Ships
- USS Remey (DD-688) Captain from 1 May 1945 · Relieved on 12 June 1946
Compiled lists give him USS Remey (DD-688) from 1 May 1945 to 12 June 1946.
The name, the rank, and the ship agree with the records that can be checked. “Captain” on the command line is the old word for the officer in command. On 1 July 1945 the Navy Register still has him in the lieutenant commanders’ section of the line, and the Legion of Merit written for the night before he ever had Remey calls him lieutenant commander. He did become a captain. The Registers of 1 January 1960 and 1 January 1966 both date that rank from 1 July 1958. The opening date, 1 May 1945, is the date printed by NavSource and by uboat.net. It was not read off a deck log for this essay. Those same compilations close the tour on 12 June 1946.
He is not John Henry Balch, the World War I hospital corpsman who won the Medal of Honor and came back as a reserve officer in the second war. He is not Rear Admiral George Beall Balch, whose name sits in the Naval Academy registers only as a former superintendent. His file number, once the wartime registers start printing one, is 82735.
The destroyer the lists give him was already famous before he had her. Remey’s night in Surigao Strait, 25 October 1944, was fought under Reid Puryear Fiala. Balch was in that same strait that night, but in another ship, and not on her bridge. What follows is the man the registers and one citation will support, and the months the command lists assign to him. Where a ship’s reputation runs past those months, it is left with the ship.
Origins
The Navy Register is blunt about the day he was born and silent about the place. On 1 January 1950, in the class block that still lists him a lieutenant commander, the birth column on his line reads 25 March 1915. The same three numbers are there when the 1 January 1955 Register calls him a commander, and when the 1 January 1960 and 1 January 1966 Registers call him a captain: 3, 25, 15. The Registers do not print a town beside them.
The Academy does print a place, and it is not quite the same kind of fact. The 1935–36 Annual Register, in the roster of the fourth class, class of 1939, lists “Balch, John Bernard,” appointed from Hawaii, admitted 25 June 1934. The 1939–40 Annual Register, on the page that gives age at admission for the graduating class, puts him at 19 years and 3 months. Counted back from 25 June 1934, that age lands on 25 March 1915, which is the birth date the later Registers print. The Lucky Bag of 1939 heads his sketch “John Bernard Balch, Honolulu, Hawaii,” and the classmates’ paragraph says he “hails from that land of permanent sunshine and palm trees, Hawaii.” Hometown and appointing state are what those books are for. They are not a birth certificate. Uboat.net states the birthplace as Honolulu and the death as Annapolis on 26 June 1993. The birth date matches the Registers. The city of birth and the death are that site’s, and no obituary or cemetery record was found here to confirm either one.
No source read for this essay names a parent.
The yearbook is the only picture of him before the war, and it should be read as his classmates talking, not as a fitness report. They called him Red and Joe. “This tall, rangy, red-headed Irishman, known to so many of us as Joe.” The “Irishman” is their word. Nothing in the registers makes it a genealogy. “His ready smile and sunny disposition contradict the Irishness and the carrot top.” They were frank about the classroom. “He may not shine in academics (referring especially to Dago)” — Dago was their name for Spanish — “but give his hands a task, or put him in or on the water, and he’s in his native element.” They put his height in a joke: “his short stature (6 ft. 3 in.).” They closed on temperament. “His quiet, unassuming attitude covers a calm determination to have what is his and to hold it in spite of man, money, or the devil himself.”
The activities printed with that sketch, in the block that includes “Rear Commodore,” are football as a plebe, battalion football the other three years, battalion swimming, water polo, battalion crew, and the Boat Club all four years, treasurer in second class year and rear commodore in first class year, with two stripes. The Boat Club chapter of the same book names the officers without depending on that column: commodore R. N. Perley, vice commodore E. I. Gibson, rear commodore J. B. Balch. The narrative just above that list, in a line the OCR breaks as “Per-ky,” says “Chip” Perley, “Gibby” Gibson, and “Red” Balch led the club that year, trying to make sailing a minor sport and the Academy “sea-conscious.” A midshipman’s stripe is an office in the brigade, not a decoration. The water was already the part of the Academy he was good at. The classroom was not.
