Ships
- USS Converse (DD-509) Captain, 20 January 1944 – 27 September 1944
He is neither of them. He is John Barr Colwell of the United States Navy, Naval Academy class of 1931, the commander who had Converse from 20 January 1944 to 27 September 1944, and the vice admiral the 1968 Navy Register places in the billet of Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Fleet Operations and Readiness. He is not Captain John C. Colwell of the 1920s and 1930s registers, not Albert Roy Colwell, not Samuel C. Colwell of the Naval Reserve, not Reuben Harry Colwell, and not Lawrence Stuart Colwell of the class of 1954. He is not the John B. Colwell of Sparta, Tennessee, whose Social Security record gives a 1941 birth and a death on 16 February 2008. He is not his own brother, Judge William F. Colwell of Pawnee City. The site stub that sent the search after him says only that Commander John Barr Colwell had Converse, with those two dates. The dates are in a crew history. The life around them is in the registers, the Lucky Bag, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, a brother's obituary, and the Naval Institute's summary of an oral history that was not read for this essay. Where those stop, the sentence stops.
Origins
He was born on 26 November 1909. That date is in the date-of-birth column of the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of 1 July 1944, beside John Barr Colwell, signal number 3268, and the same day, 26 November 1909, is in the 1 July 1943 register and again in the 1 July 1945 register. A Social Security death-index compilation lists a John B. Colwell born that day, died 5 February 2008, last residence Takoma Park, Maryland. The Naval Institute heads its oral-history page for Vice Admiral John Barr Colwell with the years 1909–2008. The middle name is the Navy's. The index gives only the initial.
The 1931 Lucky Bag heads his page "John Barr Colwell," nickname "Collie," and "Pawnee City, Nebraska." The sketch says he "entered the world and grew to manhood in the town of Pawnee City, Nebraska, a region sometimes called 'God's Country.'" His younger brother's obituary does not leave the family's geography that simple. Judge William F. Colwell, born 21 November 1915, "was born in Bookwalter, NE and moved with his family to Pawnee City in 1918." John, born in November 1909, would have been eight, and nine that November, if the household moved in 1918, and the yearbook puts his birth in Pawnee City. The two notices can both be true if the household moved more than once. Neither notice names the parents, and no register does either. The brother's obituary, written in 2020, says William was preceded in death by his sister, Elizabeth Herries, and by his brother, Vice Admiral John B. Colwell. That is the family the public record will name: two brothers and a sister. It will not name a father or a mother.
The same obituary lists three nieces, Mary Neill, Betsy Williams, and Molli Hull, and two nephews, David Herries and James Colwell. It does not say whose children they were. David Herries sits naturally with the sister who had married. James Colwell is the one nephew who still carries the name. The notice does not call him John's son. No wife of John Barr Colwell has turned up in the registers, the yearbook, the Institute's summary, or the brother's obituary. The yearbook, written when he was twenty-one, is silent about any girl at all.
Formation
The 1 July 1944 register gives his date of entry as 21 June 1927, in the column headed date of entry, on the same line as the birth date. He was seventeen. The Lucky Bag says that at that age "an idea struck him apparently with great force" and took him to "Hall's War College" for a period of preparation, and then to Annapolis. The school has not been found under that name outside the yearbook. What the yearbook is sure of is the destination.
He was "Collie" to the class. The sketch says he got "house broke" with surprising ease, starred in academics his plebe year and the year following, and was "still at it." Under his portrait the activity line reads: Fencing Manager, second-class and first-class years; Track, plebe year; Star, all four years; "N" Club; M.P.O. The prose that goes with the list is classmate portraiture, not a fitness report. It says he was game and took things as they came; that when they came "with harrying perversity" he strained at the leash, "but who does not?"; that his failings, with his generosity and sympathy, endeared him to the class; that as master of ceremonies at a bull session he was unsurpassed; that his wise-cracks were part of the day's routine; and that among them he would not be forgotten. That is the voice of a yearbook. It is the only voice, from before the war, that describes the man rather than his station.
