Ships
- USS Twiggs (DD-591) Captain from 4 November 1943
John Benjamin Fellows Jr. (16 February 1910 – 30 March 1974) was a United States Navy officer from Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1931 and spent the following decade in cruisers, a seaplane-tending minesweeper and destroyers. In October 1940 he joined the new destroyer Gwin as her engineer officer. He served in her as engineer, executive officer and finally commanding officer, and he was her captain when she fought in the battleship night action of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on 14–15 November 1942. In that action two of the four destroyers screening the battleships were sunk and a third was damaged beyond saving. The Gwin, hit twice, came out the least damaged of the four. He received the Navy Cross for that night. In the summer of 1943 he took the Gwin through the Rendova landing, where a shore battery hit her, and the rescue of survivors from the cruiser Helena. On 13 July 1943, at the Battle of Kolombangara, a Japanese torpedo struck her amidships, and after about seven hours of damage control she was abandoned and sunk by American torpedoes. Sixty-one of her officers and men died. He received the Silver Star for that period. He then commissioned the new destroyer Twiggs, and he spent the rest of the war ashore: at the Army-Navy Staff College, with a mission to India and China, and on the operations staff of the Tenth Army on Okinawa. After the war he served with the naval mission to Colombia, commanded the fleet oiler Neches, and held shore posts in Norfolk and Boston. Sources of lesser authority say that he finished his career in the Mediterranean with the Military Sea Transportation Service and retired in 1959 with the rank of rear admiral. He died at Gloucester, Massachusetts, at the age of sixty-four. He should not be confused with his father of the same name, who was mayor of Fitchburg in the early 1920s.
He was born in Fitchburg on 16 February 1910. His Navy biography names his mother as Blanche D. (Nichols) Fellows and his father as "the late John Benjamin Fellows." Fitchburg is a city in north-central Massachusetts, and the father was a public figure there. Reference compilations, drawing on the Massachusetts legislative register and Boston newspapers, describe the elder John Benjamin Fellows (1878–1943) as a bank teller who sat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for the 12th Worcester District in 1912 and 1913 and was mayor of Fitchburg from 1921 to 1925. In 1928 he was appointed city treasurer, and he held that office until he died on 6 May 1943. The same compilations say his own father, John I. Fellows, was an immigrant from Canada who worked as a druggist in Massachusetts for more than fifty years. They also identify the circus press agent Dexter Fellows, for years the publicist of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, as a brother of the mayor, which would have made the showman the naval officer's uncle. That relationship rests on secondary reference works and a 1915 druggists' trade journal, not on any document about the son, and none of the sources examined here shows whether uncle and nephew knew each other well.
Genealogical compilations list John as the eldest of seven children. A sister, Louise, died in 1917 before her second birthday. The others were Carl, Arnold, Althea, Rosamund and Margaret, the youngest born in 1925, when John was fifteen. So he grew up the oldest son of a large household, in a family well known in its city, and he carried his father's full name. The sources say nothing about his schooling beyond the fact that he attended Fitchburg High School. They do not say why he chose the Navy or who nominated him. His biography records that he entered the Naval Academy in June 1927 "as a Midshipman from Massachusetts." He was seventeen.
The Naval Academy's yearbook for the class of 1931, the Lucky Bag, gives the only contemporary portrait of him as a young man. His classmates called him "Jed." The entry on page 178 opens: "A cheerful, vivacious and good-humored personality easily enables John to be liked upon first appearances, and a longer acquaintance produces frank admiration." It goes on: "His nature, neither radical nor conservative, carried him smoothly along thru these four years, strengthen friendships more each day, while his infective humor and steadfast loyalty helped many a classmate from some unpleasant rout." His studies gave him no trouble: "Academically, John isn't bothered, for a combination of Massachusetts savviness and a thoroughness in preparation have successfully enabled him to complete each term with a goodly reserve of velvet." In Academy slang "velvet" was a margin of marks above the passing line. He ran track, earning a class numeral, and played class basketball and class tennis. The writer allowed him only "a somewhat sketchy career in company baseball," and added that "should one wish a few fast sets of tennis, a game of cribbage, or a thrill at the movies, John is a willing companion." He finished as a midshipman second petty officer. The sketch is a friendly yearbook piece, written to be light. Still, the qualities it names, an easy and moderate nature, humor, loyalty to friends and careful preparation, are the only description of his character from his own time that the sources examined here contain.
