Ships
- USS Mississippi (BB-41) Captain from 18 July 1945 · Relieved on 10 May 1947
John Francis Crowe, Jr., was born on 28 February 1896 and served as an officer in the United States Navy. He became a commander on 1 November 1939 and a temporary captain on 18 June 1942. In the Pacific War his command was the battleship Mississippi (BB-41), a New Mexico-class ship that had been in commission since 1917.
Crowe took command of Mississippi on 18 July 1945, relieving Heman Judd Redfield, Jr.. The captains ahead of him on the wartime list were Penn Leary Carroll, who had her when the United States entered the war, then Walden Lee Ainsworth, Calvin Hayes Cobb, and Lunsford Lomax Hunter. Under Hunter she served in the Aleutians and the Central Pacific, and on 20 November 1943 an explosion in a main-battery turret off Makin killed 43 of her men. Redfield commanded her from April 1944 through the Philippines campaign, the night action in Surigao Strait, the Lingayen Gulf landings, where a kamikaze damaged her, and the operation off Okinawa. The fighting behind her battle stars was over by the time Crowe took the bridge.
Japan gave up within weeks of his assuming command. Mississippi went north with the occupation force and was in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, when the surrender was signed. His work in that anchorage was the work of a captain at the close of a war: anchor watches, inspections, and a crew that had been away from home through years of Pacific duty, held to the routine of a battleship that was no longer firing in support of a landing.
He remained in command long after the fleet stood down. On 15 February 1946 the Navy reclassified Mississippi from BB-41 to AG-128 and started her toward a second career as a trials ship for gunnery and, later, guided missiles. Crowe saw her through that change of designation. He was relieved on 10 May 1947.