Ships
- USS Heywood L. Edwards (DD-663) Captain, 26 January 1944 – 25 December 1944
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the text carried by the Destroyer History Foundation from the Navy's ship-history series, says Heywood L. Edwards was commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard on 26 January 1944, "Comdr. J. W. Boulware in command." That first date is official. The same history never says when he left. The 25 December 1944 end is repeated by NavSource (credited there to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves), by uboat.net, and by Patricia E. Hartle's compiled ship's diary on the Destroyer History site, which says that on Christmas Day "the new ship Captain, Commander A. W. Sheppard" relieved him. NavSource and uboat.net spell the relief Albert Lee Shepherd, not Sheppard. Shepherd is a real officer: the Military Times Hall of Valor prints a Silver Star to Commander Albert Lee Shepherd for taking Heywood L. Edwards alongside the grounded Longshaw under shore fire on 18 May 1945. That action is five months after the date those lists give for Boulware's detachment, so the next captain, whatever the spelling, was in the ship by Okinawa. The Christmas date itself has not been read from a deck log. It is a tradition of secondary lists that agrees with itself and is not yet a log entry.
He was a northeast-Missouri high-school boy who became a destroyer captain, took a section of tin cans down Surigao Strait in the dark, and then almost disappears from the public record. The Navy can be followed. The household cannot.
Perry, and the temper the yearbook would not drop
The 1945 Navy Register, in the captains' table, gives his date of entry as a midshipman as 9 July 1923 and his birthday as 27 May. The year attached to that May day does not survive the print. One transcription of the same page reads 1906. Another reads 1909. A fourteen-year-old could not have entered the Naval Academy in July 1923, so 1909 is an OCR ghost. 1906 is possible. The Hall of Valor page, homeofheroes.com, and uboat.net all say 27 May 1905, which would have made him eighteen when he reported to Annapolis and which fits the day and month the Register does print cleanly. None of those three is a birth certificate. The year is not settled here. The place is. The Lucky Bag says Perry, Missouri. He came from Perry High School. The opening clause of the class sketch, the part that named whatever distinction he brought from that school, is illegible in the copy used for this essay. What remains is the classmates' verdict on it: the distinction "meant nothing when he donned our uniform and was just a plebe," and yet "he brought with him the qualities which had gained him that distinction and they have marked his career at the Academy."
They called him Joe. They did not call him gentle. "Quick of temper, with a natural talent for destruction, it was only to be expected that he would make an athlete. Conquering that temper almost cost him his nose before he made good with the 'varsity boxers — and the temper isn't beaten yet." The boxing pages of the same Lucky Bag put a "Boulware," mangled by the scanner as "Boulwarc," in the squad photograph under Coach Spike Webb. The index sends "Boulware, J. W." to that boxing section as well as to the biography. The yearbook is a portrait with a joke in it, not a fitness report. It is still the only description of his face under pressure before the war: a fast temper, a nose that nearly paid for it, and a place on the boxing squad once the temper had been beaten down far enough to be useful. They said the temper was not beaten. There is no later letter, diary page, or fitness-report extract in hand to say whether they were right.
Academically they gave him a policy rather than a rank in class. "His policy academically is not to grease and not to worry. Joe never starred but anyone could rest easy with the marks he made." Languages bothered him. "Dago did cause him a few wrinkles because it was all Greek to him." The Masqueraders, the Academy theatricals, used "his good judgment rather than his good looks," and he worked the stage gang "all unhonored and unsung." The sketch's last line is the one the Navy actually kept: he had "the qualities of an officer and those stripes are going to care for themselves." No parents are named. No girl is named. A different boy, John Stark Boulware, was born in Perry, Ralls County, on 2 April 1905 to James Edward Boulware and Lydia Richards Moss, and died in Missouri in 1988. He is not this officer. Joe Wood's mother and father are not in any document read for this essay.
Battleship, destroyer, schoolroom, Asiatic Fleet
The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers dated 1 January 1928 lists him as an ensign, signal number 5272, and shows him reporting on 26 August 1927 to Maryland. That is the battleship. He had been out of the Academy a summer. The class of 1927's usual commissioning day is 2 June 1927, and uboat.net prints that day, but the Register line actually read here is the reporting date to Maryland, not the commission date. The ship is the fact. What he did on her is not in the Register.
The Register of 1 January 1930 has moved him. The duty column reads Selfridge. In 1930 the only Selfridge in commission was the destroyer DD-320, not the later DD-357, which was not commissioned until 1936. The Register does not say what billet he held. It says the ship. Between Maryland and Selfridge the files used here are silent. Two years on a battleship, then a destroyer, is the shape. The months inside those two years are not filled in.
