Pacific ships

USN · Lieutenant Commander

Wilson, Julian DuBois

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JW

Ships

Julian DuBois Wilson was born on 2 July 1896. He was a member of the United States Naval Academy class of 1918 and followed a career in surface ships. By the middle of the 1930s he was a lieutenant commander. Wartime promotion carried him to commander and then to captain.

On 5 June 1936 he took command of the destroyer Worden (DD-352), relieving Henry Bryan Broadfoot. Worden was a Farragut-class ship, commissioned at the Puget Sound Navy Yard on 15 January 1935. Robert Earle Kerr had commanded her at commissioning, and Clarence Edward Olsen had also served as commanding officer before Broadfoot. Wilson's two years fell in the last peacetime period of the destroyer force. He was promoted to commander on 3 February 1938 and stayed in Worden until 11 June 1938, when he turned the ship over to Lunsford Yandell Mason.

Ransom Kirby Davis commanded Worden after Mason, and William Grady Pogue had her from April 1941. On 12 January 1943, with Pogue in command, the destroyer was escorting a transport into Constantine Harbor at Amchitka when a current set her onto a rock. She lost power, broached in the surf, and broke up. Fourteen of the crew drowned. Pogue was washed overboard and pulled from the water alive.

Wilson next commanded the fleet oiler Mattole (AO-17). He took her on 16 June 1940 and remained until 6 March 1943, a tour that ran from the last months of peace through the early part of the Second World War. On 1 January 1942 he was appointed a temporary captain. On 30 June 1942 he was promoted to captain.

On 30 December 1944 he assumed command of the battleship Maryland (BB-46), relieving Herbert J. Ray. The Colorado-class ship had already been through Pearl Harbor, the Central Pacific landings, and the night battle in Surigao Strait. In 1945, under Wilson, Maryland returned to the western Pacific for the Okinawa campaign. In April a kamikaze struck her and put an after turret out of action, and she withdrew for repair. He was still her commanding officer when the fighting ended. He was relieved on 1 December 1945. Wilson died in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on 1 September 1958.