Formation
He did not come in with the class he finished with. The Annual Register for 1934–35 lists him among the midshipmen of the fourth class, class of 1938. The 1935–36 register then does two things that only make sense together. It carries his name in the relative standing of that class for the first year of the course, June 1935, 564 members. And it lists him again under “Retained in classes indicated,” the turnback table. On that line the DjVu text reads the middle name as Barnard, which is not how the fourth-class roster in the same volume spells him, and not how any later register spells him. The line is otherwise his: symbol h, turned back to the class of 1939, date 12 September 1935. The symbol key in that volume says h means “Deficient in studies for second term; turned back into next lower class.” The register does not say which course, and it does not invite a motive. He repeated plebe year. The Lucky Bag’s shrug about Spanish is the only later comment, and it is a joke, not the finding.
He stayed. The 1938–39 Annual Register has him in the present first class, class of 1939. The merit roll in the 1939–40 register, “581 members, all of whom graduated,” puts Balch, J. B., at order of merit 375. The relative-standing page for the completed course gives the same 375, with the symbol L. The key says L means appointed on probation as an ensign in the line of the Navy. Year by year on that page his standings read, with an asterisk on the first, 89, then 378, 519, and 345, against class memberships the page prints as 677, 614, and 581 for the later years. The fourth-year standing, 345, is not the same number as the four-year order of merit, 375. Both are in the lower half of a class that graduated everyone still there. The Navy was not promoting him for his grades. It was commissioning him anyway, which in June 1939 it did for the whole surviving class.
The date of that commission is 1 June 1939. It is the entry date on his line in the Registers of 1950, 1955, 1960, and 1966. The 1 July 1942 Register says, as a class footnote just above these names, “Commissioned ensign June 1, 1939,” and by then lists him among the lieutenants. The 1941 Register’s index still calls him an ensign. The step through lieutenant (junior grade) is not on a line read here. Uboat.net gives him lieutenant (junior grade) on 1 June 1942 and temporary lieutenant on 15 June 1942. Two weeks is possible in the wartime promotion wave. It is not confirmed by a register opened for this essay, and it is not used as a date.
The first ship that is documented is a destroyer, and he was a very junior officer in her. The Navy Directory of 1 June 1940 lists “Balch, John B, ens, u s s Downes.” The Directory of 1 November 1940 lists the same. The Directory of 1 April 1941 is more specific, because it rosters the ship. Under DOWNES: Lieutenant Commander T. H. Hederman commanding, Lieutenant E. L. Lugibihl executive officer and navigator, and, among the ensigns, “6593 Ens. J. B. Balch, 1st lt.” First lieutenant, in that column, is the ship’s billet — hull, boats, deck division — not a rank. He was still an ensign. Downes in 1941 was the destroyer Downes (DD-375). The directories do not print the hull number.
That April list is the last station found before the war. It does not say he was still in Downes on 7 December 1941, when that destroyer was burned in drydock at Pearl Harbor beside Cassin. The gap is eight months, and it must not be filled in. From the spring of 1941 until the autumn of 1944 the duty stations go dark. Rank does not. On 1 July 1942 the Register lists him a lieutenant. On 1 July 1944 the index lists “Balch, John B., Lt. Cd,” file number 82735. By the summer of 1944 he was a lieutenant commander. Where he learned to be one, the registers do not say.
The war as he lived it
The first night the records will actually describe is not a night he commanded anything.
