Ships
- USS Jenkins (DD-447) Captain, 9 July 1943 – 29 December 1943
- USS Little (DD-803) Captain from 19 August 1944
Madison Hall, Jr., of Bryan, Texas, was born on 5 March 1911. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis with the class of 1931 and served as a junior officer through the peacetime Navy of the 1930s. On 1 July 1939 he was a lieutenant. After the United States entered the Second World War his promotions came in quick succession: temporary lieutenant commander on 15 June 1942, and temporary commander on 1 November 1942. He held that wartime rank of commander when he received his first destroyer command. He remained in the Navy after the fighting ended and retired as a captain.
On 9 July 1943 he relieved Harry Fanker Miller as captain of USS Jenkins (DD-447), a Fletcher-class destroyer already seasoned in combat. Commissioned at the end of July 1942, USS Jenkins had screened the landings at Casablanca that November under Miller and had then gone out to the South Pacific. By the time Hall came aboard she was in the Solomon Islands, where the fight for New Georgia was still underway and Japanese ships were still trying to run troops and supplies down the Slot from Rabaul. He took a ship that knew night action, at the moment when those night actions were deciding the central Solomons.
Within a few days of assuming command, Hall had USS Jenkins in the Battle of Kolombangara. On the night of 12–13 July 1943 the destroyer steamed in the van of a small force of cruisers and destroyers that intercepted a Japanese formation off the island. The meeting came in darkness and at close range, and both sides used guns and torpedoes. Hall worked USS Jenkins into the attack and kept her in the fight as the formation maneuvered. The Japanese light cruiser Jintsu was sunk in the action. Torpedoes also struck ships on the Allied side: cruisers were damaged, and the destroyer Gwin was lost. For the way he handled USS Jenkins that night, Hall received the Silver Star.
The rest of his months in USS Jenkins mixed rescue work with the fleet's turn toward the Central Pacific. On 18 July 1943, still in his first weeks aboard, the destroyer was sent to a position about one hundred miles south of the Santa Cruz Islands to aid the seaplane tender Chincoteague, which Japanese bombers had damaged. USS Jenkins escorted the tender back toward Espiritu Santo while enemy aircraft remained a threat. Through the early autumn she stayed on escort duty and in training as the Pacific Fleet prepared the Gilbert Islands assault. In November 1943 she screened Rear Admiral W. A. Radford's Northern Carrier Group during the strikes and landings at Makin and Tarawa. Hall left the ship on 29 December 1943, relieved by Philip Daly Gallery. USS Jenkins remained in the Pacific under later captains, among them Gene Thomas Shirley, who had her in the last year of the war.
His next command was a new ship. On 19 August 1944 Hall became captain of USS Little (DD-803), another Fletcher-class destroyer. He took her through fitting out and training and then west across the Pacific as the fleet gathered for the last campaigns against Japan. By the spring of 1945 USS Little was off Okinawa with the forces covering the invasion of the Ryukyus. Her station was the radar picket line, the outer ring of destroyers posted far from the transports so their radars could see raids forming and their guns could meet those raids, often with only a few ships nearby.
That station cost the ship on 3 May 1945. Japanese aircraft attacked USS Little while she was on radar picket duty off Okinawa, and suicide planes struck her. The hits started fires and opened the hull. The crew fought the damage, but the wounds were too severe, and USS Little sank. Hall came through the loss of his ship. For his conduct as commanding officer in that action he received a Gold Star in lieu of a second Silver Star, recognizing gallantry on the picket line on the day USS Little went down.
A Legion of Merit, with the combat device, added to those two Silver Stars and covered his service in command of USS Jenkins and USS Little through the fighting from July 1943 into May 1945. In those two destroyers he had gone from the night battles of the Solomons to the suicide-air attacks off Okinawa. He stayed in the Navy when the war ended and retired as a captain. Madison Hall died on 13 November 1991.