Ships
- USS Hunt (DD-674) Captain from 31 October 1951 · Relieved on 20 November 1953
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships calls him Comdr. Lynn F. Barry at the recommissioning of Hunt. The Navy Register of 1 January 1952 still prints his permanent rank as lieutenant commander, dated 1 July 1951, while carrying him in the commanders' lineal list. By 1 January 1955 the permanent rank is commander, and the date of that rank is the same day, 1 July 1951. He is not Barry Kennedy Atkins. The Lucky Bag of the Naval Academy class of 1941 and the Navy Registers expand the F. The middle name is Forbes.
Hunt had been out of commission since 15 December 1945. Barry took her when she came back, at San Diego, on 31 October 1951. What he did in the Pacific war is not that command.
Origins
The Register gives the birthday the Lucky Bag does not. On 1 July 1943, 1 July 1944, 1 July 1945, 1 July 1947, 1 January 1952, 1 January 1955, 1 January 1958, and 1 January 1960, the date of birth beside Lynn Forbes Barry is 12 July 1919. No register examined here prints a birthplace. The class book gives the home that went with the name: Washington, D.C. The index of the 1941 Lucky Bag puts an address under him, 412 3d Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. Whether he was born in that city, or only brought up there, the registers do not say.
The sketch his classmates wrote is the only picture of him before the Navy, and it is a character reference more than a biography. The script over the photograph is his own name, Lynn F. Barry, not a nickname. "You want to behave tonight? Then go with Lynn!" That, they said, was the reputation he had built. If anyone thought him a sissy, boxing or wrestling would correct it. For six years Forbes went to a Boy Scout camp on the Potomac, and there he won his gold palm as an Eagle Scout. Two years before he entered the Academy he won a two-year scholarship to Staunton Military Academy by writing an essay. Through the prepping, and before it, "his mind was on his work and athletics, leaving no time for women at all." At Annapolis he kept the same reputation. He might not get the highest grades, they wrote, but he had "that common sense and the poise that every Naval officer should have," and with it "his complete love of the sea." They thought those two things would carry him far.
The activities line under the sketch is plainer than the prose: Boat Club; Ketch Skipper; Company Yawl; baseball 4; battalion football 4, 2, 1; battalion boxing 2; Spanish Club. In that book the numbers run from 4 for plebe year to 1 for first class, so the baseball and one of the football seasons are plebe year, the boxing and another football season are second-class year, and the last football season is first-class year. Nothing in the book names his parents, a brother or a sister, or the girl the sketch says he had no time for. The scholarship essay does not survive here. Staunton is in the sketch and not, so far, in a school register this search recovered.
He entered the Naval Academy on 1 July 1937. That is the "date of entry" the wartime registers print beside the birthday, and it is the ordinary date for the class that would graduate in 1941. The war moved the graduation up. The Register of 1 July 1941 lists him as an ensign, signal number 7504, date of rank 7 February 1941, the date dittoed down the class from the man at the head of the block. The same 7 February 1941 is the date of his first commission in every later register that prints it, and the source code on the 1958 and 1960 lineal lists is 1, which that edition defines as the United States Naval Academy, year group 1941. His class standing, the congressman or the at-large appointment that got him in, and the order of merit are not in the volumes read for this essay. The Lucky Bag's state roll places the nickname-less "Lynn Barry" with the District of Columbia names, just before the "at large" block. That fits the Washington address. It is not an appointment paper.
Formation
His first ship was a battleship, and he joined her as the newest kind of officer.
On 1 July 1941 the Register's duty column for signal 7504 shows 1 March 1941 under "date of present shore duty, leave, or commencement of cruise." The name on that line was lost to the OCR of the printed page; the alphabetical index of the same volume ties signal 7504 to Barry, Lynn F., ensign, and the men on either side of 7504 in the body are the classmates who bracket him everywhere else, John Baptiste Thro and Welby Northmore Pugin. The Navy Directory of 1 April 1941, the last directory the Navy published, is unambiguous: "Barry, Lynn F, ens, u s s Nevada." On the ship's own roster he is Ens. L. F. Barry, in the run of ensigns without signal numbers that follows the numbered officers. The captain is F. W. Rockwell. The executive is Commander H. J. Grassie. The navigator is Lieutenant Commander L. C. Grannis. Barry has no billet printed. He is one new ensign in a long wardroom. The 1 March date is the best candidate for the day he reported, because it sits in the cruise column and the April directory already has him aboard. It is not a deck-log entry, and it should not be treated as one.
