one another, say 11 May 1944. The Legion of Merit, from Commander Seventh Fleet serial 072 of 5 January 1945, is the Navy's own bracket. It calls him Commander James Harvey Brown, file number 0-75024, commanding officer of Ammen, for the campaigns in British and Dutch New Guinea, the Moluccas, and the occupation of Leyte. The rank in the citation is the rank at the award, or the rank the staff believed. The July register still had him a lieutenant commander. The promotion to commander falls in that gap. The day was not recovered.
Ammen herself had been in the war for a year before him. She was commissioned on 20 March 1943 under Commander John C. Daniel, went to Attu, found the air and the submarines quiet and the weather not, and spent the autumn in the Aleutians. From late December 1943 she was on the New Guinea coast: Cape Gloucester, the Admiralties, Hollandia and Aitape in April, the screen of escort carriers into the first week of May. If the command lists are right, he relieved her in the middle of that month, at the turn from Hollandia toward Wakde. If they are early or late by weeks, the error is at that turn. What DANFS tells for the rest of May and the summer is the work the Legion says was his: Wakde and Sarmi from 17 to 21 May, Biak from 27 May, the night of 8 and 9 June when the cruiser-destroyer force broke up a Japanese attempt to reinforce the island, Noemfoor on 2 July, harassment of bypassed garrisons, the unopposed landing at Cape Sansapor at the end of July, an eighteen-day liberty in Sydney, Morotai in September for two days that nobody fought him for. The citation's phrase for it is "numerous hazardous operations including several enemy crippling raids," and landing support in which the ship did heavy damage in the air attacks. DANFS, for those particular months, often has the enemy absent, or half-hearted. The raids the citation means are not given dates of their own. They are not invented here as a cruise log.
In October the ship left Manus for Leyte. At Humboldt Bay she joined the screen of Wasatch, the force flagship. The group sailed on 15 October. Ammen brought the command ship into Leyte Gulf before dawn on the 20th. The bombardment ran from about 0700 to just before 0945. The landing craft went in. DANFS says she was there to protect the flagship, and that she took no part in the bombardment. For five days she covered Wasatch and went to sea with her at night when the flagship retired from San Pedro Bay. That duty kept her out of both surface fights the Japanese made against the landing. On the afternoon of the 25th she was sent to guard the eastern entrance of the gulf, after the battle in Surigao Strait and the fight off Samar were already over. She shifted formations for a few days, screening escort carriers, then back inside the gulf, and on the 29th she was again in the flagship's screen. The great naval battle of Leyte Gulf is not his battle. He was on the edge of it, watching the flagship.
Then the aircraft came. DANFS gives him, though not by name, the first sixteen days of November against the air attack. On 1 November a burning Yokosuka P1Y, a Frances, twin-engine, crashed into the destroyer between her stacks. The plane caromed off into the sea. The topside damage was considerable. Twenty-six men were casualties. Five of them were dead. DANFS does not print their names. It says the ship carried on, and that over the next two weeks she claimed a number of hits and two probable kills. On 16 November she left for the Admiralties, entered Seeadler Harbor on the 21st, and on the 30th sailed east. She was in San Francisco on 21 December. The repairs were at Mare Island. They kept her out of Lingayen Gulf and out of Iwo Jima.
The Silver Star, Commander Seventh Fleet serial 01660 of 23 April 1945, covers 29 October to 17 November, the screening days and the crash. It says he maneuvered the ship into position, that the guns fired on six planes and helped shoot down three, that the ship was struck, that he kept his station and got the repairs done so the fighting efficiency was not seriously impaired. DANFS says considerable topside damage and five dead, and two probable kills rather than three shot down. The citation says the efficiency was not seriously impaired. Both can be true of a ship that buried five men and stayed in the screen. The Legion, already signed in January, tells the crash in one clause: the gun crews hit the plane, the transcription says "hit and flames," and the plane crashed into the ship, and by prompt direction he kept the damage from taking her out of her work. The broken grammar is the transcription's. The event is the Frances of 1 November.
He brought her back. On 9 February 1945 she sailed from the Golden Gate with Chenango, reached Pearl Harbor on the 15th, trained and escorted there into the first week of March, and on the 4th left with St. Louis and Beale. Ulithi on the 13th. Leyte on St. Patrick's Day. On 27 March she went out with Task Force 55, the Southern Attack Force, for Okinawa. She was off the beaches early on 1 April. The first wave was ashore just after 0830. For ten days she screened the transports and the cargo ships. On the 10th she went to the Marianas with Task Group 51.2 and was back in the Ryukyus on the 20th.
