Ships
- USS Newcomb (DD-586) Captain from 10 November 1943
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the history of Newcomb (DD-586) as transcribed on HyperWar, says she was commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard on 10 November 1943, Commander L. B. Cook in command. The initials expand from the registers and the Lucky Bag, not from the list. He was Lawrence Blanchard Cook, Naval Academy class of 1931. He was not a captain in rank when he read his orders on that ship. He was a commander, and a temporary one. The captaincy came years later, in peacetime, and the day of it was not found.
Identification
The list's "L. B." is the short form. The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps prints the full name. On 1 January 1933 he is Lawrence Blanchard Cook, ensign. On 1 July 1936 he is the same man, a lieutenant (junior grade). On 1 July 1940 he is a lieutenant. On 1 July 1942 he is a lieutenant commander. On 1 July 1944 and 1 July 1945 he is a commander. The Lucky Bag of 1931 heads his sketch Lawrence Blanchard Cook, of Nashua, New Hampshire, and calls him Larry. Nothing read here gives him a different middle name. The one later register that spells the first name Laurence, the volume of 1 January 1958, is an optical-character reading of the same Blanchard Cook who sits in the class order where Lawrence has sat for twenty-five years. It is not a second officer.
He is not the Cooks on the lines beside him, and they are not three American names that failed to expand. The card file marks all three Royal Australian Navy. The essay already filed for line 114 identifies that officer as Frederick Norton Cook, the elder brother, Naval College entry of 1919. The essay filed for line 116 identifies Cook, W. F. as William Frank Cook, called Bill, the younger brother, college entry of 1930. A note filed for line 117 says Cook, William is not a third man: the Sea Power Centre's "Lieutenant William Cook" on Vendetta in September 1944 is the same William Frank Cook, who is already line 116. The live stubs, as fetched for this essay, still print separate ship lines: Frederick on Hobart from 18 October 1943, W. F. on Nizam from 1 February 1945, William on Vendetta from 26 September 1944. Those lines belong to the Australian brothers, and the question of which card holds which of their commands is not reopened here. Nothing in the American registers folds Lawrence Blanchard Cook into either brother. He was not born at Numurkah, he did not enter the Royal Australian Naval College, and he did not command Hobart, Nizam, or Vendetta.
He is also not the other Cooks the same registers print with a B in the name. Allen B. Cook, Arthur B. Cook, Audley B. Cook, August B. Cook, and Ozias B. Cook are different officers. Arthur B. Cook is the aviator who rose to rear admiral and commanded the Lexington and later the Bureau of Aeronautics. Lawrence Blanchard Cook's course column, in the registers where it can be read, is blank. He was not designated a naval aviator. An earlier temporary ensign, Lawrence Harvey Cook, appears in a 1921 register and is a different man, commissioned and gone before this one entered the Academy. No other line officer named L. B. Cook turned up in the registers read for 1933, 1936, 1940, 1942, 1944, and 1945. The commanding officer the Dictionary names on Newcomb on 10 November 1943 is this one.
Origins
The registers agree on the day he was born and on the state, and they agree on almost nothing else about the house he came from. On 1 January 1933, again on 1 July 1940, again on 1 July 1942, and again on 1 July 1944, the birth column reads 13 September 1907, Massachusetts. The entry column reads 16 June 1927, New Hampshire. That second date is the day the Navy counted him as having entered the service, which for a midshipman of his generation is the day he was admitted to the Academy. The state beside it is the state that appointed him, not the state that registered his birth. Massachusetts and New Hampshire sit on opposite sides of the same line for the whole of his recorded career.
The yearbook supplies the town the class was willing to print under the photograph: Nashua, New Hampshire. Compilations of the Navy Cross, Hall of Valor and Home of Heroes, add a town of birth, Lowell, Massachusetts, and a home town that matches the yearbook. Lowell is not in the register. No birth certificate, no city directory, and no obituary was opened. No father is named. No mother is named. No brother or sister is named. The junior who appears in a later California real-estate license under the same three names was not tied, in anything read here, to this officer, and he is not used.
