Ships
- USS Yarnall (DD-541) Captain, 8 August 1944 – 17 December 1944
James Henry Hogg was born in Illinois on 25 July 1903 and made his home in Knoxville. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1927 and was a lieutenant commander by July 1941. The wartime command that fixes his place in the Pacific record is a four-month tour in a Fletcher-class destroyer during the drive into the Philippines.
On 8 August 1944 he relieved Benjamin Francis Tompkins and became captain of Yarnall. The ship, hull number DD-541, had been built by Bethlehem at San Francisco and commissioned at the end of December 1943. Before Hogg came aboard she had already worked in the gunfire and antiaircraft screen for the landings on Saipan and Tinian. He took her from that Marianas duty into the fast carrier force.
From late August 1944, Yarnall screened the carriers of Task Force 38. Under Hogg she was with the force for the strike on Palau on 6 September, the attacks on Mindanao and the Visayas from 9 to 14 September, and the strikes on Luzon on 21 and 22 September. In October the same screen covered raids on the Nansei Shoto and Formosa from the 8th through the 14th. From 24 to 26 October, in the carrier action the Navy recorded as the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea, Yarnall stayed with the fast carriers as they ran north against the Japanese decoy force during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
For that run of operations he received the Silver Star. The award, written up while he was a commander and later carried at the rank of captain, recognized the way he fought the ship inside a fast carrier task group. Yarnall put up a heavy and accurate antiaircraft screen and helped beat off four determined Japanese air attacks before they could damage the group. Moved out ahead as a picket, she shot down four enemy planes, with two more assessed as probably destroyed, and worked clear of two torpedoes and two bombs.
His command ended on 17 December 1944, when James Beattie Denny took Yarnall. That was the day the Third Fleet met the typhoon that overwhelmed the destroyers Hull, Monaghan, and Spence. Yarnall came through the storm. Hogg left her with the Philippine campaign still going, and the ship went on with the carriers into 1945 under her next captain.
He was advanced to the temporary rank of captain on 20 March 1945. He stayed in the Navy after the war and retired as a rear admiral. He and his wife, Mary Jane, had a son, James Robert Hogg, born in Annapolis in 1934, who entered the Naval Academy in his turn and rose to admiral. James Henry Hogg died on 3 March 1984.