Ships
- USS Erben (DD-631) Captain, 28 May 1943 – 18 December 1943
Joseph Henry Nevins, Jr., was born in Manhattan, New York, on 18 June 1904. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis with the class of 1925 and served his career in the United States Navy, retiring as a rear admiral. He died in Annapolis, Maryland, on 24 December 1991.
He was promoted to lieutenant commander on 29 December 1939. On 1 August 1942 he received the temporary rank of commander, the grade he held when he took a new destroyer to the Pacific.
Bath Iron Works in Maine launched Erben on 21 March 1943. Mrs. C. B. G. Gaillard, daughter of Rear Admiral Henry Erben, sponsored the ship, named for the nineteenth-century officer who had commanded ironclads on the Mississippi and later a coastal patrol fleet in the Spanish-American War. Nevins assumed command when the Fletcher-class destroyer was commissioned on 28 May 1943, and he remained her captain through 18 December 1943. After fitting out she worked up from Boston, crossed the Pacific, and arrived at Pearl Harbor on 2 October 1943 to join the Fifth Fleet.
The crew trained in the Hawaiian Islands with carrier forces. On 1 November, during those exercises, Erben recovered an aviator who had come down at sea. On 8 November she sailed from Pearl Harbor, met a carrier task group on 15 November, and took a place in the screen while the carriers struck the Gilbert Islands ahead of the landings.
Marines went ashore in the Gilberts on 20 November. Erben stayed with the carriers that were flying support, and late that afternoon her guns engaged when thirteen Japanese torpedo planes attacked the formation. Through the operation her crew also took aviators from the water after planes crashed or ran out of fuel. Nevins commanded her in that fighting from 18 through 26 November.
The same task group then struck the Marshalls. On 4 December, as the ships withdrew, Japanese aircraft kept up a night attack for more than seven hours. Erben fired on the torpedo planes and came out of the action undamaged. For his leadership as commanding officer during the Gilberts occupation and that Marshalls fight, Commander Nevins received the Silver Star, cited for handling the ship within reach of Japanese bases and for the defense of the task group.
He was relieved on 18 December 1943 by Morgan Slayton. Three days later Erben left Pearl Harbor and went on through the later campaigns of the Pacific war. William Hutton Snyder commanded her from March to December 1945, and Stanley P. Wyatt had her from December 1945 into February 1946. Nevins's months in Erben covered her commissioning, her passage into the fleet, and the carrier screening in which the new destroyer met Japanese aircraft off the Gilberts and the Marshalls.