Cotten, John Henderson

Ships

• USS Charles J. Badger (DD-657) Captain, 18 April 1944 – 26 August 1945

Lieutenant Commander John Henderson Cotten had Charles J. Badger (DD-657) from 18 April 1944 to 26 August 1945. That pair of dates is a compiled commanding-officer list. It is not a deck log. It is the only command window that attaches this name to a fighting ship in the sources read here.

He is one man in the Navy’s own books. The Register of 1 January 1934 lists him as a midshipman from North Carolina, admitted 24 August 1931. The Register of 1936 has him an ensign on New Mexico. The Register of 1 July 1944 prints the birth date 28 June 1913 beside John Henderson Cotten, file number 74887 in the index of that volume. The same file number is on the index lines of 1 July 1945, 1 January 1950, and 1 January 1955. The Registers of 1 January 1959, 1 January 1960, 1 January 1961, and 1 January 1962 still have him, a line captain, Naval Academy source code, year group 35, designator 1100, lineal number 1125. The 1 January 1962 line prints the birth date again as digits, 28 June 1913, and the date 6 June 1935. No second John Henderson Cotten appears in the registers searched.

He is not his father, Lyman Atkinson Cotten, Naval Academy class of 1898, who died in January 1926 and for whom the Navy named the destroyer Cotten (DD-669). He is not his older brother, Lyman Atkinson Cotten, born 25 April 1909, who taught English at the University of North Carolina and was not a naval officer. He is not Junius Lee Cotten, born in August 1895, a naval aviator, a commander and then a captain on the retired list, in charge of the trade schools at Naval Air Station Jacksonville on 1 April 1941, file number 17077. He is not Charles B. Cotton, a pay clerk in the Ninth Naval District in the Directory of 1 June 1940, later indexed as a supply lieutenant commander. He is not Harris C. Cotten, a different name on the 1 July 1945 index. He is not Johnny Walter Cotten, Thomas Randolph Cotten, Cecil Cotten, or Michal Cotten, names that appear in the 1966 Register after this officer has dropped out of it. A Liberty ship was named for his grandmother, Sallie Southall Cotten. That ship is not his, and the destroyer Cotten is not his command. No source read here puts him in command of the ship that carried his father’s name.

Origins

The birth date the Navy printed is 28 June 1913. The Register of 1 July 1944 writes it out, “28 June 13,” next to an admission month of August 1931 whose day the optical reading lost. The Register of 1 January 1962 prints the same day as digits, 6, 28, 13. The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, in the article on his father, gives the same day. A family genealogy site, citing California passenger and crew lists that were not opened for this essay, gives 10 June 1913 at Karuizawa. The Annual Register of the Naval Academy, for the class of 1935 at the end of its second year, June 1933, gives his age at admission as 18 years and 2 months. On a warrant dated 24 August 1931, a boy born on 28 June 1913 is 18 years and just under two months; a boy born on 10 June is 18 years and two months and some days. The age column does not settle it. The date used here is the one the Registers spell.

The place is the finding aid’s, not a certificate. The John Henderson Cotten Papers at the University of North Carolina say he was born in “Karulzawa,” Japan, in 1913, to Lyman A. Cotten, naval attaché, and Elizabeth Henderson Cotten. Karulzawa is the finding aid’s spelling of Karuizawa, the hill town above Tokyo. The 1935 Lucky Bag, in the paragraph the optical reading places immediately before his name, says he was born and bred in Japan until the age of three, and makes a joke of a fair complexion among “the natives.” The class book’s hometown line under the name is Salisbury, North Carolina. That is his mother’s town, not the plantation his father’s people kept in Pitt County.

The father is a known officer, and the boy’s first years are the edge of that career, not a second copy of it. Lyman Atkinson Cotten, son of Robert Randolph Cotten and Sallie Sims Southall Cotten, entered the Naval Academy in September 1894 and was graduated 6 April 1898, early, for the war with Spain. He married Elizabeth Brownrigg Henderson on 16 July 1908. She was the daughter of John Steele Henderson, a North Carolina congressman, and Elizabeth Brownrigg Cain, born in Salisbury on 4 August 1875, educated at St. Mary’s in Raleigh. The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography puts the father’s attaché duty at the embassy in Tokyo and the legation in Peking in 1912–1915, which is the window in which a son could be born at a Japanese hill station and leave Japan at three. The same article sends the father back to Tokyo later, in the early 1920s. The class book does not put the son there for that second tour. What it does put on the page is a Navy child whose legal home, by the time he was a midshipman, was written as Salisbury.

