Ships
- USS Eaton (DD-510) Captain from 5 September 1945
Commander James Louis May of the United States Navy took command of the destroyer Eaton (DD-510) on 5 September 1945. He held that command through the first months of the occupation and until the ship left active service in June 1946.
She was a Fletcher-class destroyer, launched at Bath, Maine, on 20 September 1942 and commissioned on 4 December 1942. Edward Louis Beck brought her into commission and took her to the Pacific. Edward Frank Jackson, Fritz Gleim, and Chesford Brown followed him in turn. Under those officers Eaton served in the Solomons, the Philippines, and the landings off Borneo. May relieved Brown on 5 September 1945, three days after Japan’s surrender.
The ship had already sailed north, on 28 August, to cover minesweeping in the Yellow Sea off Jinsen, the port now called Inchon, ahead of landings planned for the next month. From 6 September through the end of October, with May in command, Eaton directed sweeping of the approaches to the Yangtze and served as the harbor-entrance control vessel at Shanghai. On 9 September a party from the destroyer boarded five Japanese vessels that were trying to leave the port. A prize crew from Eaton remained on Medium Landing Ship No. 5 for nearly a month.
Eaton then joined the South China Force and worked from Hong Kong. Until 29 December 1945 she visited ports along the China coast from Haiphong, in Indochina, to Hulutao, in Manchuria, a sweep of about two thousand miles. She reached New York on 8 February 1946 and the next month went on to Charleston, South Carolina. On 21 June 1946 she was placed out of commission in reserve, and May’s command of Eaton ended with that decommissioning.