What the class book does say about the boy before Annapolis is one joke and one school. "Finishing a brilliant career at Werntz's War College, Larry came to take a post graduate course at the Naval Academy." Other sketches in the same Lucky Bag call the place Werntz's Preparatory. His sketch promotes it to a war college. The joke is that a boy from Nashua had already done his hard studying in the cram school at Annapolis, and that the Academy was the graduate course. The next sentences take the joke back. He had no little trouble with the wide course. The success the class was willing to grant him, it says, was conscientious effort through all four years. Then the sketch offers the other explanation the company liked better: some said the success was his ability to look most intelligent when he knew least about a subject. That is roommate prose. It is not a grade, and it is not a fitness report. It is the picture they chose to leave.
He had decided opinions on everything, the sketch says, and unlike others of that kind he was open to conviction. He would give a hand where it was needed, and on that the writer hangs "his wide popularity." The second paragraph is the pleasure he took in the routine. He was on the Reception Committee, the sketch says, for four years, and his affable manner was the asset. He was "a jubilator with a great tenor," and so he sang in the Glee Club and the Choir and also in the showers. The last line of the sketch, before the activity list, is the class's summary and not a Navy one: "A rich and rare mixture of sense and humor moulded into a strong character."
The activity lines printed under the sketch do not quite match the prose. They read: assistant football manager, fourth-class and third-class years; Reception Committee, third class, second class, and first class; Glee Club, the same three years; Choir, all four years; and the word Buzzard. The sketch's "four years" on the Reception Committee is one year longer than the line. The pages read for this essay do not define Buzzard. It is left as a word the class printed under his name. No sport numeral is printed. No star, the academic mark, is printed. No wife is named, and no girl. The only voice in the sketch is the class's.
Formation
He finished. The Register of 1 January 1933, in the ensigns of his class, carries the date of rank as a ditto back to 4 June 1931, the day printed at the head of that block, and the class note of the registers that follow is "Commissioned ensign June 4, 1931." His signal number that New Year was 5580. His duty was King. The same day's Navy Directory, 1 January 1933, says the same thing in the alphabetical list: Ensign Lawrence B. Cook, U.S.S. King. A year earlier, the Directory of 1 January 1932, he had been an ensign in Herbert. Those are the first two ships the directories attach to his name. Neither directory calls him commanding officer. He was an ensign, a year and a half out of the Academy, on Herbert and then on King. The directories do not say what watch he stood.
The birth and entry columns on the 1 January 1933 date page, on the row that lines up with signal 5580, are the ones already given: 13 September 1907, Massachusetts; 16 June 1927, New Hampshire. The cruise column on that row reads 11 July 1931, and the expiration of the last cruise is the ditto of August 1930. Sea service in rank is printed as one year and six months, total sea service one year and eleven months. The July 1931 date is three weeks after the commissioning day. It is the register's date for the start of the cruise he was still on, not a story about what King did.
He was still an ensign on 1 January 1933. By the Directory of 1 October 1934 the rank has changed and the ship has changed. The alphabetical line, with the surname misread as Cock and then corrected by the neighbors John H. Cook and Nathan E. Cook, is Lieutenant (junior grade) Lawrence B. Cook, U.S.S. Northampton. The day he became a lieutenant (junior grade) is not printed on a line that could be trusted. It falls in the eighteen months between the January 1933 register and the October 1934 directory. The Directory of 1 January 1935 has him there again, still a lieutenant (junior grade). The Directory of 1 July 1936 has him there. The Register of 1 July 1936 has him there, signal 4966, duty Northampton. The Directory of 1 January 1937 still has him on her, and the ship's roster that day prints him with no extra title: signal 4966, Lieutenant (junior grade) L. B. Cook, under Captain T. A. Symington in command and Commander S. S. Lewis as executive officer. Northampton was the flagship of Cruiser Division 4, Scouting Force. The directory does not print a type beyond cruiser. Cook was one of the lieutenants (junior grade) on the roster, not the navigator, not the gunnery officer, not the engineer. The directory does not say which watch he stood.
He left her between that January and the autumn. The Directory of 1 September 1937 spells the new ship, in the alphabetical list, as Orgonne. The ship's roster in the same volume is headed Argonne, Commander A. T. Clay commanding, and the lieutenant (junior grade) on it at signal 4966 is L. B. Cook, again with no extra title. The January 1938 directory repeats the misspelling in the alphabetical list and again prints him on the Argonne roster, still a lieutenant (junior grade), still without a titled job. Argonne was the flagship of the Base Force. He was a junior officer on the ship that carried the flag, not an officer of the flag.