He graduated and was commissioned an ensign on 4 June 1931, during the Depression. His first ship was the new cruiser Chester, where he stood deck and engineering watches until July 1934. The Navy directories of 1932 and 1933 list him in her. His biography says he then spent a year as communication watch officer in the cruiser Chicago, flagship of the Commander, Scouting Force, and returned to the Chester for seven months as a watch and division officer. After that he went as executive officer to the Sandpiper, a minesweeper long used as a tender for seaplanes, and took part in the Aleutian Islands Survey. The biography dates the survey to the summer of 1936. The Sandpiper's official history places her Aleutian survey work, the mapping of the Andreanof and Rat Island groups with aircraft carrying multi-lens cameras, in the summer of 1935. The Navy directories of October 1935 and April 1936 already list Lieutenant (junior grade) Fellows in the destroyer Talbot, so 1935 is the more likely year. These sources leave his early sequence of billets slightly blurred. What they agree on is a steady run of junior sea duty.
From 1935 or 1936 until June 1938 he was in destroyers, first as engineer officer of the Talbot, one of the flush-deck, four-stack destroyers built at the end of the First World War, and then as communication and torpedo officer of the Worden, a new destroyer of the Farragut class. The directories of 1937 and 1938 list him in the Worden. In those years she operated from San Diego with the destroyers of the Scouting Force and served as a training ship for the Fleet Sound School there. In 1938 he returned to Annapolis for the General Line course, a year of professional schooling for officers of his seniority, and the directories show him under instruction at the Naval Academy. He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 April 1939.
In July 1939 he was ordered to the Crowninshield, another four-stack destroyer that had been laid up at San Diego and was being returned to service after war broke out in Europe. He was her executive officer from her recommissioning on 30 September 1939. The ship sailed from Mare Island in November and spent the next months on the Neutrality Patrol in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. On 9 September 1940 she was decommissioned at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and handed over to the Royal Navy under the agreement that traded fifty old destroyers for British bases. She became HMS Chelsea the same day and sailed for convoy duty in the Atlantic. Fellows had been her executive officer for the whole of her second commission, which ended with her transfer to a navy already at war.
In October 1940 he reported to the Gwin, a Gleaves-class destroyer launched at the Boston Navy Yard that May. The Navy directory of 1 November 1940 lists him in her. She was a much more powerful ship than the old four-stackers. She had five five-inch guns and ten torpedo tubes, displaced 1,620 tons and was designed for 37 knots. She was commissioned at Boston on 15 January 1941 under Lieutenant Commander John M. Higgins. Fellows was her engineer officer. In the course of the next two years he became her executive officer and then her captain. His biography does not date those changes.
Before Pearl Harbor the Gwin did neutrality patrol in the Caribbean and, from 28 September 1941, in the North Atlantic from Hvalfjordur in Iceland. A destroyer-history website records that in January 1942 she picked up survivors of the Coast Guard cutter Alexander Hamilton, torpedoed off Reykjavik. That source is the only one examined here that mentions the episode. The ship was then sent to the Pacific. On 3 April 1942 she sailed from San Francisco Bay in the screen of the carrier Hornet, which carried the sixteen Army bombers of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, launched on 18 April. In late May she carried Marine reinforcements to Midway. She arrived at the battle on 5 June, after the Japanese carriers had been sunk. She sent a salvage party aboard the crippled carrier Yorktown, and the party was still at work when a submarine's torpedoes struck the carrier again and sank the destroyer Hammann alongside her on 6 June. The Gwin brought 102 survivors of the two ships into Pearl Harbor on 10 June. Fellows was aboard through all of this as one of her senior officers. The sources do not record whether he was then engineer or executive officer, or what he did on those days.