The father’s death is the date the household broke. On 8 January 1926, the Dictionary says, Richmond, flagship of the light cruiser division, sailed from New York for Guatemala in the worst storm of the winter. Cotten was already ill. He took the division out, went below, and collapsed with a temperature of 106. The ship put in at Norfolk. He was transferred to the naval hospital and died of pneumonia. The dictionary’s own heading dates the death 12 January 1926. The body of the article says he was buried at Arlington on 14 January. A later finding aid for the family’s photographs says he died on 14 January. The day of death and the day of burial are not the same sentence in the dictionary, and the photograph collection collapses them. John was twelve. His mother moved to Chapel Hill that year. In 1932 she went to work in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina library, and she was the first executive secretary of the Friends of the Library. She died in Chapel Hill on 3 February 1975.

There were two sons. Lyman Atkinson, the elder, was born 25 April 1909 at Newport, Rhode Island, while the father was at the Naval War College. He taught English at Chapel Hill for decades. The papers that survive under John’s name are not, in the main, John’s. They are weekly letters from the mother in Salisbury and Chapel Hill to the son, 1931 to 1962, about work, family, the arts, and racial integration in the town, plus a few letters from John to his brother about family matters, some photographs, and a Japanese map of Okinawa that United States Marines had captured. The map was given to the library by John H. Cotten of Chapel Hill in July 1948. The rest of the collection came from the brother in October 1984, after John was dead. The voice the archive kept is the mother’s.

No wife and no child were found. A genealogy that lists the parents and the brother leaves John’s spouse blank. No obituary was opened.

Formation

He entered the Naval Academy from North Carolina on 24 August 1931. The Register of 1 January 1934 still calls him a midshipman. At the end of the second-class year, June 1933, the Academy’s Annual Register places him 191st in a class it counts at 484. The subject columns on that page are shifted by the optical reading and were not used. The 1935 Lucky Bag index sends “Cotten, J. H.” to page 203. That figure is a page, not a class standing. No final order of merit at graduation was recovered.

What the classmates printed is the only account of who he was in the regiment, and the optical reading has scrambled the columns. The paragraph that ends “That is our John” sits immediately before the name John Henderson Cotten, “John,” Salisbury, North Carolina. It calls him a bridge player, perched on a wastebasket, kibitzing, and a man who played the beautiful fiancée in Masquerader shows, interested in grand opera, symphony concerts, and literary classics, with what the sketch calls an inoffensive air of knowing how to behave, and friends from the opera house through the regiment down to the corridor. A separate page of the same book, the Masqueraders’ own, names “Cotten, President,” puts him in the first row of the photograph for The Man on Stilts, and thanks President Cotten, with the director and the officer representative, for that year’s production. The named parts in the write-up of the play are other midshipmen. The presidency is his. An activities line printed in the same scrambled block as the Japan paragraph lists Masqueraders in the fourth, second, and first class years, president in the first, the make-up gang, the ring committee, and one stripe. The presidency is confirmed by the club’s own page. The stripe and the committees are that one line, and the column is not clean.

The ensign’s date that the later registers keep printing is 6 June 1935. It is on the 1 January 1950 index line and, as digits, on the 1 January 1962 line. It is the graduation day of the class whose Lucky Bag printed him. The first sea duty the Directory will support is the battleship New Mexico. He is an ensign on her roster on 1 October 1935, with no billet written beside the name, one of a run of new ensigns under Captain C. C. Soule, Jr. Lieutenant H. G. Rickover is on the same roster, in the wardroom, not in any sentence that connects the two of them. The Register of 1936 still has Ensign John Henderson Cotten on New Mexico. The Directory of 1 April 1936 and the Directory of 1 April 1937 still have him there. The Directory of 1 January 1938 still has him there, still an ensign. Nothing in those lines says what watch he stood. A new ensign on a battleship in the middle of the 1930s was learning a ship that was still a peacetime flagship of the Battle Force. The directories do not say he was her gunnery officer, her engineer, or anything else with a title. For a little more than two years the record is the ship and the rank.

The next shore of that record is another battleship, and a promotion that falls between two issues. On 1 January 1938 he is an ensign on New Mexico. On 1 January 1939 he is a lieutenant (junior grade) on New York, again with no billet on the roster, under Captain R. M. Griffin. A compiled list prints 6 June 1938 for the lieutenant (junior grade) date. That day sits inside the gap between the two directories, and it is the statutory three years from the ensign’s date, but it was not read off a register line opened here. New York in 1939 was not New Mexico. The Directory is a change of fleet and of coast. It is not a cruise.