He was commissioned ensign on 4 June 1931. On the ensigns' page of the 1 January 1934 register the date is printed in full beside Thomas Donald Tyra, "4 June 31," and carried as "do" to John Barr Colwell, signal 5037, a few lines below, with no other date in between. The same ditto sits beside him on the 1 January 1933 ensigns' page. Four June 1931 is the ordinary graduation day of the class of 1931, and the Lucky Bag of that class is his.
On 1 January 1933 his present duty was the battleship Maryland. On 1 January 1934 the duty column says only "Battle Force." It does not name a ship. The Naval Institute's summary of his later reminiscences says that after graduation he served in Maryland, on the Battle Force staff in California, and in the four-stack destroyers Rathburne and Aaron Ward. Maryland is in the register. "Battle Force" is in the register. California and Rathburne are in that summary and were not found on a register page read for this essay. Aaron Ward is in the register twice. On 1 July 1935 he is a lieutenant (junior grade), date of rank 4 June 1934 by ditto from Tyra's printed date a few lines above him, signal 4759, present duty Aaron Ward. On 1 July 1936 he is still a lieutenant (junior grade) of that date, signal 4667, still on Aaron Ward.
The 1 July 1941 register, which no longer prints the ship, has a column for the expiration of the last cruise or tour of sea service. Beside him it reads April 1937. By 1 July 1937 he is ashore. He is still a lieutenant (junior grade), date of rank 4 June 1934, special-course code 32, present duty "Naval Academy (instrn.)," and his name carries the symbol (V). In that year's explanatory notes, (V) means "On promotion list." Code 32, in the key of the 1 July 1940 register, means "Completed course in chemical warfare." He is still at the Academy under instruction duty on 1 July 1938, still with code 32, and the index of that register calls him a lieutenant. On 1 July 1939 the lieutenants' page prints the date of rank in full for Tyra, "30 June 38," and dittos it down to Colwell, signal 3970, course 32, "Naval Academy (instrn.)." The Navy Directory of 1 January 1939 says the same thing in its own shorthand: Lieutenant John B. Colwell, Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, instruction.
The ordnance course comes next, and the registers are tighter than the summary. Code 26 means "Completed postgraduate course in ordnance engineering (general)." It is not beside his name on 1 July 1939. It is beside his name on 1 July 1940, when his duty is the battleship Idaho, and again on 1 July 1941, with both 26 and 32. The 1 July 1941 register dates the sea cruise then in progress from 21 September 1939. The Navy Directory of 1 June 1940 and the Directory of 1 April 1941 both have Lieutenant John B. Colwell on Idaho. So the paper trail is: Academy instructor through the register of 1 July 1939; a completed general ordnance-engineering course recorded by 1 July 1940; sea duty dated from 21 September 1939; Idaho on 1 June 1940, 1 July 1940, and 1 April 1941. The Institute's summary collapses this into "postgraduate work in ordnance engineering and a 1939–42 tour" in Idaho. The year 1942 as the end of that tour is the summary's, not a register's. The July 1942 register, where he is already a lieutenant commander, does not print a ship.
He made lieutenant commander, temporary, on 15 June 1942. On the lieutenant commanders' page of the 1 July 1942 register that date is printed at the head of the grade and carried as "do" through signal 3701, John Barr Colwell, courses 26 and 32, permanent rank lieutenant. On 1 July 1943 he is still a lieutenant commander, signal 3582, the temporary date again a ditto of 15 June 1942 from the head of the grade, permanent lieutenant with date of rank a ditto of 30 June 1938, birth 26 November 1909. Neither of those two registers, as read here, prints where he was.
The Institute's summary supplies the missing station in one clause: "In 1942 was gunnery officer in Halsey's South Pacific Force." No directory or register page read for this essay names that staff, or Halsey, beside him. The summary is the Naval Institute's abstract of eight interviews John T. Mason, Jr., recorded between April 1973 and February 1974. The transcript is 290 pages. It was not opened. The sentence about Halsey's gunnery officer is used here as that abstract, not as a quotation from Colwell and not as an order found in a file.
On 1 November 1942 he was a commander, temporary. The 1 July 1944 register, commanders' list, prints "1 Nov. 42" beside Thomas Donald Tyra and dittos it through Alexander Craig Veasey, Horacio Rivero, Jr., Allan Lorentz Reed, and John Barr Colwell, signal 3268. Permanent status in that block remains lieutenant, 30 June 1938. He had been a temporary commander for fourteen months when he was given a destroyer.
