Ships
- USS Chauncey (DD-667) Captain, 1 November 1943 – 2 March 1945
He is the United States Navy line officer of that name, Naval Academy class of 1933, file number 72335, not those neighbors and not the other Conwells who appear beside him in the registers. Robert E. M. Conwell, file 165838, was a younger officer, a midshipman in 1940 and a lieutenant by 1944. Francis G. Conwell was a tug, not a man in this list. A separate uboat.net page for a “Lester Cameron Cornwell,” birth unknown, credits command of the destroyer John R. Craig in 1945–46; that spelling and that ship are not this officer unless a better record joins them, and none opened here does.
Origins
The Navy Register gives his birth as 18 October 1910, in Iowa, and his entry into the Naval Academy as 14 June 1929, appointed from Iowa. The 1933 Lucky Bag prints his home as Albia, Iowa, and the nickname “Elsie.” The Register’s birthplace is the state, not the town. Albia is what the yearbook claimed as home, and what later compilations have repeated as a birthplace. A birth certificate was not opened.
The only account of his parents is a sketch of charter members of the San Diego Genealogical Society. It says Ora Udell Conwell, born 24 October 1881 in Wapello County, Iowa, married Emily Jane Cameron, born 8 August 1885 in Iowa, daughter of Walker Cameron and Jane A. Robinson, on 22 December 1909, and that they had two sons, Arlo Bennett and Lester Cameron. The same page, in the paragraph on Emily, misprints the marriage year as 1090. It places the parents, in November 1946, in the Carnegie Apartments at 950 Ninth Avenue, San Diego, where Ora worked as a payroll accountant for Solar Aircraft, and it records Emily’s death on 5 July 1964 and Ora’s on 16 March 1975, both in San Diego, with burial at Oak View Cemetery in Albia. That is a society biography of the parents, not a vital record of the son. No census schedule, marriage license, or naval next-of-kin card was opened, and nothing found names a wife or children of Lester himself.
The Lucky Bag sketch, written by classmates, is the only picture of him before the fleet. It says that long before the Navy occurred to him he had been set on becoming a chemical engineer, and that the idea of “life as an iron man in steel ships” pulled him off the inland and the tall corn. Plebe year came on suddenly. Navigation, not the shop work he had thought was his future, became the subject he was good at. The sketch says the women at the Academy barely registered; friends at home got an occasional letter, and that was the extent of it. What the roommates wanted remembered was practical: if one of them left something undone, Elsie would try to keep the name out of the next morning’s report. Kindliness, generosity, and good fellowship are the words they used. The only billet printed under the sketch is “2 P.O.,” the midshipman petty-officer line that fills the activity slot in that yearbook when there is no sport to list. No varsity record is printed for him.
Formation
He was commissioned ensign on 1 June 1933, the date the Register later attaches to the class with the footnote used for that graduation. On 1 April 1934 the Navy Directory has him, still an ensign, in Tennessee. He was still in her on 1 January 1935, when the ship’s roster lists him among the ensigns; on 1 July 1935, when the Register’s duty column puts him there; on 1 January 1936; on 1 January 1937, by then a lieutenant (junior grade); and on 1 January 1938, when the battleship’s roster, under a captain, an executive officer, and the observation planes of VO-2, again lists Lieutenant (junior grade) L. C. Conwell with no titled billet. The 1 July 1936 Register still indexes him as an ensign. The 1939 Register records his date of rank as lieutenant (junior grade) as 1 June 1936. Both can be true if the July 1936 book closed before that date of rank was posted. The directories show the new rank in place by New Year 1937.
Four years in a battleship was the education the yearbook had not quite predicted. Tennessee in those years was a Battle Force ship, and a junior officer’s life in her was watches, gunnery drills, and the slow hierarchy of a turret and a division, not a command. The Register does not give him the submarine or aviation qualification numbers that sit beside many of his classmates. On the cleaner 1 July 1940 page his qualification column is blank. The sea-service columns of that same register, read against the officers above and below him whose birth dates match later books, credit him with two years and eleven months of sea service in his then rank and six years and three months of sea service in all, and they put the end of his last sea tour in May 1939.
