Ships
- USS Essex (CV-9) Captain from 1 November 1945 · Relieved on 19 July 1946
Laurence Oldham Mathews, Jr. commanded the aircraft carrier Essex in the first year after Japan’s surrender. He came to that duty from inside the ship. In late August 1945 he was a commander, a rank he had held since 15 October 1942, and he was her air officer.
Essex was still under Roscoe Leroy Bowman, who had become captain on 30 June 1945 and held her through the end of the fighting. The wartime captains before Bowman were Donald Bradley Duncan, who commissioned her on 31 December 1942, Ralph Andrew Ofstie, and Carlos Wilhelm Wieber. Mathews took command on 1 November 1945 as captain.
By then the Navy had ordered Essex to Bremerton, Washington, to be inactivated. His months aboard as captain were spent on that work: a wartime crew dispersing, aircraft and stores leaving the ship, and a carrier that had fought across the Pacific being made ready for reserve. He was relieved on 19 July 1946.
John Roberts Strane, a lieutenant commander, succeeded him and remained until Essex was decommissioned and placed in reserve on 9 January 1947. The carrier returned to service on 15 January 1951 after a long modernization. Mathews’s eight and a half months were the passage between her war cruise and that later career.
He and Anne Bratton Mathews had two sons, Laurance Oldham Mathews III, born in Columbus, Georgia, on 7 April 1934, and John Bratton Mathews. The children grew up moving with his assignments. In another tour he served as attaché to Finland, where the elder son learned to sail. That son always counted Pleasure Hill, at Hunt, Texas, as home.