By 1 June 1940 the ship is small enough that the billet is written out. Lieutenant (junior grade) John H. Cotten, U.S.S. Herbert, gunnery officer. Herbert was a Wickes-class destroyer, commissioned in 1919, laid up through most of the 1920s, and from January 1935 until August 1939 a training ship for reserves and midshipmen. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the text carried by the destroyer history that cites it, sends her to Portugal by way of the Azores on 2 October 1939 and keeps her there until July 1940. The Directory of 1 June 1940, inside that stay or at the edge of it, has Lieutenant Commander R. P. Wadell in command — the Directory’s spelling — and Cotten as gun officer, with Lieutenant M. R. Stone as executive and Ensign J. T. Bland, 3d, the other watch officer named. A four-piper’s gun officer is not a battleship ensign. The battery, such as it was, was his title.

She came home, went into overhaul, and on 10 October 1940 reported to New London for sound-school training. The same DANFS text says that through 1941 her work was battle practice, torpedo drills, and antisubmarine exercises, the drills of a navy that was not yet in the war and was already training for submarines. The Directory of 1 April 1941 still has Cotten on her, and the billet has changed. Lieutenant Commander W. E. Verge is in command. Lieutenant R. Lane is executive. Cotten is the engineer. Bland, now the gun officer, has the battery Cotten had held the year before. The wardroom is still a handful of officers. He had come aboard as the gunnery officer of an old destroyer on a European station and, ten months later, was the man responsible for her machinery while she drilled off the American coast. The Directory stops, for the volumes in hand, at that April. It does not say when he left her.

War years as lived

The ranks through the first half of the war are plainer than the ships, and they are not the dates a compiled biography prints. On 1 April 1941 he is still a lieutenant (junior grade). The Register of 1 July 1942 indexes him as a lieutenant. The Register of 1 July 1943 still indexes him as a lieutenant: “Cotten, John H., Lt.,” the optical reading “Joihin.” A compiled page gives him a lieutenant’s date of 1 January 1942 and a temporary lieutenant commander’s date of 1 May 1943. The January day falls inside the gap between the April 1941 Directory and the July 1942 Register, and it was not read here as a register date. The May 1943 day does not survive the July 1943 Register, which still calls him a lieutenant. From the summer of 1941 until the spring of 1944 there is a name, a rank that has moved once, from lieutenant (junior grade) to lieutenant, and no ship.

The finding aid to his papers says he served on convoy duty in the Atlantic until the outbreak of the war. The directories do not say that. In September 1939, when the European war began, the last Directory that names him has him on New York, and the next one, June 1940, has him on Herbert in or just leaving Portugal, which was not convoy duty. In December 1941, when the United States entered the war, the last Directory that names him is eight months old, and it has him as engineer of Herbert during drills, not on a convoy. Herbert did go to convoy escort after Pearl Harbor, Key West to Halifax and Iceland, and later to Gibraltar and North Africa, and she was converted to a high-speed transport at the end of 1943. Those are the ship’s years. Nothing read here keeps him on board for them. They are not narrated as his.

Charles J. Badger is a Fletcher-class destroyer, launched 3 April 1943 at Bethlehem Steel, Staten Island, sponsored by Miss I. E. Badger, commissioned 23 July 1943 under Commander William Goodwin Cooper. The namesake is Rear Admiral Charles J. Badger, not anyone in this family. The compiled list gives her to Cotten on 18 April 1944 and takes him off on 26 August 1945. The ship’s own war, as the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships tells it in the text carried on the Wikipedia page for DD-657 — the Naval History and Heritage Command page returned an error — had already included the passage to San Francisco on 30 November 1943, reporting at Adak on 17 December, and patrol and escort in the Aleutians. From February to June 1944, DANFS says, she contributed to bombardments in the Kuril Islands. Those months straddle the compiled relief. They cannot be divided by the DANFS sentence alone.