On 1 January 1939 the directory has moved him ashore. Lieutenant (junior grade) Lawrence B. Cook, Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland. The directory does not say whether he taught, or in which department. A year and a half later he is at sea again, and for the first time the Navy prints a title that is not merely his rank. The Directory of 1 June 1940: Lieutenant Lawrence B. Cook, U.S.S. McCalla, executive officer. The ship's roster agrees. McCalla is commanded by Lieutenant Commander M. Van Metre. The executive officer is signal 4273, Lieutenant L. B. Cook. The Register of 1 July 1940, signal 4250, duty McCalla, date of rank a ditto of 1 July 1939 from the head of that block of lieutenants. The name failed to print on one extraction of that signal line and printed on the index and on the other optical-character text. The index, the directory, and the roster are the same man. He had been made a lieutenant on 1 July 1939, with the class, and within the year the Navy had made him second in command of a destroyer.
The date page of that July 1940 register, on the row numbered with his signal, still shows the birth and the entry: 13 September 1907, Massachusetts; 16 June 1927, New Hampshire. Sea service in the rank of lieutenant is eight months. Total sea service is seven years and eleven months. The columns for the date he had reported to his present duty are blank on the line that could be read. The directory is the document that says what the job was.
On 1 April 1941 the alphabetical directory places him, still a lieutenant, on Howard. The ship's roster printed in that same directory does not. Howard is commanded that day by Lieutenant F. L. Tedder, and the officers under him, as the optical character reading gives them, are an engineer and a handful of ensigns. Cook's name is not among them. The assignment to Howard rests on the alphabetical line alone. It is used here as the directory's statement of where the Bureau thought he was, and not as a photograph of the quarterdeck. He is not called commanding officer. Tedder is.
The Register of 1 July 1942 has dropped the duty column. What it still prints, for signal 3935, Lawrence Blanchard Cook, is the rank. Date of temporary rank, dittoed from 15 June 1942 at the head of the block and unbroken down to his line: lieutenant commander. Permanent rank: lieutenant. Date of that permanent rank: 1 July 1939. The special-courses column is empty. He had not been designated for aviation or for submarines or for engineering duty only. The date page gives him two years and eight months of sea service in rank, nine years and ten months in all, a cruise dated as commencing in December 1939, and the same birth and entry. December 1939 is earlier than McCalla in the June 1940 directory and earlier than Howard in the April 1941 directory. If the column means the start of the sea tour he was still on in July 1942, the ship of that tour is not named. The register of that July does not say.
By 1 July 1944 the temporary rank has changed again. In the commanders, signal 3481, the date of temporary rank is a ditto of 1 November 1942, printed at signal 3421 and carried down the page with no other date of that kind breaking the chain. Permanent status remains lieutenant, from 1 July 1939. Birth and entry are unchanged. The wartime register does not print a ship. The commander the Dictionary was about to name on a new destroyer is, on the Navy's own list of that summer, a temporary commander whose permanent rank was still lieutenant.
War years as lived
Where he was on 7 December 1941 is not in any directory read here. The last fixed point before the war is the April 1941 alphabetical line on Howard, and that line is already in conflict with the roster. Howard, by the Dictionary's account of the ship, spent the months after May 1941 exercising in the Chesapeake, and spent most of 1943 on the Atlantic and Caribbean convoy lanes, to the West Indies, Panama, Newfoundland, and Iceland, before she sailed from Norfolk for the Pacific on 21 November 1943. The Dictionary does not put Cook's name anywhere in that cruise. Two compilations, uboat.net and NavSource, list him as her commanding officer from 4 January 1943 to 13 August 1943, a temporary commander, and they name other officers on either side of those dates. Neither compilation shows a log. If their dates were right, he would have had her for the middle of the Atlantic year and would have given her up three months before she left Norfolk for the Pacific, and he would have gone from her to the ship that was commissioning in Boston in November. That is a coherent gap-filler. It is not used as his cruise. The paper that would make the Atlantic convoys his was not found. What can be said is narrower. In the spring of 1941 a lieutenant of his name was carried on Howard in the alphabetical directory. In the summer of 1942 he was a lieutenant commander at sea, on a ship the register does not name. In the summer of 1944 he was a commander. Between the directory and the Dictionary there is a hole, and the compilations are the only things that offer to fill it with a command.
The command the Dictionary does give him is Newcomb.
