Ships
- USS Bell (DD-587) Captain, 4 March 1943 – 9 April 1944
Lynn Chism Petross commanded the destroyer Bell in the Pacific during the first year of her war service. He took her as captain on 4 March 1943, the day the ship was placed in commission at the Charleston Navy Yard, and remained in command until 9 April 1944.
A South Carolina man of the Naval Academy class of 1926, Petross had already spent years in the surface navy before the United States entered the war. By the time he read his orders to Bell, he was a lieutenant commander with experience in destroyers and in the kind of routine that later mattered under fire: gunnery, ship handling, and the daily drill of a small crew.
Bell was a Fletcher-class destroyer of 2,050 tons, named for Rear Admiral Henry Haywood Bell of the Civil War era. Petross took her through fitting out and a shakedown in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, then brought her through the Panama Canal into the Pacific. In the summer of 1943 she joined the fast forces working out of Pearl Harbor.
Under Petross the ship screened carriers and fast battleships through the central Pacific offensive. She was with the covering forces for the Gilbert Islands landings in November 1943, then moved on to the Marshalls. In February 1944 Bell took part in the strikes against Truk and in the bombardment and landings at Eniwetok. Those weeks put a new destroyer and a new crew into night screening, anti-aircraft watches, and high-speed runs with the carrier groups.
On 9 April 1944 Petross was relieved in command of Bell. He left the ship as a commander, the rank under which his wartime command is remembered. Bell went on under later captains through the Marianas, the Philippines, and the end of the war, and was eventually transferred to the Italian Navy. Petross’s year was the ship’s first: commissioning, the passage west, and the opening blows of the central Pacific campaign.
Among the officers who served in that same destroyer force was Burton Herbert Shupper. Their paths crossed in the destroyer navy of 1943 and 1944, when captains of new Fletchers were taking green ships from the builders’ yards into the carrier screens.