He was a lieutenant (junior grade) by the Register of 1 July 1942. The index gives signal number 7537 and the rank. The body of that volume prints the full name, Lynn Forbes Barry, in the class block, but the dates on those lines were scrambled by the OCR and are not used here. The day he put on the half-stripe is not recovered.
The permanent rank lagged the rank he wore, which is how the wartime registers work and is easy to misread. On 1 July 1943 he is in the lieutenants' section. The date of temporary rank, dittoed from the head of the class block on that page, is 1 December 1942. The permanent rank is still ensign, dated 7 February 1941. Birth 12 July 1919, date of entry 1 July 1937, signal 7564. The special-courses column on his line is empty. On 1 July 1944 he is still a temporary lieutenant from 1 December 1942, still a permanent ensign from 7 February 1941, signal now 7477, and the courses column has changed. It reads 76-b. The explanatory notes of that Register define 76-b as "Completed course in RADAR, Naval Research Laboratory." The same code is still beside his name on 1 July 1945, when he is still a temporary lieutenant of 1 December 1942 and still a permanent ensign, signal 7306. The course was recorded between the 1 July 1943 Register and the 1 July 1944 Register. The Register does not give the month, or say whether he was detached from a ship to take it.
A laboratory on the Potomac in that year is at least compatible with where Nevada was, if he was still hers. After the Aleutians firing in May 1943 the ship went to the Norfolk Navy Yard for a long modernization and did not reach British waters until April 1944. That is the ship's itinerary, from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, not a set of orders with his name on them. A radar course at the Naval Research Laboratory fits a yard period better than it fits a ship at sea. It does not prove he was in Norfolk, and it does not prove he was still in Nevada.
The war, as far as the paper goes
The fighting war is the thin part, and it has to stay thin.
On 1 April 1941 he was an ensign in Nevada. On 7 December 1941 Nevada was at Pearl Harbor, got underway, was hit, and was beached at Hospital Point. A finding aid at East Carolina University says he was not there. The guide to the Cdr. Lynn F. Barry and Betty J. Barry Collection, Joyner Library, says the maps belonged to "Cmdr. Lynn Forbes Barry, a member of the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1941," and that "during the war he served as a Lt. Commander in the Navigation Dept. on the USS Nevada (but not at Pearl Harbor)." The parenthetical is the guide's, and it is the only statement found that puts him off the ship on the morning of the attack. No muster, no deck log, and no action report was found that either lists him or accounts for his transfer. The April directory and the December attack are eight months apart. He may have left in the summer. He may have left in November. The guide says he was not aboard when the bombs fell. Nothing read here contradicts that, and nothing read here proves it from a Navy document.
The rank in the guide is also late, if it is meant to cover the whole war. The registers have him a temporary lieutenant from 1 December 1942 through at least 1 July 1945. He becomes a temporary lieutenant commander on 20 July 1945. That date is the "date of temp rank" in the lieutenant commanders' section of the Register of 1 July 1947: month 7, day 20, year 45, permanent rank still ensign, permanent date of rank still 7 February 1941, signal 6705, pay-entry base date 7 February 1941, qualifications column blank. Nevada's Okinawa bombardment, in the ship's history, runs from 24 March to 30 June 1945. If he was in her navigation department for that campaign, he was a lieutenant for it, and a lieutenant commander only afterward. The guide's "Lt. Commander" is the rank he finished the summer with, or the rank the family remembered. It is not the rank the Register gives him for most of the war. His permanent rank was still ensign on 1 July 1947. The stripe he wore and the stripe the permanent list allowed were different things, and the registers are careful about the difference.