She was a Fletcher, built at the Boston Navy Yard. Laid down 19 March 1943. Launched 4 July 1943, sponsored by Mrs. C. C. Baughman. Commissioned 10 November 1943, Commander L. B. Cook in command. The stub's date is that sentence. He was thirty-six. He had been an ensign on Herbert and King, a lieutenant (junior grade) through the long years on Northampton and the shorter ones on Argonne, ashore at the Academy in the winter of 1939 in a job the directory does not name, executive officer of McCalla in the summer of 1940. The first time an official ship history names him, it names him as the man who takes a new destroyer from the yard.
The Dictionary then follows the ship and does not name him again. The cruise that follows is told here as his only through the night the Navy's own citation still has him in command, and only because no source read for this essay names a relief between the commissioning and that night. The later date on which the compilations say he left, 20 November 1944, is not in the Dictionary. It is marked when it matters, and it is not treated as a log entry.
She shook down in the West Indies for a month. She made passage to the Marshalls and arrived on 4 April 1944, and for two months she patrolled against submarines off Mille, Wotje, and Jaluit, atolls the Japanese still held. She joined the assault on Saipan as flagship for the screen from 29 May until 5 August, a fire-support ship and a patrol ship at Saipan and at Tinian. On 22 June, guarding transports, she and Chandler sank the Japanese submarine I-185. On 4 July her gunfire broke up a Japanese attack, the Dictionary's word is banzai, north of Garapan. The Dictionary does not say who directed the fire, or who had the deck when the submarine was sunk. It says the ship did those things while the only commanding officer it has named is Cook. That is as far as the sentence can be pushed.
From 6 September to 1 October she was in the fire-support and bombardment group for the Palaus. The Dictionary's count is twenty-three separate shore bombardments, and she covered underwater demolition teams and spotted for them. For the Leyte landings the Dictionary gives her a longer span, 12 October to 4 December, and a title: flagship of Destroyer Squadron 56. Flagship is the ship's word. It means a squadron commander was embarked. It does not mean Cook had become the commodore. Nothing read here names the squadron commander, and the office is not given to the ship's captain by assumption. What the ship did, in the Dictionary's list, was cover the demolition teams and fire the pre-invasion bombardment, the call fire, the night harassing fire, and the illumination.
On the night of 24–25 October 1944 the squadron made the torpedo attack in Surigao Strait that the Dictionary calls daring, and that the citation later called his. The Dictionary's account of the ship is the one that can be separated from the medal. She fired five torpedoes. At least one of them struck the battleship Yamashiro, which was sunk in the action. Newcomb was closely straddled and not hit. She went to Albert W. Grant, which had been hit, and she gave medical aid and a tow out of the battle. The Navy Unit Commendation later issued for the ship, in the text printed by Destroyer History and credited there to a Newcomb sailor, uses the same night in the ship's voice rather than the captain's. As leader of Destroyer Squadron 56 she "spearheaded a three-section night torpedo attack, boldly closing the battleship Yamashiro's terrific broadsides to aid in sinking the powerful man-o'-war with accurate torpedo salvos." Retiring, she went alongside Grant to take off casualties and take the disabled ship in tow. The commendation covers other campaigns as well, including Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which were not this captain's if the compilations' relief date is right. The Surigao sentences are the part that sits inside the dates for which he is still the only named commanding officer.
The citation that names him is the one Hall of Valor and Home of Heroes both print, and both attribute to Bureau of Naval Personnel Information Bulletin No. 338, May 1945. The bulletin itself was not opened. What those two print is the Navy's paragraph, not a log. The President takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Commander Lawrence Blanchard Cook, commanding officer of Newcomb, for the night of 24–25 October 1944 in Surigao Strait. A column of Japanese battleships, cruisers, and destroyers was advancing through the strait in the dark. Cook "directed the ship against fierce and prolonged enemy gunfire" and "skillfully placing his ship in an advantageous striking position despite extremely hazardous conditions, launched a devastating, accurate torpedo attack, subsequently withdrawing from the area without damage to his vessel." The rest is the formula the bulletins used: forceful leadership, indomitable fighting spirit, tremendous odds, credit upon himself and his command. The formula is the Navy talking. The operational sentences are the part that matches the Dictionary. He took her in, under fire, launched the torpedoes, and brought her out unhurt, and then the ship, in the Dictionary's next clause, spent herself on the destroyer that had not been so lucky.