On 25 October 1944, in Surigao Strait, the destroyer Bennion (DD-662) was one of the ships sent down the strait to fire torpedoes at the Japanese force coming up from the south. Her commanding officer was Commander Joshua Winfred Cooper. The Navy Cross later written for him, as Hall of Valor reproduces it from Commander Seventh Fleet serial 0647 of 9 February 1945, says he took her through a night torpedo attack against a column of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, launched the attack, and retired without damage to the ship. Cooper’s rank in that citation is “Captain [then Commander].” The man under him in the combat information center was Balch.
The Legion of Merit, as the same compilation prints it, is the only detailed account of Balch that night. It calls him lieutenant commander, file number 0-82735, “Executive Officer and Combat Information Center Evaluator” of Bennion. The text says that by cool direction of the combat information center he estimated the course, speed, and position of the enemy formation, kept a steady flow of information to the commanding officer and to the torpedo control officer, and that a proper firing position was reached and torpedoes fired “with unerring accuracy, even in the face of enemy gunfire.” He was authorized the combat “V.” The division line on that web page misspells the ship “Benion.” The citation text itself spells BENNION (DD-662).
The 1 July 1945 Navy Register is the official trace of the medal, and it is only a trace. Beside his name in the lieutenant commanders’ list is the letter (D). The notes at the front of that volume say (D) means “Awarded Legion of Merit, Navy Department.” The Register does not reprint the citation, does not name Bennion, and does not give the date of the action. The full wording lives, for this essay, in a secondary compilation of citations. It is specific enough, and it matches the decoration mark, that the night and the job are not in serious doubt. What the citation claims about the torpedoes is the Navy’s language in an award, not a damage assessment. It does not name the ship the torpedoes hit. Later arguments about which American destroyer put the torpedo into the battleship Yamashiro are not settled here, and they are not Balch’s to be awarded by this essay. What can be said is what the citation is for: in the dark, with the enemy shooting, the executive officer who was also the CIC evaluator kept the picture steady enough that the captain and the torpedo officer could shoot.
That is a particular kind of work. The captain fights the ship. The evaluator fights the plot: ranges, courses, the moment when the geometry is right and the moment when it has already gone. Cooper got the Navy Cross for taking Bennion in and getting her out. Balch got the Legion of Merit for the information that made the firing position. The Lucky Bag had said to put him on the water and he was in his element, and that the classroom was not. A destroyer’s CIC in 1944 was both. It was a mathematical job done in a steel room while the ship he was second-in-command of was being shot at. The citation’s word for how he did it is “cool.” There is no letter from him, and no oral history, to say whether that was composure or simply the absence of any other usable reaction. The Navy was willing to put the word on paper.
He was executive officer that night. The citation does not say when he had become one, or when he left Bennion. Bennion’s own campaign, Marianas through Okinawa, is the ship’s, and most of it cannot be claimed as his. She was still in the war after Surigao. Whether he was still in her is not known.
The command begins, on the lists, on 1 May 1945. NavSource’s commanding-officer table, credited to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, gives Lieutenant Commander John Bernard Balch from 1 May 1945 to 12 June 1946, between Reid Puryear Fiala, who had her from commissioning on 30 September 1943, and Eugene Baker Henry Jr. Uboat.net prints the same dates and calls the rank temporary lieutenant commander. Nothing opened here is a Remey deck log or a change-of-command report. The best corroboration inside the war itself is indirect. Uboat.net’s event list for Remey, which that site draws from ship diaries, has USS Iowa topping off Remey on 4 July 1945 and again on 19 July 1945 and names the destroyer’s commanding officer as Lieutenant Commander J. B. Balch. Those lines were not checked against Iowa’s original diary. They are the only contemporary-looking sentences that put him in the ship by name during the summer they say he had her.
If 1 May is right, he missed Remey’s Surigao attack by half a year. He had already had his own Surigao, in Bennion. What he inherited was a Fletcher-class destroyer of Destroyer Squadron 54 that had been in the Pacific since December 1943 and was, in the late spring of 1945, with the fast carriers off Okinawa and then against Japan. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships does not name him. The Naval History and Heritage Command page would not open for this essay. The public-domain DANFS text carried on the ship’s Wikipedia page is what was used, and it is the ship’s story. Read against the list dates, it is the only account of the cruise.