In July 1942 the Gwin sailed for the South Pacific. During the Guadalcanal landings in August she was in the screen of Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher's carriers, and afterward she escorted convoys of troops and supplies to the island. On the evening of 13 October 1942 she was one of three destroyers covering the unloading off Lunga Point when Japanese heavy artillery, which the Marines called "Pistol Pete," began shelling Henderson Field. According to Morison, the three ships "took him under fire and silenced him, though not for long." A few days later she went out with the destroyer Grayson to find survivors of the destroyer Meredith and the tug Vireo, sunk by Japanese carrier aircraft on 15 October. The Meredith's men had spent three days and nights on rafts among sharks, and Morison records that 88 were rescued. A ship-listing compilation dates Fellows's command of the Gwin from 24 October 1942. If that date is right, he was her executive officer during the October rescue. No primary record of the change of command was found. The official order of battle for the November operations lists "Gwin, Lt. Comdr. John B. Fellows, Jr." He was thirty-two.
On 10 November 1942 the Gwin sailed from Espiritu Santo with Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan's cruisers and destroyers to cover reinforcements for Guadalcanal. That evening, according to the Office of Naval Intelligence's narrative of the battle, Halsey's South Pacific headquarters detached the cruiser Pensacola and the destroyers Gwin and Preston to reinforce Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid's carrier force. The detachment kept the Gwin out of the cruiser night action of 13 November, in which Callaghan was killed and four American destroyers were sunk. The next day Admiral William F. Halsey sent Rear Admiral Willis A. Lee into the same waters with the new battleships Washington and South Dakota to stop a second Japanese bombardment force. Lee was given four destroyers: the Walke, Benham, Preston and Gwin. Morison describes the arrangement: "The four destroyers, from four different divisions and with no division commander on board, had been assigned to him because at the moment they had more fuel than any others under Kinkaid." The battleships had not operated together before leaving Nouméa, and Lee had had no opportunity to prepare a formal operation order.
On the night of 14 November the force rounded the western end of Guadalcanal in single column, Walke, Benham, Preston and Gwin in that order 300 yards apart, with the battleships about 5,000 yards astern. The Gwin was the last destroyer, just ahead of the flagship. The Japanese force under Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo included the battleship Kirishima, heavy cruisers, the light cruisers Nagara and Sendai, and destroyers, divided into several groups around Savo Island. When the battleships opened fire a little after midnight, Fellows's ship went to work at once. She chose a cruiser as a torpedo target, but one tube fired prematurely through a short circuit, and the range was too long for the high-speed setting. She fired two spreads of star shell to light the battleships' targets and two salvos of antiaircraft common shell, which fell short. The intelligence narrative judged that the Gwin was apparently the only one of the van destroyers to fire at the targets the battleships were engaging.
Then a group of Japanese destroyers led by the Nagara came around the southwestern corner of Savo, under the dark mass of the island, to make a torpedo attack on the battleships. At 0026 the Gwin opened fire on the leading ship of this group at 10,000 yards. Four minutes later, at 8,500 yards, she put two consecutive salvos into it, and only one gun replied. Morison calls it "a private gun duel" between the Gwin and the Japanese advance group. Ahead of her the other three destroyers were being hit. The Walke was hit by shells and then by a torpedo that blew off her bow as far back as the bridge. The Preston, shelled from the quarter, burst into flames. The Benham lost part of her bow to a torpedo. At about 0032, as the Preston went down, a shell of about 4.7 inches entered the Gwin's No. 2 engine room on the starboard side some four feet above the waterline. It exploded near the control station and, in the narrative's words, killed "all the personnel on the upper level." The shock broke the safety links on her torpedoes, and three of them slid out of No. 1 mount and over the side, so that she lost them without firing. Fellows put the rudder hard right to avoid the sinking Preston and then came back to the base course. Just after he passed, the Preston's depth charges exploded and gave the Gwin, in the language of his report, "quite a shaking up." A second shell, apparently a ricochet, tore a hole two feet square in her side near the break of the deck and knocked open two 600-pound depth charges, which spilled their contents on the deck. A torpedo passed thirty yards astern. Morison wrote that the Gwin, "least damaged of the destroyer quartet, passed through the swirling water marking Preston's grave, shaken by exploding depth charges. She continued to fire at the enemy as long as anything remained within range." With three guns still working, she fired at gun flashes in the lee of Savo until 0036, when all targets were gone. Soon afterward Admiral Lee, recognizing that his destroyers could no longer fight, ordered them to retire. The Washington went on alone and wrecked the Kirishima.