War years as lived
The ship was Converse (DD-509), a Fletcher-class destroyer commissioned on 20 November 1942 under Commander D. C. E. Hamberger. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships sends her through the northern Solomons with Destroyer Squadron 23 in the autumn of 1943: the Buka and Shortland bombardments, the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay, a night shoot with Stanly at a surfaced submarine, and the Battle of Cape St. George, where a Japanese torpedo struck her and did not explode. None of that was his. He was not her captain. The squadron's Presidential Unit Citation, as DANFS dates it, covers 31 October 1943 to 4 February 1944. His command, when it begins, overlaps that citation by days, not by the battles that made the citation.
A crew history, "Thanks for the Memories," the Converse yearbook of 1981 edited by Sam Pompei and reprinted at destroyerhistory.org, says that on 20 January 1944 Commander J. B. Colwell, USN, relieved Lieutenant Commander E. H. McDowell, USN. McDowell had been executive officer and had himself relieved Hamberger. The same history says McDowell relieved Colwell on 27 September 1944. They were not found in DANFS, which names Hamberger at the commissioning and does not name the captains who followed. They are used here as the crew book's dates.
What the crew book says he walked into is a ship already proud of itself. Before the paragraph that records his relief of McDowell, the yearbook prints a message from Captain Arleigh Burke: no squadron in any navy had won more battle honors in less time than "the fighting, chasing 23rd." The message is placed before Colwell takes command. It is not printed as a welcome to him.
The yearbook gives January 1944 to "intensive preparations" for operations against New Ireland and New Britain. DANFS says she rejoined the squadron at Port Purvis on 30 January 1944 "for bombardments and hunting forays against Japanese shipping through February and March in the northern Solomons." The yearbook is more particular, and it is a reunion book, not an action report. It says her first job in the new operation was anti-shipping sweeps around Green Island and Cape St. George, working from Hathorn Sound and Blanche Harbor. On 5 February she bombarded the supply and bivouac area at Buka and destroyed a number of barges. On 10 February she bombarded supply areas at Tairaka and Teopasino on Bougainville. On 13 February she went with other ships of the squadron on what the yearbook calls one of the most daring missions of the war, an anti-shipping strike of the Rabaul–Kavieng–Truk route ending in a dawn bombardment of Kavieng harbor. The sweep, it says, found nothing. The bombardment was answered by heavy and accurate counterbattery fire. Every ship was straddled. None was seriously damaged. On the way out, a short bombardment left a radar station probably destroyed, supply dumps hit, wharf areas damaged, and one large ship with decks awash. From 1900 on 14 February to 0200 on 19 February, the yearbook says, Converse was at battle stations for 67 hours of a 103-hour stretch.
A second sweep and bombardment of Kavieng followed. The yearbook says that on the preliminary sweep the ships found a 5,000-ton Japanese merchantman and sank her. It does not say Converse sank her alone. At Kavieng, it says, Converse and Spence of Destroyer Division 46 fired at the shore while the three ships of Division 45 swept south. Hits were seen in the town, and gasoline and ammunition burned in the harbor. When the return fire seemed to have the range, the destroyers retired at high speed under stack smoke. The yearbook's last Solomon action under this telling is coverage of the Green Island landings and more anti-shipping sweeps.
DANFS picks up the ship, not the captain, on 27 March 1944, when Converse cleared Port Purvis to join Task Force 58. She screened the carriers for the strikes on the Palaus from 30 March to 1 April, covered the Hollandia landings through the air attacks and the bombardment, and was still firing during the landings on 22 April. At the end of the month she was in the screen for the carrier attacks on Truk, Satawan, and Ponape. Strikes preparatory to Saipan began on 12 June. On 15 June, while troops went ashore in the Marianas, her task force hit the Bonins, then came back. When the Japanese fleet came out, DANFS says she "continued her screening through the resulting aerial Battle of the Philippine Sea" on 19 June, the two-day fight in which three Japanese carriers went down and Japan lost aircraft and pilots it could not replace. She joined the shore bombardment of Guam and Rota at the end of June, replenished at Eniwetok, and on 4 August sailed for overhaul at Mare Island.