By the Register of 1 July 1935 he was back at Annapolis, "Naval Academy (instrn.)," marked (V). In the explanatory notes of the 1 July 1941 Register, (V) means on the promotion list, not an aviator, and course number 31 means "Completed course in torpedo instruction." The 1935 line already carries that 31. He was still a junior officer teaching, or being taught, in the yard where he had been a midshipman, and he already had the torpedo course the Navy bothered to print. The Register of 1 July 1936 still styles him lieutenant (junior grade), signal 1865, marked (Y), "subject to examination, and/or confirmation," and places him not on a named ship but on "Asiatic station (assignment)." Orders to the Far East had been cut. The ship had not yet been printed.
The 1938 Navy Directory prints it. "Boulware, Joe W, lt, u s s Pillsbury," and on the ship's own roster, "Lt. J. W. Boulware, exec," under Lieutenant Commander A. J. Spriggs, commanding. The only Pillsbury then in commission was DD-227, the Clemson-class destroyer that had been with the Asiatic Fleet since 1922. He was the executive officer. The directory does not say for how long, and it does not say what the China coast did to him. It says the job. By the 1939 Navy Directory he was no longer on her. The alphabetical entry reads "lt, naval oper, navy dept, Washington, D C," and his signal number sits on the Office of Naval Operations list just above the Bureau of Navigation heading. One 1940 Navy Directory still has him there, a lieutenant in Naval Operations. Another 1940 Navy Directory has already moved him: "lt, s/m chaser div 31, u s s PC-451," and the division roster calls PC-451 the flagship and him "comdr S/M div 31." The Register of 1 July 1941, which still indexes him as a lieutenant, gives the date he reported to the duty then listed for him as 12 August 1940. The OCR of that page renders the station itself only as "do," a ditto, so the Register transcription does not by itself name the chaser. The directories do. Twelve August 1940 is also the day secondary lists give for PC-451's commissioning. That coincidence is noted. It is not a DANFS page read for this essay. DANFS for the chaser was not in hand.
What the directories do establish is the job, and it was not a single small ship in a corner. He was commander of Submarine Chaser Division 31, with his pennant in PC-451. The 1941 directory, whose Marine Corps promotion list is printed "as of April 1, 1941," still has Lieutenant J. W. Boulware in that billet, with Ensign R. R. Stuart as executive, gunnery officer, and first lieutenant, and an ensign of the Naval Reserve as engineer. The division had at least one other chaser, PC-452, under her own commanding officer. No cruise, no contact, no weather report from those months was found. Uboat.net and NavSource extend his PC-451 command to "mid 1942." That end date is theirs. No 1942 or 1943 Navy Directory was read to test it.
The rank moved while he was in that world, or just as he left it. The Register of 1 July 1942 indexes him as lieutenant commander and, in the same column where his classmates carry their 1941 dates of rank, prints 14 September 1941. The 1945 Register is explicit: permanent rank lieutenant commander, date of rank 14 September 1941, and, in the captains' list, a temporary rank whose date is dittoed from the officer above him, Gerald Roland Dyson, who is printed "20 Mar. 45." Read that way, he was a temporary captain from 20 March 1945, nine months after Surigao and three months after the Christmas relief the secondary lists give him. The compiled list's "Commander" is the rank he held when he took Edwards and when he fought her. The citation compilers later call him "Captain [then Commander]." Both can be true if the March 1945 date is right. The ditto is the weak joint in that sentence, and it is labeled as a ditto.
By 1 July 1939 the Register had added two more course numbers to the torpedo mark: 18, the Naval War College correspondence course in strategy and tactics, and 24-a, the postgraduate course in communications. He had gone to Washington as a lieutenant who had finished those courses. The Register does not say the courses got him the desk. It says he had them, and that the desk and the courses occupy the same year.
The year the paper goes quiet
From the summer of 1942 until the Boston commissioning in January 1944, this file has a hole. The July 1942 Register still lists him, as a lieutenant commander, but the duty column in the transcription is another ditto, and the station it dittos was not recovered. The 1944 Register's index calls him a commander, signal 2601, and does not, in the page that was found, name a ship. No directory, no orders, no letter says whether he was in a school, on a staff, or fitting out the destroyer that would be his. Hartle, writing decades later from crew diaries and from what she says was Boulware's own Navy diary, starts the ship's story at the commissioning and does not fill his previous billet. The diary is cited by her. It was not seen for this essay. Whatever he did in those eighteen months, the public record has not kept it. The next sentence the Navy printed about him is the commissioning.