By 1 January 1939 the directory had moved him. He was a lieutenant (junior grade) in Decatur, a destroyer of Destroyer Squadron 10, Atlantic Squadron, flagship of the squadron. Lieutenant Commander H. S. Covington was commanding officer and Lieutenant L. W. Pancoast executive officer. Conwell is on the roster without a titled job. A register printed at Washington in 1939, whose signal numbers were to be used through 1940, places him as an instructor at the Naval Academy. The 1 June 1940 directory says the same: lieutenant (junior grade), instructor, Naval Academy, Annapolis. The shore duty fits the May 1939 end of sea cruise in the July 1940 service table. He had come back to the school that had made him, to teach, just as the fleet was coming out of the treaty years.
The 1 July 1940 Register then lists him, signal number 4687, as ordered in connection with the destroyer Ward. The June directory still had him at the Academy, and the 1 November 1940 directory does not mention Ward at all. It lists him as lieutenant (junior grade), executive officer of Palmer, under Lieutenant Commander J. S. Blue. Either the Ward orders were overtaken or they were never more than orders. Nothing opened here puts him on board Ward.
Palmer, a Wickes-class destroyer laid up since 1922, had been recommissioned on 7 August 1940. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships dates her conversion to a minesweeper from 19 November 1940, eighteen days after the directory that still carries Conwell as her executive officer. He was still executive officer on 1 April 1941, now a lieutenant. The 1 July 1941 Register gives the date of that rank, beside his signal number 4487, as 1 October 1940. Blue was still in command. Conwell’s first title in a ship’s roster, on the edge of the war, was not command. It was the executive officer’s billet in an old destroyer being turned into a sweeper.
On 1 July 1940 the service table also records the birth date, the Iowa appointment, and the ensign’s commission of 1 June 1933 once more. Total sea service of a little over six years, most of it in Tennessee, then a short destroyer cruise in Decatur, then the Academy, then Palmer: that is the man the wartime Navy was about to promote quickly, because everyone of his year was promoted quickly.
War years as lived
The wartime registers stop printing ships. What they do print is rank, and one decoration.
On 1 July 1942 he was still a lieutenant. On 1 July 1943 he was a lieutenant commander. A secondary list dates the temporary promotion 1 October 1942, which sits inside that year and is not confirmed by a register line read here. On 1 July 1944 he was still a lieutenant commander, signal 4445, and the letter after his name is (E). In that year’s explanatory notes, (E) means the Silver Star Medal from the Navy Department. On 1 July 1945 he is in the commanders’ section, still with the Silver Star and not, in that book, with a Bronze Star. The commander’s rank therefore falls between those two July registers. A secondary list’s date of 1 January 1944 for temporary commander is not usable: the 1 July 1944 Register still has him a lieutenant commander.
The ship that the Silver Star names is not Palmer. It is the Fletcher-class destroyer Chauncey (DD-667). A citation transcribed by the Hall of Valor, attributed to the Pacific Fleet Board of Awards, serial 50, and dated there 14 May 1946, awards the Silver Star to Commander Lester Cameron Conwell, then a lieutenant commander, file 0-72335, as commanding officer of Chauncey in the attack on Rabaul harbor on 11 November 1943 and in the invasion and occupation of the Gilberts from 18 to 26 November 1943. The original serial was not opened. The medal itself is not in doubt by the summer of 1944, because the Register already carried it. The citation’s 1946 date may be a later writing-up. What the citation claims is specific. In three concentrated air attacks he fought the ship in defense of the whole task group, the citation says, brought Chauncey through undamaged, and gave the other ships cover that mattered. It calls the leadership what citations call leadership. The operational sentence is the useful one: the ship was hit by three raids and came out whole, and the man in the citation was the commanding officer.