That return was the start of the picket line. DANFS calls it one of the more arduous duties of the war, a schedule against pilots who meant to die in the ship. Her first night on station she tracked one plane after midnight on the 21st and did not see a second, which came in low and dropped a bomb close aboard on the starboard quarter. The near miss blew in the water and showered the ship with fragments. Eight men were wounded. She stayed until evening, was relieved by Russell, and sent the worse casualties to Crescent City off the Hagushi beaches before she went into Kerama Retto.
On the 28th she was support ship on radar picket station 1, north of the island, with Bennion. An Oscar dove on the two of them. The guns did not stop it. It hit Bennion's fantail and did only minor damage. Before 0200 on the 30th, six to eight planes came straight at the station. The first two suiciders overshot Ammen and went into the sea close aboard to port. The third glanced off Bennion. The fourth came for Ammen and went into the sea as well. The two ships shot down the fifth. The sixth fell three or four miles off. A night fighter got the last. On 1 May she embarked a fighter-director team. From the 3rd to the 9th she was on station 9, vectoring the combat air patrol onto raids of one, two, and three planes. On the evening of the 12th, in the anchorage, she fired at an Oscar and a Tojo diving on New Mexico. The Oscar missed. The Tojo hit the battleship.
From 13 to 18 May she was fighter director on station 16, about fifty miles west-northwest of Zampa Misaki, and fought no engagement of her own. She was alongside Hamul for repairs from the 19th to the 22nd. On the 24th she was back, on station 15, in the middle of a kikusui. Through that night the planes crossed and recrossed, and the ships fired when they came close, and none of them made a determined run on her station. The next morning her fighters shot down two Tojos and two Tonys. A fifth Tojo got through, dove, and looked to be aimed at Ammen. She fired. He passed down her length, winged over, and crashed the after torpedo mount of Stormes. Stormes stayed afloat. On the 27th, in the next mass attack, Ammen and Boyd fought off eight coordinated runs between half past eight in the evening and two in the morning, and took no damage.
The Navy Cross is the Navy's sum of that season, from 20 April to 29 May 1945. It calls the situation unique in naval warfare. It says he fought the ship through twenty-seven engagements, maneuvered so that three planes crashing close aboard left her with minor damage, and, as a fighter-director ship for much of the time, contributed to seven more kills by the combat air patrol. It says he kept the command ready day and night, "despite the tremendous mental strain on himself and his men," and that the mission was early warning for the fleet. The strain is the citation's word. It is the nearest thing to a portrait of him on the picket line that an official sentence contains. DANFS does not count to twenty-seven, and it does not count to seven. It tells the nights. The citation tells the judgment.
DANFS keeps her on the picket line for another four weeks after the end of May, with the Japanese air effort thinning, and ends that duty on 23 June. The command lists relieve him on 14 June, with Lieutenant Commander George Van Rogers the next name. The Navy Cross stops on 29 May. Nothing after 14 June is told here as his cruise: not the last picket tour if he had already left, not the voyage to Leyte on the 27th, not the empty sweeps of the East China Sea in July, not Nagasaki and Sasebo in September. If the relief date is early, the missing piece is a few more weeks of the same picket duty, not another man's occupation of Japan. Eight battle stars belong to Ammen. They run from other captains' Aleutians through his New Guinea, Leyte, and Okinawa, and they are the ship's.
A photograph index prints a Navy Unit Commendation for the ship's picket service from 1 April to 24 June 1945, signed as James Forrestal's. That text was not read in a Navy letter. The end date runs ten days past the command-list relief. The ribbon is the crew's. It is not proof he was still aboard on the 24th.
Cost
The cost that can be counted is other men's, and it is not complete.
On Shaw, the magazine, the abandoned dock, his own survival in a letter home, and no wound the papers mention. How many of Shaw's men died that morning is not a number taken from a source opened for this account. The picture is famous. The names are not here.
On Abner Read, if he was the executive officer the finding aid says he was, the mine off Kiska killed or took seventy men and wounded forty-seven, and tore the stern off the ship under him. Their names are not in DANFS. What he did in the dark is not in the oral-history summary. He lived. The ship was rebuilt. He did not have her on 1 November 1944, when she sank in Leyte Gulf and twenty-two more of her people were lost. That sinking is not written as his. It happened on the day his new ship was hit.