The ship with another man's name
Heywood Lane Edwards had been captain of the destroyer Reuben James and had gone down with her west of Iceland on 30–31 October 1941, the first American destroyer sunk in the Atlantic fight, with ninety-nine of his crew. DANFS tells that in the paragraph before it tells the new ship's launch. Boulware did not inherit Edwards's career. He inherited a hull named for a dead destroyer captain, sponsored by that man's mother, Mrs. Louise S. Edwards, launched at Boston on 6 October 1943 and placed in commission on 26 January 1944 with himself on the quarterdeck. He was thirty-eight if the 1905 birthdate is right, and a commander. The crew, in Hartle's account, was mostly new, collected at Norfolk for destroyer training and sent north by train. That is her research, drawn from a boatswain's letter and from later interviews. DANFS does not describe the crew. It describes the work.
Shakedown began 25 February off Bermuda. Gunnery followed off the Maine coast. She sailed from Boston on 16 April, transited the Panama Canal, stopped at San Diego, and reached Pearl Harbor on 8 May. There she drilled with Task Force 52 under Vice Admiral R. K. Turner, "helping to weld the coordinated amphibious force which was to sweep across the Pacific," in the DANFS sentence. The phrase is the official history's, not a claim about his private feelings. On 29 May the force left Pearl for the Marianas. Edwards screened the transport group. On 15 June, the day of the Saipan landings, she took a patrol station to seaward of the beaches. From 21 to 30 June she closed the beach to shoot for the Marines, and she kept at that until 2 July. She then joined the cruiser Montpelier for the bombardment of Tinian.
On the night of 7 July the official history gives him, or at any rate gives his ship under his command, the first choice that had a human count on it. Soldiers cut off from the American lines were stranded on the beach. Edwards put a whaleboat in the water and made four trips over the reefs, took off forty-four men, and put them on a nearby LCI. DANFS calls the reefs treacherous. It does not say who coxswained, and it does not say whether the captain went in the boat. Hartle, using the diaries, adds that the men were of the 105th Infantry, 27th Division, that the boats were the whaleboat and the gig, that one Japanese prisoner came off with the forty-four, that enemy shells landed close aboard and did no damage, and that the ship also picked up a friendly pilot whose plane had crashed. Those details are hers. They are not in DANFS. They are the sort of thing a commanding officer's diary would notice, which is why they are tempting, and why they stay marked as unverified. What is firm is the forty-four and the four trips.
She fired more Tinian bombardments on 19–21 July, returned to Saipan fire support, and left the Marianas on 30 July for Eniwetok. Hartle says that on 22 July, while Edwards was being relieved on a bombardment station by Norman Scott, shore batteries hit Norman Scott and then Colorado, and that Edwards was sent back in and helped silence the guns at about eighteen hundred yards. DANFS does not tell that story. It is left as Hartle's. If it happened, it happened on his watch. It is not adopted here as a ship's-history fact.
The next objective DANFS names is Peleliu. Edwards left on 18 August, trained with the amphibious forces at Florida Island, and sailed for the western Carolines on 6 September. She arrived on 11 September and kept an antisubmarine patrol around the heavier bombardment ships until the 13th, when she was sent in to cover underwater demolition teams on the beach obstructions. On 15 September, the day of the assault, she fired for the troops, threw illumination at night, and the next day knocked out an ammunition dump. Then the barges. Shortly after midnight on 23 September she met a group of barges loaded with reinforcements. She lit them with star shell and opened with the five-inch battery. By dawn, DANFS says, she had sunk fourteen of them, aided by landing craft, and had helped stop some 650 Japanese troops from landing. The Navy Unit Commendation later quoted by Hartle and by NavSource tells the same night with a slightly different verb: on the night of 23–24 September she "detected a column of fourteen Japanese barges attempting to reinforce the Palau garrison and aided in destroying the whole group with its 650 enemy troops." "Sank fourteen" and "aided in destroying" a column of fourteen are not the same sentence. Both are in print. Neither is a deck-log extract read here. The night is his. The arithmetic of who fired the killing round is not pinned to his hand alone.
She reached Manus, in the Admiralties, on 1 October and joined Rear Admiral Oldendorf's fire-support group for the return to the Philippines. She sailed for Leyte on 12 October, bombarded on 18–20 October, and shot for the landings on the 20th. DANFS says that work went on for four days under frequent air attack. Then she was sent to the strait.