One of them can be divided by another document, and it falls before him. On the night of 1–4 February 1944, Task Group 94.6 under Rear Admiral Wilder D. Baker sortied from Massacre Bay, Attu, and bombarded Kurabu Zaki on Paramushiru. Kevin Don Hutchison’s account in the Proceedings of February 1994, drawn from the task-group action report of 12 February 1944, puts Charles J. Badger in the group with Picking, Sproston, Wickes, Young, Luce, Kimberly, Richmond, and Raleigh. It says the lead destroyers, Badger, Luce, and Kimberly, opened fire on the southern airfield hangars, and that Badger claimed a torpedo hit on a maru that was then hulled by Richmond and beached. That strike is 4 February. The compiled list still has Cooper in command until 18 April. It is the ship’s action under the previous captain. It is not Cotten’s, unless the list is wrong, and nothing read here says the list is wrong.

What can be said of his command, if the list is right, starts in the Aleutians after the middle of April and runs through the rest of the Kuril sentence, the part DANFS does not date inside “February to June.” No second action report was opened that names a June bombardment and names him. On 8 August 1944, DANFS says, the ship sailed for San Francisco and Pearl Harbor, joined an assault convoy, and on 14 October sailed for the Philippines. She escorted transports into the landing at Dulag, Leyte, on 20 October. On the eve of the Battle of Leyte Gulf she guarded empty transports retiring toward New Guinea, then came back to Leyte with reinforcements. In December she was in Huon Gulf rehearsing the Lingayen landing. She sailed 27 December. On 8 January 1945, entering Lingayen Gulf, the convoy was attacked by kamikazes. DANFS says one of them crashed into Kitkun Bay. Two days later Badger escorted Kitkun Bay to San Pedro Bay and took up patrol. None of that text names the captain. It is the itinerary inside the compiled window.

After Ulithi she rehearsed at Leyte for the Kerama Retto landing, the step before Okinawa. DANFS has her there on 26 March 1945, guarding a landing that surprised the Japanese and did not stop the suicide planes. It says that during those attacks she claimed a kamikaze. Once the Okinawa landings began she took the southern flank. On 7 April she joined a force moving north against the last Japanese surface sortie, Yamato and Yahagi and eight destroyers. Carrier aircraft sank Yamato, the cruiser, and all but four of the destroyers before the surface ships could engage. The morning the record keeps for this ship came two days later, and it was not a gunnery problem.

In the half-light of early morning on 9 April 1945, DANFS says, she was lying to on her fire-support station. An eighteen-foot Japanese suicide boat — the public DANFS text says a Japanese army Maru-ni — came out of the gloom, dropped a depth charge close aboard, and got away. The position given with that sentence is 26°18' N., 127°39' E. The explosion knocked out the engines and caused heavy flooding. Quick work, the same account says, controlled the flooding, and a tug brought her into the Kerama Retto anchorage. After temporary repairs she went to Bremerton for overhaul and arrived 1 August. The verbs are the ship’s: knocked out, controlled, brought, proceeded. They are not a portrait of a man on the bridge. No action report signed by him, no deck-log page, and no letter of his from that morning was found. If the compiled dates are right, he was the commanding officer when the plant died and when the tug came. The Navy’s measure of the work, in the only prose that describes it, is that the ship did not sink and that she reached a yard.

The war ended while she was still in that yard. The compiled list keeps him in command until 26 August 1945, eleven days after the surrender, and then gives the ship to Lieutenant John Dandridge Henley Kane, Jr., until 22 September. If that date is right, he did not take her back to sea, and he did not take her into reserve. DANFS says she was placed out of commission in reserve at Long Beach on 21 May 1946. NavSource’s table says 10 May 1946. Either day is after he had left. She received five battle stars. Those are the ship’s. They are not entered here as his decorations.

The Register of 1 July 1944, the first register inside the command window, prints his name on the active list with the qualifications “6-a” and “18-a,” the birth date, and the August 1931 admission. The rank columns on his line did not survive the optical reading. In that volume, 18-a means the Naval War College correspondence course in international law. The code 6-a is printed beside his name and is not defined in the explanatory notes that could be read; item 6 in the same key is a master’s license under the Steamboat Inspection Service, and no “6-a” line was found. He is not to be called the holder of that license on this evidence. The index of the same register gives file number 74887 and a rank the optical reading turns into garbage. The Register of 1 July 1945, still inside the compiled command, indexes him as a commander, file 74887. The project stub and the NavSource table style him a lieutenant commander for the whole window, 18 April 1944 to 26 August 1945. A compiled page styles him a temporary commander from 1 March 1944. The July 1943 Register still has him a lieutenant, so he was not a commander then. Between July 1943 and July 1945 he became one. Which rank he wore on 9 April 1945 was not read off an order.