Fellows's action report, quoted in the intelligence narrative, records the following hours as a damaged ship's log rather than a story. "0050 Ship is acting very tender. Took a 15° roll to port and was very slow in recovering. Repair party has not been able to determine water-tight integrity status of No. 2 engine room because of escaping steam." Boilers were secured, ammunition was carried out of the after handling room and thrown overboard, and a fire hose was kept on the 20-millimeter ammunition in the after clipping room. At 0100 he ordered the jettison bill put into effect. At 0140 the repair party reported that the engine room was not taking water, and the jettisoning stopped. By then five depth charges and the provisions stored in a vacant radar compartment had gone over the side. A machinist's mate first class, Earle Cross Johnson of Manchester, New Hampshire, received the Navy Cross posthumously for his conduct aboard the Gwin that night. The sources examined here give no full count of her dead.
Lee had learned that the Benham was badly hurt, and he ordered the Gwin to escort her toward Espiritu Santo. In the early morning the two crippled ships found each other. At 0415, the report records, the Gwin "took station 1,000 yards on Benham's port quarter and retired in company." Through the day the Benham's crew bolted turbine lifting bars and torpedo-handling tracks across her cracked deck to hold her together, but the cracks kept spreading as the sea rose. At 1615 she stopped and asked the Gwin to come up. The sea was too rough to put the ships alongside each other, so the Benham's crew came across by rafts, lines and her whaleboat, and many men swam. By 1824 all of them were aboard the Gwin, and Morison records that no lives were lost in the transfer. Fellows then tried to sink the empty hulk with torpedoes. The first exploded prematurely, the second ran ahead, the third ran erratically and the fourth passed astern. In the end he used the five-inch battery. The Benham's magazine exploded, she broke in two amidships, and she sank. A popular history of the ship, quoting what it gives as his report, describes the end: "Ship sank with bow and stern rising up and touching as she went down amidships." According to her official history, the Gwin landed the survivors at Nouméa on 20 November (Morison has her making Espiritu Santo first) and went on, by way of Hawaii, to the Mare Island Navy Yard, which she reached on 19 December 1942.
The Navy Cross citation, as extracted in his Navy biography, credits him with having "fought his ship with such courage and determination that severe damage was inflicted upon the enemy," and states that the Gwin, "although repeatedly struck by enemy shells, maintained galling and effective fire on the Japanese ships." It continues that "despite the partial disability of his ship" he "rendered invaluable assistance to a friendly vessel in distress, after which he rescued the entire crew of the sinking vessel." The award was published in the Bureau of Naval Personnel's Information Bulletin in November 1943. The citation's claim of severe damage was the language of the day. Morison, writing with Japanese records in hand, concluded that by the time the four American destroyers were out of action the Ayanami alone among the Japanese ships had been injured. She was later abandoned and scuttled.
The Gwin was repaired at Mare Island and returned to the South Pacific on 7 April 1943. While she was on escort duty in the South Pacific, Fellows's father died in Fitchburg on 6 May 1943. The sources examined here do not record when or how the news reached him.