What was kept, and later given away, is charts. The collection, unprocessed, 3.18 cubic feet, received 2 May 2017 as the gift of Kathy Barry Boone, holds eleven military grid maps dated 1935, 1938, and 1943–1945. The guide says several from 1944 cover the French northern coast, the southeastern coast, the Mediterranean, and the Marseille region, with sheets of 1935 and 1943–1944 in that same region. Others are the Italian east coast and the former Yugoslavia west coast, dated 1938. There is Okinawa, 1945, and Iwo Jima, marked Secret. Most of the sheets, the guide says, carry marks for enemy fortifications, and also airfields, roads, train routes, and coastlines, and some marks that have not been identified.
Those coasts are not a random pile. Nevada, after Norfolk, reached British waters in April 1944, fired on Normandy from 6 to 17 June and again on 25 June, fired in the invasion of southern France between 15 August and 25 September, had her guns relined at New York, and was off Iwo Jima from 16 February to 7 March 1945 and off Okinawa from 24 March to 30 June, then with the Third Fleet off Japan from 10 July to 7 August. The French sheets, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa are the charts a navigation department on that ship would have had on the table. The Italian east coast and the Yugoslav west coast are not places DANFS puts Nevada. A navigator's portfolio can hold coasts the ship never fired on. Marks on a chart show that somebody plotted fortifications. They do not show that Barry was the officer who did it, or that he was on board when the ship was on that coast. The guide says the maps belonged to him and that he served in the navigation department. It does not say he was the navigator, and the only time a Navy document names the navigator of Nevada in his lifetime of records is April 1941, when the navigator was Grannis and Barry was an ensign with no billet.
No citation, no war diary signed by him, and no deck-log signature was found. The medal column of the Registers of 1 January 1952, 1 January 1955, and 1 January 1958 does not carry a decoration code for him, in editions whose notes say that only the highest Navy decoration is shown. His classmates on the same lines often have one. He does not. If he won a Bronze Star or a letter of commendation, it is not in those columns. Nevada's seven battle stars and Hunt's wartime stars belong to the ships. They are not his unless a citation says so, and none was found.
The war, as it can be told, is an ensign on a battleship in the spring of 1941, a man the library guide says was gone before Pearl Harbor, a temporary lieutenant from the first of December 1942, a radar course at the Naval Research Laboratory on his record by the summer of 1944, a stack of marked charts from the coasts Nevada fought and from two coasts she did not, and a lieutenant commander's date of 20 July 1945, three weeks before the shooting stopped. The months between April 1941 and the charts are not filled in. Inventing them from the ship's famous year would be a different man's cruise.
The cost
Nothing in the paper says what the war cost him in the way a citation or a letter would. There is no wound, no lost ship, no reprimand, no quotation from him about any of it. The classmate who wrote the Lucky Bag sketch had already described a boy who spent his time on work and athletics and left none for women, and who loved the sea in a complete way. That is a portrait of a careful midshipman in 1941. It is not evidence of how he behaved when Nevada was under fire, if he was there, or when he was not.
The only choice the records actually show is the ordinary one the whole class made: he stayed in the Navy, and the Navy kept his permanent rank at ensign until long after he had been doing a lieutenant's job. That was policy, not a personal sacrifice he is known to have argued about. By 1 July 1947 he was eleven days short of twenty-eight, a temporary lieutenant commander whose permanent commission was still the ensign's commission of 7 February 1941. The file number that follows him through the indexes is 100149.
What he left, physically, is the charts, and a collection the library catalogs under his name and the name Betty J. Barry. The guide does not say who Betty J. Barry was to him. It does not say who Kathy Barry Boone was, except that she gave the maps on 2 May 2017. Wife and daughter are the natural reading of a joint collection given by a woman with his surname and another name. They are a reading. No marriage record, no obituary, and no child's birth record was found, and this essay does not promote the reading into a fact. If there were other children, or a house, or a retirement town, they are not in the sources read here. The maps, with the fortifications inked on them, are the part of his war that survived in a public room.
After
The ship the compiled list actually gives him is the second life of a Fletcher destroyer.