The decoration the family papers remember is not the morning of 9 April. The finding aid to his own papers says he was awarded the Bronze Star in 1945, and it also says that as commander of Badger he was involved in the bombardment of the Gilbert Islands, Okinawa, and other Pacific islands. The Gilberts are not in the DANFS itinerary of this ship at all. She was reporting at Adak in December 1943, when the Gilberts operation was already over. The finding aid to his brother’s photographs says something different and more specific: a Bronze Star for action in the Kurile Islands, and command of Badger given to him in 1945. The command date in that sentence is a year later than the compiled list. The Kurils are in the ship’s history, and part of them, the February strike, is before the compiled relief. Hall of Valor’s page for John Cotten does not list a Bronze Star. The Register of 1 July 1945 records distinctions issued through 1 May 1945, and no decoration symbol was recovered from his line in the optical text. No citation was found. The Bronze Star is what two archival biographies assert. It is not a text that says for what, or on what day, or over whose signature.

After

The war rank is still the one the 1 January 1950 Register uses. The index line there is file 074887, John Henderson Cotten, commander, line, year group 35, with 6 June 1935 on the same line. In the body of that volume his name sits in the alphabetical run of his Naval Academy class, between Charles Bonham Langston and Ralph Jacob Baum, on a page of officers who are, where the rank prints, commanders. The finding aid, which is not a register, says that after the war he held several assignments, chiefly in Washington, and that he saw duty on Des Moines in 1948–1950, Compass Island in 1959–1960, and Galveston in 1961. It does not say he commanded any of them. It says he was at the Armed Forces College in Norfolk in 1952, the Fleet School at Key West in 1953, and the Naval War College at Newport in 1956–1957, and that in 1954 he was naval liaison officer to the Eighth Army in South Korea. The photograph collection’s note shortens the Korean duty to “briefly” and a liaison to the Army, and it puts him in 1964 with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, on the Multilateral Force. None of those billets was checked against an order or a ship’s roster. They are the shape the family papers’ processors gave the career. The registers, which do not print the ships in these years, at least keep the rank.

On 1 January 1959, 1 January 1960, 1 January 1961, and 1 January 1962 he is on the active list of line captains. The 1960 and 1962 lines are the ones that can be read as a row: lineal number 01125, source code 01, which that series of registers uses for the Naval Academy, year group 35, designator 1100, a line officer who is not designated for aviation or for engineering duty only, date of rank 1 July 1954, birth 28 June 1913, and, at the end of the 1962 row, 6 June 1935. Captain from 1 July 1954 is the Navy’s date, printed three times in a form the optical reading does not scramble. A compiled page’s 1 July 1954 for the captaincy matches it. The same compiled page’s 1 July 1965 for retirement was not found in a register. He is in the 1962 volume. A search of the 1966 Register’s optical text found other men named Cotten and did not find John Henderson. Absence from one OCR is not a retirement order.

The decoration that does have a published synopsis is not the war. Hall of Valor, citing All Hands for November 1965 and marking the citation as needed, says Captain John H. Cotten received the Legion of Merit for service in 1964 and 1965 as chief of the Special Studies Division, Policy Planning Staff, in the office of International Security Affairs, and as deputy and senior officer in that division. The synopsis is political-military work: the Berlin crises, studies of command, and the control of international nuclear forces. The page files the award under the heading “Vietnam War,” which is the site’s label for the years, not a sentence in the synopsis. Nothing in the synopsis puts him in Vietnam, on a ship, or under fire. It puts him at a desk in the argument over how allied nuclear forces would be commanded. The photograph collection’s “Multilateral Force” in 1964 is the same office and the same year, and it is the same kind of work. The Legion of Merit, on this evidence, is for that, not for the depth charge off Okinawa and not for the Kurils.

He died at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1982. That is the finding aid to his papers. No month, no day, and no death certificate were found. He was sixty-eight if the year is right and the birth date is 1913. His mother had died seven years earlier. The letters she had written him every week from the time he entered the Academy until 1962 were already in the boxes, or on their way into his brother’s hands. The Okinawa map had been in the library since 1948, given from a Chapel Hill address while he was still a commander. What the Navy kept, in the registers, is a line captain of the class of 1935 who had been a lieutenant on the eve of his one known command and a commander by the last summer of it. What the ship history kept is a destroyer stopped in the water at dawn off Okinawa, engines gone, flooding checked, towed in. The two were not joined by any citation this essay could find.