The Gwin spent the spring on escort work. When the New Georgia campaign opened on 30 June 1943, she was in the screen of the transports landing Army troops on Rendova Island, across Blanche Channel from the Japanese airfield at Munda. She sailed in a destroyer division commanded by Commander John M. Higgins, the officer who had commissioned her, who now flew his pennant in her as division commander while Fellows commanded the ship. The Japanese gunners at Munda Point had held their fire, expecting a landing on their own beaches. When the first American wave hit the Rendova beach they opened up on the nearest targets, the destroyers patrolling the channel. Morison writes that "the first salvo straddled Gwin and, two minutes later, a 4.7-inch shell crashed her main deck aft, killing three men, wounding seven and stopping the after engine." She was ordered back to the transport area, and while other destroyers silenced the batteries she laid a smoke screen over the transports as they unloaded. Her official history adds that her gunners shot down three aircraft when Japanese planes attacked. The intelligence narrative noted that she was "the only destroyer which survived the Battleship Night Action of 14-15 November 1942."
On the night of 4–5 July she was in the screen of the destroyer-transports landing Marine Raiders and Army troops at Rice Anchorage, on the northern coast of New Georgia. In the darkness the destroyer Strong was torpedoed and sank. The official accounts disagree about the Gwin's part in the fight with the Japanese shore batteries that night. Morison says that "Gwin and Radford silenced the shore batteries, although without air spot it was rather like the game of pinning a tail on a donkey, blindfold." The intelligence narrative says the two destroyers tried to fix the batteries' positions but "had no success in silencing" them, because the Japanese stopped firing whenever they were fired on and started again when the fire slackened. Fellows's Silver Star citation, as extracted in his biography, says he "rescued several survivors from one of our destroyers." The popular history of the ship says the Gwin found a raft carrying five men from the Strong and took them to Guadalcanal.
On the night of 5–6 July the cruiser Helena was sunk at the Battle of Kula Gulf. One group of about 88 of her survivors, led by her captain, Charles P. Cecil, made their way in three motor whaleboats, each towing a life raft, to an island seven miles from Rice Anchorage. On the morning of 7 July, Morison writes, "Chief Signalman Charles A. Flood blinked an S.O.S. to Gwin and Woodworth who had been sent to hunt for them, and who picked them up safe if not altogether sound." The Gwin's official history credits her with 87 of the Helena's men. Captain Cecil later wrote to the ship. Two secondary sources reproduce the letter, one with the heading "To the Commodore and Commanding Officer of the USS GWIN," that is, to Higgins and Fellows together. Neither gives an archival reference. "You may rest assured that everyone on the beach that morning offered up at least a silent prayer, when the GWIN lay to, waiting for our boats," the letter says. "There are no words to describe the weight which was lifted from our hearts. That, though, was far from being all. The efficiency with which we were cared for on board was only equaled by your kindness." It ends: "Please accept our most sincere thanks as we salute a fighting ship, which took time out for an act of mercy."
Five days later the Gwin went into her last action. On the night of 12–13 July Rear Admiral Walden L. Ainsworth took the cruisers Honolulu, St. Louis and the New Zealand cruiser Leander up the Slot with two groups of destroyers to stop a Japanese reinforcement run to Kolombangara. Higgins was again aboard the Gwin as Commander Destroyer Division 23. In the first phase of the battle the Allied cruisers smothered the Japanese light cruiser Jintsu, which sank with most of her crew, and the Leander was torpedoed. In the confusion that followed, the American destroyers became scattered. According to the intelligence narrative, the Gwin was the only one of the rear destroyers able to take her ordered station ahead of the cruisers as Ainsworth turned up the Slot after what he believed were enemy cripples.