On Ammen, on 1 November, five dead and twenty-six casualties in all, a Frances between the stacks, and a citation that says the fighting efficiency was not seriously impaired. The two sentences are the record's honesty. The ship stayed. Five men did not. On 20 April 1945, the first night of picket duty, eight wounded by a bomb that missed and still reached them. DANFS names none of the thirteen. Through the rest of April and May the citation's three crashes close aboard and the nights DANFS tells — planes in the water to port, a Tojo that chose Stormes instead of Ammen, eight attacks with Boyd and no damage — are the occasions when the ship was not the one that burned. Bennion was hit beside her. Stormes was hit in her place. New Mexico was hit in the anchorage while Ammen's guns were firing. The Navy gave him a Legion of Merit for the months through Leyte, a Silver Star for the sixteen days of the gulf, and a Navy Cross for the picket line. It did not give the dead a sentence of their own.
Nothing read here says he was wounded. Nothing says he asked to leave the bridge. The citations praise coolness, station-keeping, and repairs made fast enough that the ship could be used again the same day. The Navy Cross is the only one that admits the strain, and it admits it for the men as well as for him. An engineer who had already watched a magazine explode under his feet, and a stern break off a ship he helped run, spent the last spring of the war conning a destroyer that aircraft were trying to fly into. He got her out with minor damage and with five men already dead from the November crash, and eight more hurt on the first picket night. That is the cost the paper will bear. The rest is unnamed.
After
The finding aid sends him from Ammen to the Naval Academy, an instructor in marine engineering, 1945 to 1947. The engineer the navy had made of him, destroyer after cruiser after the wreck of Shaw, was for two years a teacher of the machinery. A small file holds a centennial program and a 1946 pay table. Then the junior course at the Naval War College, 1947 to 1948. His papers from that year include position papers on Russia and on what atomic weapons would do to naval warfare, a bibliography of the Attu campaign, and a graduation program. Attu was not an abstract syllabus. His ship had bombarded it.
That list is not followed. The papers say he had the ship as commanding officer for a goodwill cruise, Task Group 44.7, from 22 September to 4 December 1948, to Mombasa, Cape Town, Durban, Montevideo, Massawa, and Rio de Janeiro, and that a collision with Willard Keith in 1949 is a file of its own. The finding aid's span for the command is 1948 to 1950. The cruise reports, in the archive's summary, note Indian immigration at Mombasa and describe the ports. They do not say what he thought of showing a destroyer in those harbors three years after the picket line.
From 1950 to 1953 he taught in the new command-and-staff course at the War College and drafted a staff manual, a manual of operational planning, and The Navy Staff. From 1953 to 1954 he commanded Escort Destroyer Division 62 in the Atlantic, the flag in Lloyd Thomas, on hunter-killer work. The files include his examination for promotion from commander to captain, and papers on the grounding of Harwood near Boston in 1953. The finding aid does not say he ran her aground, or that he was the officer who inquired. The grounding is not narrated as his act.
The finding aid says he was promoted to captain in 1954 and sent to the Military Sea Transportation Service as commander for the Gulf subarea and naval shipping-control officer, through 1958, concerned with cargo and marine safety, speaking, keeping the books of the operation. A 1955 issue of the New Orleans Port News is in the file, and a 1957 roster of the Propeller Club of that port. The day of the captaincy was not read in a register. A compilation's 1 July 1954 is not used.
In 1958 he took Montrose. The papers include a Far East itinerary from June to December 1958, a change-of-command program, and the ship's history. In 1959 he was commander of Destroyer Squadron 15, the flag in Boyd, with a goodwill visit to Japan in July and, in the correspondence, an exercise called STRIKEX in 1960 with Carrier Division 7. His last navy duty, in the finding aid, was chief of staff to the commander of the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, 1960 to 1961. A roster, a telephone directory, and a 1953 history of the base are the file. A compilation's retirement on 1 June 1961 was not found in a register and is not used. The papers say he retired, attended a retired-officers program at Duke, and from 1962 to 1978 taught mathematics at Louisburg College in Louisburg, North Carolina. A file of 1960 to 1963 is the applications to Duke and to Purdue, and then the college job. On 2 December 1991 he spoke at the college when an exhibit on Pearl Harbor was presented. The notes for that talk are in the papers. He was the engineering officer of Shaw, fifty years on, explaining the morning to students in a small town.
In 1983 he sat for the interviews, about eighteen hours on several days from March into November, with Donald R. Lennon. The transcript is 320 pages. It was not read. The catalog says it covers South Dakota, the Academy, and the career. He had already given the papers, beginning in 1988, and he gave more through 1992, from Louisburg, as captain, retired. His wife's obituary clipping is dated December 2002. The compilations end him on 10 June 2003. What he left that can still be opened is the boxes at Greenville: orders, letters, the claim for personal property lost when Shaw's bow blew off, the damage reports, the citations, the photographs, and the voice on the tapes. The five men killed on Ammen on 1 November 1944 are not named in any of it that was read.