The strait
Oldendorf waited at the upper end of Surigao Strait for the Japanese southern force. DANFS puts Edwards at the head of Section 3 of Destroyer Squadron 56, screening the left flank of the cruiser line. The section was Edwards, Bennion, and Leutze. Samuel Eliot Morison, writing "The Battle of Surigao Strait" in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings for December 1958, deploys the same three sections: Captain Smoot's Section 1, Captain Conley's Section 2, and "Commander Boulware's Section 3 (Bennion, Leutze, Heywood L. Edwards)," steaming south, west of the left-flank cruisers, at twenty-five knots, toward a Japanese column that still had a battleship in it.
Just after 0300 on 25 October, DANFS says, Edwards and her unit were ordered to attack. With Leutze and Bennion she "steamed down the port side of the enemy column and ran through a hail of gunfire to launch torpedoes." The official history's next sentence is the one that will not sit still: "Two hits were obtained on Japanese battleship Yamashiro, with Albert W. Grant on the American side damaged but afloat." It does not say whose torpedoes those two hits were. Grant was in Section 1, not in Boulware's. Morison's Proceedings account is harsher and more specific, and it disagrees. He has Section 3 firing between 0357 and 0359, at 7,800 to 8,000 yards, at the destroyer Shigure and the battleship he spells Tamashiro. Shigure, he writes, escaped by turning radically from 010 degrees to 185. The battleship, and possibly Shigure, took Edwards, Bennion, and Leutze under gunfire at the moment the torpedoes left the tubes, and the splashes followed them as they turned toward Leyte and retired under smoke. "No hits were scored by either side."
Both accounts are in print from men who had the battle reports. They cannot both be the last word on whether Section 3's fish hit. This essay does not choose. What they share is the part that belonged to him personally: he took three destroyers down the flank, into gunfire, launched, and brought the three back. The Navy Cross citation, as printed by the Hall of Valor from Commander Seventh Fleet serial 0647 of 9 February 1945, uses that shape and no other. It awards the cross to "Captain [then Commander] Joe Wood Boulware" for "extraordinary heroism and distinguished service" as "Commander, Attack Section THREE, Destroyer Squadron FIFTY-SIX," on the night of 24–25 October 1944. "Leading his section through intense and prolonged enemy gunfire in a night torpedo attack against the flank of an advancing column of hostile battleships, cruisers and destroyers," he "placed the section in a tactically advantageous position to deliver a well executed attack and retired without damage to his units." The citation says the attack "contributed in large measure to eliminating an imminent and dangerous threat to our transports and other ships in Leyte Gulf." It does not claim a hit. It claims the geometry, the nerve to stay in the gunfire long enough to shoot, and a section that came home whole. Grant's ruin, in the other section, is the night's proof that "without damage" was not guaranteed.
After the torpedo attack, DANFS says, the Japanese steamed into Oldendorf's gun line. The heavy ships did the killing. As the destroyers retired, Edwards "took station on the port bow of the cruisers in search of enemy cripples," patrolled the eastern entrance of the strait for a day, and went back to Leyte Gulf. The unit commendation, in the Hartle and NavSource quotations, adds that "in retiring, she made a thorough search of the battle area and aided in sinking a crippled Japanese destroyer." Hartle's diary compilation goes further and says Edwards found a Japanese destroyer dead in the water at dawn and sank her with the five-inch battery, then watched three or four hundred survivors refuse rescue and swim for an island held by Marines. DANFS says "search of enemy cripples" and does not describe that sinking in the narrative proper. "Aided in sinking" and "sank her" are another pair that will not be collapsed into one. The search is in the official history. The dawn execution, and the men in the water who would not come aboard, are in the later compilation that claims his diary. If the diary says it, the diary was not on this desk.
She stayed in the gulf, patrolling the shipping, until 25 November, and reached Manus again on 29 November for rest and repair. DANFS then has her sailing on 15 December, exercising in the Palaus, and leaving on 1 January with Oldendorf for Lingayen Gulf. If the Christmas relief is real, he was still the captain for the departure from Manus and for part of that Palau pause, and he was not the captain who took her into Lingayen, where DANFS says she shot down two suicide planes on 6 January. Iwo Jima, the collision with Bryant, the long Okinawa gun line, the Longshaw rescue, the claim that she was never hit by the enemy: all of that is the ship's story under the next commanding officer. It is not his year. Eight of the nine original DesRon 56 ships were hit or sunk before the war ended, by the Destroyer History Foundation's count, and Edwards was the one that was not. That survival is real. It is not a medal he can be handed for months he did not command.