At about 0156 the Honolulu's radar picked up ships ahead. Ainsworth was not sure whether they were Japanese or his own detached destroyers, and he spent several minutes calling his destroyers to check their positions. Morison describes the scene in flag plot and how "one's fate hangs by a hair." The ships were four Japanese destroyers under Captain Shimai that had run up the Slot after firing their first torpedoes and, Morison writes, reloaded their tubes in a rain squall in eighteen minutes. While the Americans waited, they fired again. At 0205 Ainsworth decided the ships were enemy and ordered a turn to unmask his batteries. Morison writes that "the two cruisers and destroyer Gwin turn right into the path of the deadly 'long lances.'" The St. Louis was hit forward, and the Honolulu took one torpedo in the bow and a dud in the stern. "Gwin, ahead of Honolulu, receives one amidships in her engine room at 0214 and at once explodes, burning white-hot — a terrible sight." The intelligence narrative records that she had been in a hard left turn when she was hit, that her rudder jammed, and that she came down on the Honolulu's starboard side in flames. The cruiser's rudder was thrown hard right, and a collision was narrowly avoided.
What followed took the rest of the night and most of the morning. By 0247 the fire had been brought under control. The Gwin's fantail was about three feet under water and her jammed rudder kept her circling to the left, but she still had power on her starboard engine and screw. The destroyer Ralph Talbot came alongside to tow her, with the Maury screening. At 0655 Japanese aircraft appeared and the tow had to be cast off while all three ships fired at them. Fighters from the Russell Islands broke up a larger strike shortly after daylight. At 0810 the Ralph Talbot tried to take the Gwin in tow from ahead, and more aircraft interrupted the attempt. At 0900 the Gwin reported that she was settling and listing. At 0915 the Maury went alongside and took off, in the narrative's words, "the Captain, the Division Commander, 8 other officers, and 44 men." Morison and the ship's official history say that the Ralph Talbot took off the Gwin's crew. The intelligence narrative records only the Maury's removal of this last party. On orders from the screen commander, the Ralph Talbot fired torpedoes into the Gwin, and she broke in two and sank about 0930. By the time Fellows left her, about seven hours had passed since the torpedo hit.
Morison and the ship's official history put her losses at two officers and fifty-nine men. The intelligence narrative, which counted differently, gave sixty-seven casualties, including six wounded and one officer and fifty-five men missing. The Gwin had been his ship for almost three years, from her fitting out at Boston to her end in Kula Gulf.
His Silver Star citation, as extracted in his biography, covers the whole period from Rendova to Kolombangara. It credits him with directing "well-sustained and accurate fire against enemy shore batteries" and covering a landing, and states that at Kolombangara, which the citation calls "the second battle of Kula Gulf," "his daring ship-handling contributed directly to the destruction of four and probably six enemy vessels." A shorter version of the citation, reproduced in an awards database, names the Rice Anchorage landing and the Kolombangara action. The popular history of the ship quotes a third text, not found in any official source examined here, which says he "worked valiantly for seven hours in a desperate but futile attempt to save his vessel." The same article quotes a message it attributes to Ainsworth, saying that the force had evened the score by "sinking four to six Jap ships." The claim matched what American radar operators had believed that night. It was not true. Only the Jintsu was sunk. Morison records that two Japanese survivors, found days later sitting in one of the Gwin's motor whaleboats, "told the tale of four destroyers sunk that confirmed our exaggerated score." The intelligence narrative, written soon after the battle, already noted that only the light cruiser's loss had been confirmed.
Fellows came home. He took courses at the Fleet Sound School at Key West and at the Naval Training Station, Norfolk, and on 5 October 1943 he reported to the Charleston Navy Yard in South Carolina, where a new destroyer, the Twiggs, was fitting out. She was a Fletcher-class ship, larger than the Gwin, and was commissioned on 4 November 1943 with Commander John B. Fellows Jr. in command. After a shakedown cruise to Bermuda in December, she worked out of Norfolk as a training ship. During that time, on 22 February 1944, he married Harda Klaveness at Norfolk. Virginia marriage records, as indexed by a genealogical service, give his age as thirty-four and hers as twenty-seven, and name her parents as Christian Klaveness and Clara Normann. He commanded the Twiggs until March 1944. A ship-listing compilation gives 6 April as the date of his relief. She did not go to the Pacific until May.