The ship’s own history, the public-domain DANFS text as carried in the Wikipedia article that incorporates it, fits those dates without naming him. Chauncey was launched on 28 March 1943 at Federal Shipbuilding in Kearny, New Jersey, sponsored by Mrs. R. K. Anderson, and commissioned on 31 May 1943. She left Norfolk on 28 August and reached Pearl Harbor on 19 September. In early October she screened carriers against Wake and picked three aviators out of the water. She was at Espiritu Santo on 6 November. Three days later she sailed for the 11 November strikes on Rabaul, coordinated with the Bougainville landings. After the carriers’ first strike, Japanese aircraft came out, and for forty-six minutes Chauncey’s guns were almost continuously in action. That is the hour the Silver Star is about, described from the ship’s side rather than the board’s. The force then went north. On 18, 19, and 20 November the carriers struck Tarawa ahead of the landings, and once the troops were ashore Chauncey again helped beat off an air attack over the ships she was guarding. The citation’s Gilbert Islands window, 18 to 26 November, covers that fight. DANFS does not say the ship was undamaged. The citation does.
A second citation, transcribed from Commander in Chief, Pacific, serial 030464, dated 21 June 1945, awards the Bronze Star with Combat “V” for meritorious service as commanding officer of Chauncey from 8 November 1943 to 3 March 1945, and names the landings on Saipan, Guam, and Leyte. The 1 July 1945 Register, ten days after that serial date, still shows only the Silver Star. The lag is real. The medal is not in the official list consulted here. The citation is the evidence, and it is a transcription.
If that command window is right, and it is the best dated evidence of command that was opened, then a run of the ship’s history belongs to his time in the chair even where the citations do not itemize it. After the Gilberts, DANFS has Chauncey with the carriers for the 4 December 1943 strike on Kwajalein and Wotje, in a night air attack that was driven off after midnight, then back to Pearl Harbor. In late January 1944 she screened escort carriers into Majuro and patrolled there and at Kwajalein through the occupation. In April she watched Emirau, screened escort carriers off the Aitape landings, replenished at Manus, and stayed on the New Guinea strikes into May. In June she was off Saipan for the pre-landing raids and the assault on the 15th, then off Guam for bombardment and air strikes, her guns in the air attacks of the 16th and 17th. She was back and forth to Eniwetok with transports, and from 9 July she was in the bombardment of Guam before the landings on the 21st, screening carriers there through the month. She left Guam eastbound on 10 August for Eniwetok and repairs at Pearl Harbor. In October she sailed with the Southern Attack Force for Leyte, gave close protection at the landings on the 20th, patrolled the transports that night while they unloaded close to the beach, and on the 22nd, two days before the Battle of Leyte Gulf, cleared with unloaded ships for Manus. In November she made two escort voyages toward Leyte and Palau. The Bronze Star names Saipan, Guam, and Leyte and does not mention the Marshalls, Emirau, or Aitape. Those are the ship’s movements during the months the citation assigns to him, not a separate claim that a board enumerated them.
After that, DANFS has her in overhaul and training off the West Coast until late February 1945, then at Pearl Harbor. The force she joined next got underway on 14 March for the strikes that opened the Okinawa campaign, including the bombing of Franklin on 19 March, when Chauncey moved in to screen the carrier. That March sailing is after 3 March 1945, the last day the Bronze Star citation gives him. uboat.net ends his command on 2 March. The one-day difference was not settled from a deck log. Okinawa, the kamikaze picket line, and the last strikes on Japan are the ship’s story after him, unless a log shows he was still aboard. None was opened. He is not to be written into Franklin’s screen on the strength of a ship history that has changed captains.
What the two citations add up to is a command of about sixteen months in which the tested hours were air attacks: Rabaul on 11 November 1943, the Gilberts later that month, and, on the Bronze Star’s own words, the landings at Saipan, Guam, and Leyte. The Silver Star’s particular claim is that he kept his own ship intact while covering the others. That is as close as the paper comes to a character under fire. There is no letter, no oral history, and no deck-log remark in his voice.
