Ships
- USS The Sullivans (DD-537) Captain, 30 September 1943 – 22 July 1944
Kenneth McLoud Gentry was born in Kansas on 21 October 1907. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1930 and was promoted to lieutenant on 1 September 1937. In the first year of the Pacific war his rank moved quickly: temporary lieutenant commander on 1 January 1942, lieutenant commander on 30 June 1942, and temporary commander on 15 October 1942.
From the middle of 1942 until 11 May 1943 he commanded the older destroyer King (DD-242). His next sea command was a new Fletcher-class ship. The hull had been laid down at Bethlehem Steel in San Francisco on 10 October 1942 as Putnam. After five brothers named Sullivan were lost together in the cruiser Juneau off Guadalcanal, the Navy renamed the destroyer for them. The Sullivans was launched on 4 April 1943, with their mother as sponsor, and was commissioned on 30 September 1943 with Commander Gentry in command.
He remained her captain until 22 July 1944. After shakedown he sailed from the West Coast on 23 December 1943 with the destroyers Dortch and Gatling and entered Pearl Harbor on 28 December. Training in Hawaiian waters put The Sullivans into Destroyer Squadron 52. Her duty was the screen of the fast carriers. In January and February 1944 she guarded those carriers through the Marshalls assault on Kwajalein and Eniwetok, then stood with them when they struck the Japanese fleet anchorage at Truk in mid-February. Gentry reported that the opening raids met no opposition and had caught the defenses unprepared. When a torpedo bomber damaged the carrier Intrepid during that strike, The Sullivans was one of the destroyers that escorted the carrier clear.
She stayed with the carrier groups through the spring. The ships hit targets in the western Carolines and covered the April landings at Hollandia on New Guinea, then struck Truk again and bombarded Ponape at the turn of May. On 29 April 1944, in that second blow at Truk, The Sullivans shot down her first enemy aircraft. In June she screened carriers for the invasion of Saipan and was with them at sea for the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the action that broke the Japanese naval air force in the Marianas.
On 22 July 1944 Gentry turned The Sullivans over to Ralph Jacob Baum. Under Baum the destroyer went on to the Philippines and Iwo Jima. Robert Richard Dupzyk commanded her from 19 September 1945 until she was decommissioned at San Diego on 10 January 1946. Gentry was advanced to temporary captain on 1 May 1949. He died on 24 July 1985, at the age of seventy-seven.