The crew book tracks the same cruise and adds two small human details DANFS does not. At Palau, it says, Converse took part in the shore bombardment and picked a single Japanese out of the water; he was transferred to Lexington; his partner refused rescue and went back to a wreck that was then destroyed by gunfire. On the Bonin raid she took five more Japanese off a raft. The yearbook's calendar of the fast-carrier weeks is Hollandia on 21–23 April, Truk on 29–30 April, Ponape on 1 May, Saipan on 11–12 June, the Bonins on 14–16 June, the air battles west of Saipan on 19 June, raids on Saipan, Pagan, and Guam on 20–25 June, Rota and Guam on 27 June, and Guam again on 30 June and 1 July. It says that on 3 August, at anchor at Eniwetok, orders came for the Navy Yard at Hunters Point, with training in Hawaii to follow. DANFS says she sailed on 4 August for Mare Island. Hunters Point and Mare Island are not the same yard. Both sentences are left standing in the gaps. What they agree on is that the combat cruise ended in the first days of August.
He was relieved on 27 September 1944, if the yearbook is right, while she was in that overhaul and the Hawaiian training that followed it. DANFS brings her back to action on 3 November 1944, screening carriers on the routes to Leyte, and then to Mindoro, where on 21 December she rescued 266 men from LST-749 under suicide attack, and on to Lingayen, Corregidor, the Visayans, and the Okinawa picket line. Those months are the ship's. They are not his. McDowell, the officer he had relieved in January, was the officer who relieved him in September. The yearbook does not say why the command was given back.
By 1 July 1944, while he was still her captain, the register marks him (G-1). In that volume's distinctions, (G-1) means "Awarded Bronze Star Medal." The 1 July 1945 register still carries (G-1), and its notes say the distinctions printed there are those issued and recorded through 1 May 1945. No citation was found. The register does not say whether the medal was for the Kavieng weeks, for the screen around the Philippine Sea, for the South Pacific staff, or for something else. It is not narrated here as a reward for a named action.
Nothing in DANFS or the yearbook records a man killed on Converse while he had her. The torpedo that failed to explode, the near miss that killed the radars, the nights off Empress Augusta Bay, were 1943. The suicide planes and the 266 men in the water were after he had left. His war in command, on the paper that survives, is a borrowed ship at the end of a famous squadron's Solomon run, a February of long hours at battle stations under counterbattery fire, a spring and summer in the screen of the fast carriers, and a relief during the yard period.
Cost
The cost that can be documented is mostly a cost in credit, and in what the record refuses to explain.
He took Converse after the squadron had already done the thing it would be remembered for. Burke's message, the Presidential Unit Citation's window, Cape St. George, the unexploded torpedo: all of that belonged to the officers and men who had been aboard in the last months of 1943. Colwell's name sits on the last days of the citation period and then on a different kind of war, sweeps and bombardments in waters the squadron already knew, and after 27 March the anonymous, necessary work of a screening destroyer in Task Force 58. DANFS can say "continued her screening" through the Battle of the Philippine Sea and be accurate without ever saying what the captain decided. The crew book can count 67 hours at battle stations off Kavieng and still not record an order in his voice. There is no action report here with his signature, and no letter.
The Bronze Star is on the register by 1 July 1944 and the citation is not. A decoration without its words is a mark in a column. It does not say what he did under the straddles at Kavieng, or on the staff before that, or whether anyone thought the medal was enough. When he left the ship in September, the hard months still ahead of her, Mindoro and Corregidor and Okinawa, went to the man he had relieved. If that was a verdict on his eight months, the yearbook does not say so. It records the relief and goes on with the ship.
What he carried out of the war, on the Institute's later summary, was not a destroyer reputation but an ordnance education: the postgraduate course already on his 1940 register, the gunnery billet on Halsey's staff if the summary is right, and then a long tour at the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren. The summary calls Dahlgren the next thing. It does not say what the proving ground asked of him, or what it cost. The wartime registers stop at the Bronze Star, the temporary rank, and the birth date. They do not mention a wife waiting, a child born, a wound, or a night he described. Those silences are the cost this essay can actually point to. The rest would be invention.