What the medal list cannot agree on
The Hall of Valor page prints one award: the Navy Cross, for Surigao, with the serial and the date given above. Homeofheroes.com prints the same citation and adds a home town, Beverly Hills, California, which no register or directory read here confirms. NavSource, which is a photograph archive and not a medal roll, says he received the Navy Cross and the Bronze Star and retired as a rear admiral.
The Navy's own 1945 Register marks him differently. Its table of distinctions defines (B) as the Navy Cross, (G-1) as the Bronze Star Medal, and (H-1) as a special letter of commendation with authority to wear the commendation ribbon. Beside Joe Wood Boulware the Register prints (G-1) and (H-1). It does not print (B). The temporary-captain date dittoed onto his line is 20 March 1945, which is after the 9 February 1945 serial on the Navy Cross citation. A register that had been closed before that serial was written would explain a missing (B). A register that already knew a 20 March rank date is harder to explain. Either the cross was awarded and had not yet been posted, or the citation compilers and the Register are not describing the same piece of paper, or the OCR dropped a (B) that was on the page. The transcription used here shows (G-1) and (H-1) clearly, in two copies, and no (B). The Bronze Star and the commendation are therefore the decorations the 1945 Register is willing to swear to. It does not say for what. The Navy Cross is the decoration the later citation compilations are willing to swear to, with a quotation and a serial, for Surigao. Both are left standing. He is not credited here with a Bronze Star for a named battle, because no citation for it was found. He is not stripped of the Navy Cross, because the citation text is too specific to wave off, and he is not granted it as a settled fact against the Register's silence.
The ship's Navy Unit Commendation, quoted by Hartle as signed by John L. Sullivan, Acting Secretary of the Navy, covers Saipan-Tinian, Palau, Surigao, Iwo Jima, and a slice of Okinawa. The last two periods fall after the relief date. The letter, as she quotes it, authorizes the ribbon for anyone attached during one or more of the periods. If that quotation is faithful, he was entitled for the first three. The original letter was not seen. The quotation's praise of the Surigao torpedo attack is the ship's, and it matches the job the citation gives him: he "gallantly led Section Three."
After the ship
He left her, if the lists are right, on Christmas Day 1944, at anchor among the ships gathering for Lingayen. Hartle misnames his relief. The weight of the later record is that the man who walked aboard was Albert Lee Shepherd, who would fight the ship through the suicide-plane months and earn his own Silver Star for the Longshaw boats. Boulware's war as a commanding officer, on the evidence that can be dated, was the gunfire war of 1944: Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu, Leyte, and one night action in a strait. He did not command her when the kamikazes came in earnest. That is a fact about the calendar, not a judgment about his nerve. The night he did fight was the one in which destroyers were sent down a strait at battleships, and his section came back.
Then the paper thins again. No directory in hand places him in 1945 after the detachment, or in 1946, or on any staff in the decade after the war. The Register of 1956, in a columnar transcription that has torn the dates into separate digits, still lists "BOULWARE JOE WOOD" as a captain. The registers of 1957 and 1958, searched for the name, do not show him among the active officers recovered by that search. OCR can hide a man, so the absence is not a proof of the day he retired. Uboat.net says he retired on 1 July 1957 as a rear admiral. The Hall of Valor page says he retired as a rear admiral and prints 1 July 1994 where that site prints a death date, opposite a birth of 27 May 1905. Those are two different Julys, thirty-seven years apart, and mixing them is the obvious error waiting for a careless reader. Uboat.net's death line is 30 June 1994, at Altoona, Lake County, Florida, aged eighty-nine, which fits a 1905 birth and not a 1906 one. No Florida death record, no obituary, and no grave were found in the searches made for this essay. No wife is named anywhere in the registers, the directories, the Lucky Bag, the citation pages, or Hartle's preface. No child is named. Homeofheroes' "Beverly Hills" is a home-town field on an award page, not a census line.
What he left, on the evidence, is the section that came home, the forty-four soldiers in a whaleboat, a ship that another man then took through Okinawa without an enemy hit, and a diary Hartle says she was allowed to copy and that has not surfaced in any archive checked here. The classmates who wrote that the stripes would take care of themselves were right about the stripes. They were not given a sentence about anyone waiting for him when the stripes came off.
The ship he had served as executive officer did not get that luxury. Pillsbury, DD-227, was sunk with all hands south of Java in the first days of March 1942, by Japanese cruisers and destroyers, with no survivors recovered. He had been off her since at least the 1939 directory, and in Washington, and then on the chasers, while she went into the war under other officers. The loss is not his story. It is the edge of it. The destroyer whose books he had kept as a lieutenant was annihilated. He lived to command another one, and he lived, if the Florida date is even roughly right, almost fifty years past the strait.