He spent the rest of the war ashore, in school and on staffs. From April to August 1944 he was a student at the Army-Navy Staff College in Washington. In September 1944 he joined the India-China Mission, his biography says, "his duties concerning joint security." The sources examined here say nothing more about that assignment. In January 1945 he was detached, and from then until September 1945 he served in Section G-3, the operations section, of the Tenth Army headquarters on Okinawa. The Tenth Army was the Army command that fought the land battle there from April to June 1945. A naval officer who had fought destroyers in the Solomons was now working on an Army operations staff ashore while the ships offshore suffered heavy losses to suicide aircraft.
One of the ships lost was his own former command. On the evening of 16 June 1945 the Twiggs, on picket duty in the western fire support area off Okinawa, was hit on the port side by an aerial torpedo, which exploded her No. 2 magazine. The plane then crashed into her, and she sank within an hour. Her commanding officer, Commander George Philip, was among the dead. Her official history gives 162 dead and missing and Morison gives 126, with about 188 survivors. Fellows had trained her first crew a year and a half before. No source examined here records whether he learned of her loss at the time, or what he made of it.
His campaign medals were the American Defense Service Medal with the bronze "A," for service in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbor; the American, European-African-Middle Eastern and Asiatic-Pacific campaign medals, the last with seven engagement stars; the World War II Victory Medal; and the Navy Occupation Service Medal with the Asia clasp.
When he returned to the United States he was assigned to the Navy Department. From November 1945 to February 1946 he worked in the Naval Mission Section of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. He then became executive officer of the United States Naval Mission to Colombia and stayed in that post until May 1947. From June 1947 to November 1950 he was Director of Distribution at the headquarters of the Fifth Naval District in Norfolk. He was promoted to captain to date from 1 July 1950.
In January 1951 he took command of the Neches, a fleet oiler built as a Maritime Commission tanker and taken over by the Navy before her launching in 1941. She had served in the Pacific through the war and had been decommissioned in 1950. Her official history records that she was recommissioned at Oakland, California, on 3 January 1951, during the Korean War, and operated as a tanker of the Military Sea Transportation Service and with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. His biography says that from 3 August 1951 to 3 January 1952 she operated in the European area "assigned to occupation duty." He left her in June 1952. She was his last seagoing command recorded in the official sources.
In August 1952 he reported to the headquarters of the First Naval District in Boston, in his home state, as Director of Training. From July 1953 he was the district's Assistant Chief of Staff for Personnel, the post he held when his official biography was written in January 1955. The Navy register of 1959 still lists him as a captain on active duty.
The rest of his career is known only from sources of lesser authority. A popular magazine article about the Gwin states that his last assignment was as Commander, Military Sea Transportation Service, Mediterranean Sub Area, and that he retired in 1959 with the rank of rear admiral. A military awards database also describes him as a retired rear admiral. The sources examined here do not say whether the flag rank was an active promotion or the one-grade advancement then given at retirement to officers specially commended for their performance in combat. The same article names his children as a son, Michael, and a daughter, Sanna. No other source examined here mentions them.
John Benjamin Fellows Jr. died on 30 March 1974 at Gloucester, Massachusetts, at the age of sixty-four, according to the Massachusetts death index. No obituary was found, and the sources examined here do not record his burial place or how he spent the fifteen years after he left the Navy.
The record of the man himself is thin. There is a yearbook sketch of a good-humored midshipman from Fitchburg who was liked on sight, could be counted on by his friends, and passed his courses with marks to spare. Then there is the official record of a decade of junior duty, much of it in old and new destroyers. There are the extracts of his action report from the night off Savo: the roll that came back too slowly, the steam in the engine room, the ammunition going over the side, the station taken at 0415 on a crippled ship's quarter, a whole crew brought aboard by raft and line in a rising sea, and four torpedoes that would not sink an empty hulk. There is a cruiser captain's letter thanking his ship for an act of mercy. And there is the long morning off Kolombangara, which ended when he left a sinking ship with her division commander and the last of her crew, eight months after she had come out of the battleship night action as the least damaged of four destroyers.