Ships
- USS Brownson (DD-518) Captain, 3 February 1943 – 26 December 1943
- USS Watts (DD-567) Captain, 29 April 1944 – 27 January 1945
Joseph Benedict Maher was born in Connecticut on 21 March 1904 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1927. He spent his career as a surface officer. From 21 November 1941 to 6 January 1943 he commanded the destroyer-minesweeper Stansbury. On 1 July 1942 that ship took aboard 372 survivors of the passenger liner City of Birmingham, which a German submarine had torpedoed about 250 miles east of Cape Hatteras.
On 3 February 1943, at the New York Navy Yard, Lieutenant Commander Maher commissioned the Fletcher-class destroyer Brownson (DD-518) and became her first commanding officer. Bethlehem Steel had built her at Staten Island. She was the first ship of the class finished with a square bridge, laid down in February 1942 and launched on 24 September 1942. Mrs. Cleland S. Baxter, granddaughter of Rear Admiral Willard H. Brownson, sponsored her. The destroyer carried the admiral’s name.
Her early work was in the Atlantic. Until 11 June 1943 she escorted convoys and patrolled against submarines along the northeastern seaboard and farther out in the North Atlantic. In mid-April 1943 she joined Gillespie and Dyson as escort for the new battleship Iowa during trials from New York toward Hampton Roads. From 12 to 31 May she crossed to North Africa and returned. In mid-June she left for the Pacific, passed the Panama Canal, and went on through Pearl Harbor to the Southwest Pacific, where the campaign had reached the Bismarck Archipelago.
On the afternoon of 26 December 1943, Brownson was screening the landings at Cape Gloucester, New Britain, when a Japanese dive bomber hit her with two bombs. The bombs struck near the number two stack, to starboard of the centerline. A heavy explosion followed inside the ship, her back broke, and she sagged amidships while bow and stern lifted. Maher ordered the crew to abandon ship. She sank about seventeen minutes after the hits. More than a hundred of her men were killed. Maher survived, and the destroyers Daly and Lamson recovered the living. Brownson received one battle star for her service.
He returned to command the next spring in another new destroyer. On 29 April 1944, the day Watts (DD-567) entered service, he became her captain. She was a Fletcher-class ship, as Brownson had been. He remained in command until 27 January 1945.
He next led Destroyer Division 92. From 11 May through 21 June 1945 he was officer in tactical command of a radar picket station off Okinawa, with his flag in Boyd. The station gave early warning and directed fighters against raids aimed at the ships off the beachhead, and the picket ships fought the planes with their own guns. When aircraft badly damaged Thatcher, he brought Boyd alongside to help and then escorted the crippled destroyer toward port while the attacks went on. He received the Navy Cross for that duty. Over a stretch of twenty-eight days the station was credited with thirty-one enemy suicide planes.
Maher remained in the Navy and rose to rear admiral. He retired in 1957, thirty years after leaving the Naval Academy, while serving as military liaison with NATO in London. He died of congestive heart failure on 10 June 1996 in Annapolis, Maryland, at the age of ninety-two.