The yearbook had said he looked most intelligent when he knew least. That was a midshipman's joke, not a description of this night. He had been the untitled junior lieutenant on a cruiser for three years. The night in the strait is the first moment at which a document describes him deciding anything. The document is a citation. It describes the decision in the Navy's words, and it does not quote him. No letter, no action report, and no memoir of his was found. What he said on the bridge, what he thought of the straddles, whether the torpedo that hit Yamashiro was one he was sure of or one the Dictionary later counted, is not in the paper. The paper says the ship was not damaged, and that Grant was, and that Newcomb went to her.
The Register of 1 July 1945 still lists him among the commanders, and it prints the medals. Beside the name Lawrence Blanchard Cook the distinctions are (B), (G-1), (G-1). The key at the front of that volume says (B) is the Navy Cross and (G-1) is the Bronze Star Medal. Two Bronze Stars, then, and the Navy Cross, as of that July. No citation for either Bronze Star was found. They are not assigned here to Saipan, or to the Palaus, or to Surigao, or to any other day. They are two entries in the register. The same volume does not print his ship. He is a commander with three decorations and no duty station the optical character reading kept.
If the compilations are right that he left Newcomb on 20 November 1944, then he had already left her before the register was dated, and the rest of her war is another man's. The Dictionary does not say so. It goes on, without a new name. Shore batteries at Ormoc on 9 December, while she screened landing craft. A convoy through air attack to Mindoro, 19 to 24 December. Two kamikazes driven off at Lingayen on 6 January 1945. Fire support at Iwo Jima from 10 February, a submarine on 25 February with unknown results. Okinawa from late March. On 6 April, off Ie Shima, she was hit five times by suicide planes. Eighteen killed, twenty-five missing, sixty-four wounded. She was towed to Kerama Retto, then to Saipan, Pearl Harbor, and San Francisco, and she was still there when the war ended. She was decommissioned on 20 November 1945 and scrapped at Mare Island in October 1947. She received eight battle stars. The Navy Unit Commendation covers the crew who served in any of the named periods, which is a different test from the test of who had the command.
The compilations name the officer who relieved Cook as Commander Ira Ellis McMillian, from 20 November 1944, and they have McMillian in command when she was hit off Okinawa. uboat.net spells him McMillian and says he was wounded. That relief, and that wound, were not found in the Dictionary or in a report opened for this essay. They are the reason the Okinawa afternoon is not told here as Cook's. Counting eight stars, or the five kamikazes, as his would be counting a cruise the citation does not reach and the Dictionary does not attach to his name. He had her, on the documents that name him, from the day she commissioned until the night in Surigao Strait. What he did in the month after that night, if he was still aboard, is inside the Dictionary's Leyte dates and outside anything that names him again.
After
On 1 January 1952 the register lists Cook, Lawrence Blanchard, as a commander. On 1 January 1956 the same name is a captain, in the line, in the block of the class of 1931, the man after Michael Galligan O'Connor and in the place where the old signal-number order would put him. On 1 January 1957 he is a captain again. The designator printed with the 1956 rank is the line officer's 1100, broken by the optical character reading into "110 0." The date of rank as captain did not stay on his line. It falls somewhere between those two New Years, 1952 and 1956, and the day was not recovered. No ship, no staff job, and no school is printed with the postwar name in the lines that could be read. The registers say he was still a naval officer, and that the temporary commander of 1944 had become a permanent captain. They do not say what he did with the decade.
The volume of 1 January 1958 still carries the name, spelled in that optical character reading Laurence Blanchard Cook. The word captain did not stay beside it. A text of the 1962 register that could be searched, the active-duty volume as Internet Archive served it, did not contain Lawrence Blanchard Cook at all. uboat.net prints a retirement date of 1 July 1961. That date was not found in a register opened here, and it is not used as his last day in uniform. It is the compilation's date, sitting in the hole between a name that is still on the list in 1958 and a name that is absent from the 1962 text that was searched.
No obituary was found. Hall of Valor and uboat.net both give 9 December 1999, and uboat.net places the death in San Diego County. Home of Heroes does not give a death. No grave record was opened. No widow is named in any source read here. No child is named. The tenor the yearbook put in the showers, the executive officer of McCalla, the commander who took a new destroyer out of Boston and into Surigao Strait and brought her out unhurt, is, after 1945, a rank in a register and then a date in a compilation. The life that would connect them, the house, the marriage, the work of the 1950s, the illness or the accident or the ordinary old age, was not in the paper.