Hunt recommissioned at San Diego on 31 October 1951, "Comdr. Lynn F. Barry in command." That sentence is DANFS, and it is the whole of what the official ship history says about him by name. After refresher training in local areas she departed 14 February for Newport and arrived 3 March 1952. DANFS then says she cruised from that port for the next two and a half years, on antisubmarine and plane-guard duty, and that she left Newport on 1 June 1954 for Yokosuka, the start of a long cruise that went on to the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Suez, and Naples. The two and a half years and the 1954 cruise are the ship's. A compiled commanding-officer list on NavSource, which is not a log and not DANFS, ends Barry on 20 November 1953 and starts Robert Hoitt Alexander that day. If that date is right, Barry had the recommissioning, the winter workup on the coast, the passage to Newport, and about twenty months of the Atlantic antisubmarine and plane-guard routine, and he did not have the 1954 voyage west. If the date is wrong, the records used here cannot fix it. DANFS never says when he was relieved. No change-of-command notice was found in a newspaper. The end of the tour is a date on a photograph index, and it is labeled as that.
The rank he held while he had her is the awkward one already noted. DANFS says commander in October 1951. The Register of 1 January 1952, signal 5591, has him in the section headed commanders, line, with permanent rank lieutenant commander, date of present rank 1 July 1951, birth 12 July 1919, first commission 7 February 1941, and a blank qualifications column. The alphabetical index of that volume, file 100149, designator 1100, calls him CDR and dates the line 7 February 1941, which is the original commission, not a new promotion. On 1 January 1955 the permanent rank has caught up: commander, date of present rank 1 July 1951, same birthday, same first commission, signal number garbled on the page but the name clear. He had been wearing a commander's title, at least for the ship's history and the lineal list, since the recommissioning. The permanent list made him one with a date that falls three months before he took Hunt.
After Hunt, the registers show schools rather than ships. The code numbers change from edition to edition, so they have to be read against the key in the same book. On 1 January 1955 his special-qualification code is 11, and that edition's key defines 11 as Naval School of Intelligence. On 1 January 1958 the code is 16, and that edition's key defines 16 as Naval School of Intelligence. On 1 January 1960 the codes are 04 and 35. In that edition 04, a new item the notes say was added that year, is "Qualified for Command of Destroyers," and 35 is "PG Naval Intelligence." The designator never changes. He stays 1100, an unrestricted line officer, not 1630, the special-duty intelligence designator the same notes describe. He was a line commander who had commanded a destroyer and who had been through the Navy's intelligence school, not an officer who had left the line. The registers do not say when he sat in the classroom, or where he was stationed between November 1953, if that was the day, and the 1955 book. No second command was found.
On 1 January 1958 his lineal number is 08284-00, source code 1, year group 41, designator 1100, date of present rank still 1 July 1951. On 1 January 1960 the same lineal number, the same designator, the same date of rank. He is in the line commanders, not the retired list. The alphabetical index still carries file 100149 and the rank CDR. He had not been made a captain in any register read through that date. Classmates still on the list in 1962 show a new date of rank, 1 July 1959, which is the sort of date a captain's selection leaves behind. That is their line, not his.
On 1 January 1962 he is gone. The active alphabetical index runs from Barry, Kenneth, to Barry, Margaret, with no Lynn between them. In the body of the lineal list Harold Graham Leahy is followed by John Baptiste Thro and then by Powell Prestridge Vail. In 1960 Barry had stood between Thro and the next man. The 1962 volume's title is the register of officers and of reserve officers on active duty, and a retired officer who was in the 1952 index was not found in it either, so the book may simply have stopped printing the retired list. Absence from it proves he was not on active duty. It does not prove a retirement date, a retired rank, or a death. He was an active commander on 1 January 1960. He was not an active officer on 1 January 1962. The day he left, the ceremony if there was one, and what he did with the years after are not in the registers, and no obituary turned up under the full name.
On 1 January 1962 he was forty-two, born 12 July 1919, and not yet forty-three. The Lucky Bag had promised that common sense, poise, and a complete love of the sea would carry him far. The record carries him to a destroyer command, an intelligence qualification, and then off the active list as a commander while men he had stood next to since 1937 went on. Whether that was the end he wanted, or a physical, or a choice, the paper does not say. The charts went, eventually, to a library in Greenville, North Carolina, under his name and Betty J. Barry's, from Kathy Barry Boone. That is the last public trace.