On that text, the carrier group was back off Okinawa before the end of May 1945. On 8 June Remey was with the bombardment of Okino Daito, then back with the carriers, and in to Leyte on 11 June. By 1 July the carriers were going at the home islands again. Strikes on Tokyo on the 10th, on northern Honshu and Hokkaido on the 13th and 14th. On the night of 14/15 July Remey was in the bombardment of Muroran. On the 16th she screened carriers and then joined the ships shelling Hitachi. She was in and out of the screen through the late-July strikes, weathered a typhoon that delayed the next attacks, and was off Honshu again on 9 August. Detached the next day, she went north with others of the squadron to the Kurils, joined the anti-shipping sweep in the Sea of Okhotsk on 11 August, and was at Adak on the 14th, bound for a west-coast overhaul, when the surrender came in. The orders changed. She went back to Japan for occupation duty in the Ominato area, stayed in Japanese waters until 15 September, and sailed for San Francisco, arriving 1 October 1945. In December she shifted to San Diego. From January 1946 she was in commission, in reserve. She did not decommission until 10 December 1946.
The part of that which is his, if the lists are right, runs from the last weeks off Okinawa through the voyage home and the long season of a ship being put to sleep, and stops on 12 June 1946, six months before the decommissioning. Henry, on the NavSource list, had her next. Balch did not strike the commission pennant.
It was not the battle the squadron is remembered for. Fiala had taken Remey down Surigao Strait at 0211 on 25 October 1944, in the eastern attack group with McGowan and Melvin, and had fired torpedoes under searchlights. Balch’s Remey, on the DANFS calendar, fired at harbor works and factories in the Japanese north, screened carriers, rode out the end of the war at an Aleutian pier, and then did the unglamorous work of occupation and inactivation. The pressure in those months was not a column of battleships. It was a destroyer still at war in July and August, close enough to the home islands to bombard them, and then a crew that had survived and now had to be taken home and dispersed. No letter says how he ran that. The fact that the Navy left a lieutenant commander in a fleet destroyer from the last offensive through the reserve fleet, almost fourteen months, is the only judgment it wrote down.
He was thirty when he took her, if the birth date is right: 25 March 1915, so thirty in March 1945, thirty when the war ended, thirty-one when the lists say he gave the ship up.
The cost
The cost that can be documented is mostly the shape of the career, not a wound.
He lost a year at the start, for studies, and graduated 375th of 581. The Navy kept him. The war then promoted him fast: ensign in 1941, lieutenant by 1 July 1942, lieutenant commander by 1 July 1944, in command of a destroyer at thirty while the shooting was still going on. The night he was decorated for, he was not the captain. He was the second officer, in the radar room, and the medal is a Legion of Merit rather than the Navy Cross his captain received for the same hour. That is not an injustice visible in the papers. It is the ordinary division of credit. It does mean the one action the Navy chose to describe in sentences was a night when the ship’s reputation attached to Cooper, and Balch’s name survived in the citation and, later, in almost nothing else.
No Purple Heart, no wound, no survivor’s account of a bomb or a collision was found. Remey, in the DANFS text for 1945, is not described as hit. Bennion, in Cooper’s citation, retired from Surigao without damage. If Balch was afraid, or if he lost men whose names he carried afterward, the public record does not say so.