After
The Institute's summary, and only that summary for most of the billets, is the spine of the career after Converse. It says a long tour at Dahlgren, then executive officer and commanding officer of the battleship Missouri, then the staff of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, and the Bureau of Ordnance. It says that in 1953–54 he was executive assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger Kyes. It says a high point was service as deputy to Admiral Red Raborn during the development of Polaris. It says he commanded the oiler Elokomin and Galveston, "first guided missile light cruiser." It says that as a flag officer he was Commander Amphibious Group Four, Director of the Chief of Naval Operations' Long Range Objectives Group, Commander Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet, and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Fleet Operations and Readiness, and that he retired in 1969.
Some of that is corroborated. Some of it is not, in the sources read here.
DANFS, in the volume published in 1968, says the second Galveston was commissioned at Philadelphia on 28 May 1958, "Captain J. B Colwell in command." She had been laid down as a Cleveland-class light cruiser, left unfinished, and rebuilt as a Talos missile cruiser, CLG-3. DANFS then follows the ship: she left Philadelphia on 30 June 1958 for trials out of Norfolk, spent the rest of 1958 in the Norfolk area, and on 24 February 1959 fired the first Talos missile ever shot at sea. It does not say he was still in command for that shot, or on the day she sailed. A compiled roster that puts his relief on 18 November 1958 was not traced to a log and is not used. Elokomin was not found in a DANFS page or a register read here. She stays inside the Institute's sentence.
The 1 January 1955 register lists him as a captain. The 1 January 1960 register lists him as a rear admiral, designator 1100, the unrestricted line. He was a captain on 28 May 1958 and a rear admiral by the first day of 1960. The day he put on the flag is not labeled in a column heading recovered here.
A citation for the years between those ranks does exist at one remove. The Military Times Hall of Valor, citing All Hands for March 1961, prints a Legion of Merit to Rear Admiral John Barr Colwell for service from 5 December 1955 to 30 December 1957 as Deputy Director of the Special Projects Office. The text it gives says he formed a group of high-caliber people versed in missile development, and that the Navy's progress in ballistic missiles could be attributed in large measure to his ability to mold a team from government, industry, and universities, under the Special Projects Office, to develop a fleet ballistic missile. The magazine page was not opened. The wording is used as Hall of Valor's reproduction of that All Hands notice, not as a citation copied from the Navy's medal file. It is the only postwar decoration for which a text, even a secondhand text, was found. Hall of Valor also lists a Navy Distinguished Service Medal to him as a vice admiral in the Vietnam War period, and says the citation is needed. The boilerplate synopsis on that page is not a citation and is not repeated here as one.
An archival finding aid at East Carolina University describes a letter of August 1964 from Vice Admiral John Barr Colwell, Commander Amphibious Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, congratulating Captain Frederick J. Ruder on the end of a tour. That is a cataloguer's identification of a signatory, and it puts him in that billet, as a vice admiral, in August 1964. The 1 January 1968 register, corrected to 1 March 1968, prints him among the vice admirals by name, and the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations roster in the same volume places "John B. Colwell, VADM, U.S. Navy" in the line that matches Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Fleet Operations and Readiness), between the manpower deputy and the logistics deputy. The Institute's summary and the register agree on that last Washington billet. The summary's 1969 retirement was not found in a register. The 1969 and 1970 registers were not in hand.
He lived a long time after the flag came off. The Institute's page dates him 1909–2008. The Social Security compilation gives John B. Colwell, born 26 November 1909, died 5 February 2008, last residence Takoma Park, Montgomery County, Maryland, ZIP 20912. His brother William's obituary of November 2020 speaks of him as already dead, and calls him vice admiral. No newspaper obituary of John himself was found, and so no list of survivors in his own name. The nephew James Colwell is still only a nephew in William's notice. The oral history, unrestricted by the man who gave it, revised and retyped in 2002 from the 1974 original, is the thing he left that speaks at length. It was not read. What this account can say he left, from the sources that were read, is a class book that remembered his wise-cracks, a destroyer cruise that the crew book remembered as Kavieng and the fast carriers, a Bronze Star without its citation, a missile cruiser commissioned under his name, a Legion of Merit text preserved at second hand for the Polaris years, and a vice admiral's title on a 1968 register and on a younger brother's grave notice.