His earlier ship should not be quietly attached to this. Compilations, uboat.net and NavSource among them, list him as commanding officer of Palmer from 12 November 1942 to 27 September 1943, which would put him in command for the North African landing, where DANFS has Palmer off Fedala on 7 November 1942, seizing a French trawler and engaging a shore battery the next day, and then on Atlantic escort through 1943. The directories prove only that he was her executive officer under Blue on 1 November 1940 and 1 April 1941. Wartime registers do not name the ship. No war diary or deck log naming a relief was opened. Palmer was sunk in Lingayen Gulf on 7 January 1945, two killed, thirty-eight wounded, twenty-six missing. That was long after the date those compilations give for the end of his supposed command, and it is not his sinking on any evidence used here. The North African operation is not narrated as his.
After
The next command that rests on a citation, rather than on a ship-photo index, is the internal-combustion-engine repair ship Kermit Roosevelt (ARG-16). The Hall of Valor transcribes a Gold Star in lieu of a second Bronze Star, with Combat “V,” to Commander Conwell as her commanding officer from 15 August 1950 to 23 July 1951, for emergency repair work for the Seventh Fleet at ports in Japan and Korea and, at Hungnam, for repair services to all types of ships while the evacuation was under fire. DANFS, again through the Wikipedia article that incorporates it, has the ship on four Far East deployments between 10 July 1950 and 23 October 1953, supporting Task Group 95.6 at Wonsan from 10 October to 27 November 1950 and Task Group 79.2 at Hungnam from 13 to 23 December 1950. Those Hungnam days fall inside the citation’s window. The citation does not name Wonsan. The ship’s history does not name Conwell. Together they support a repair-ship command in the evacuation winter, not a cruise narrative of every port she touched before August 1950 or after July 1951. On 1 January 1950 and on 1 January 1952 the Register still lists him as a commander, which matches the rank on this citation.
A Legion of Merit with Combat “V,” transcribed from Commander Seventh Fleet serial 2072 of 23 November 1953, styles him captain and commanding officer of Destroyer Division 72 from 26 December 1952 to 23 April 1953, and as commander of Task Unit 95.21 along the North Korean coast. The ships under him, including the flagship, were taken under enemy gunfire. The citation says his counterbattery damaged active guns and hurt the crews, that he ran nine search-and-rescue missions, and that he supervised getting a damaged friendly minesweeper out of an area still under fire. The minesweeper is not named. The flagship is not named. No division roster was opened. This is the citation’s account of a division commander’s cruise, not a reconstructed schedule.
He was a commander on the Register of 1 January 1952 and a captain, designator 1100, on the Register of 1 January 1956. The Legion citation of November 1953 already calls him captain for duty that began in December 1952, so the promotion sits somewhere in that overlap, and the month was not read off a promotion list. He is still a captain on the active list, file 072335, signal number 00486, on 1 January 1958, 1 January 1959, and 1 January 1960. A 1962 register text searched for this essay does not contain his name. That may be retirement, or it may be a gap in the copy. Hall of Valor says he retired as a captain, which is the last rank the registers show, and gives no retirement date.
The same secondary pages that repeat the Academy class give his death as 1 May 1994, at San Diego, aged 83. No obituary, death certificate, or cemetery record was opened. If the San Diego Genealogical Society sketch of his parents is right, both of them died in that city before he did, and were taken back to Albia. Nothing found says whether he was buried with them.
What survived the wars, on paper, is a line officer who spent his junior years in a battleship, learned destroyers as an executive officer, and then, in the citations, was the man on the bridge of Chauncey when the aircraft came, and later the man responsible for a repair ship under fire at Hungnam and for a destroyer division on a hostile coast. The voice in which he understood any of it was not preserved in anything opened here.