What he had at home is known only from his children, and only late. The 2025 obituary of John Adrian Balch III, of Fairmont, West Virginia, names “the late John Bernard and Eleanor Clise Draemel Balch” as his parents and says the son was born in Annapolis in 1947. The obituary header gives the birth as 22 August 1947. It says he grew up in a Navy family and lived in many places, including Maryland, California, Hawaii, and Virginia. It says he was preceded in death by a brother, spelled there Andrew Draemer Balch. A Wall of Honor profile at the National Air and Space Museum, which the museum warns it cannot validate, is for an Andrew Draemel Balch, born in Virginia on 10 July 1949, died 2 May 2014, “the middle child of three boys,” with a younger brother Tom, “born to a family with deep Navy roots.” That profile does not name the father. The mother’s surname in the obituary is Draemel, which makes the museum spelling of the brother the likelier one, and the obituary’s “Draemer” a probable slip. The third son, Tom, is named only in the museum tribute. No marriage date, no wedding notice, and no obituary of Eleanor were found. She is a name in her son’s death notice, forty-odd years after the war, and nothing earlier.
A son born in Annapolis in August 1947 was conceived after Remey was back on the West Coast, if the DANFS arrival of 1 October 1945 and the list date of June 1946 are both right. That is as close as the papers come to a domestic life. The places the son remembered — Maryland, California, Hawaii, Virginia — are a Navy childhood, not a set of orders. The father’s billets after Remey were not found.
After
The Registers pick him up again as a rank, not as a man.
On 1 January 1950 the lineal list of his Academy class still shows him a lieutenant commander with date of rank 1 July 1949, birth 25 March 1915, entry 1 June 1939. The alphabetical index of that same volume lists him a commander, file number 082735, line, class of 1939. The two lists disagree on the rank. By 1 January 1955 the lineal list itself says commander, and it dates that rank from 1 July 1949, with the same birth and the same entry. His classmates in the same block carry the same 1 July 1949 commander date. Whatever the 1950 split between “LCDR” and “CDR” meant — permanent rank against a temporary one is the usual explanation in those years, and it is an explanation, not a sentence the register prints — the date the Navy eventually settled on for commander was 1 July 1949.
On 1 January 1960 he is a captain, designator 1100, the unrestricted line, date of rank 1 July 1958, still born 25 March 1915, still entered 1 June 1939. The 1 January 1966 Register repeats the captaincy and the 1 July 1958 date. The 1 January 1967 Register still has him on the active-duty list as a captain. Its date-of-rank digits OCR as 1 July 1956, which disagrees with the 1960 and 1966 volumes and is treated here as a misread, not a second promotion. The 1 January 1968 active register does not list him. Uboat.net says he retired in June 1967. The registers only show that he was still active at the start of 1967 and gone from the active list at the start of 1968. June 1967 fits that bracket. It was not read off a retirement order.
No postwar command, no shore station, no school, and no second war were found under his name. The Navy Directory habit of the 1940s, which put an ensign on a named ship, does not have a match in the later registers opened here. A captain of the class of 1939 with thirty years in, designator 1100, is an officer who stayed in the line. What desks or what bridges those years were spent on is a blank.
The death is the same kind of blank with a date attached to it from outside. Uboat.net says 26 June 1993, Annapolis, Maryland, aged 78. The arithmetic fits a birth on 25 March 1915. No Capital obituary, no cemetery entry, and no Academy memorial notice was found to pin the day or the place. His son’s obituary in 2025 calls him “the late John Bernard,” which says only that he died before his son. If he died in Annapolis, he died in the town where he had been a midshipman who failed a term and was turned back, and where one of his sons was born. That is a symmetry the records do not actually establish. It is worth not pretending they do.
What survived is ordinary and, given how thin the personal record is, specific. A wife whose full name is known because a son died. At least two sons, John Adrian III and Andrew, and probably a third, Tom, if the museum profile is the same family. Grandchildren named in the 2025 obituary belong to the son’s life, not the captain’s, except as evidence that the line continued. The professional survival is the rank: ensign who had been turned back, lieutenant commander of a destroyer at the end of the war, captain in 1958, still on the active list in January 1967. And one citation, for a night in a radar room in Surigao Strait, which is the only place the Navy ever described the kind of officer he was under pressure.