Ships
- USS South Dakota (BB-57) Captain from 21 December 1946 · In command when she was decommissioned, 31 January 1947
Matthew Stelzner Schmidling was from Brooklyn. He was born on 8 October 1913, graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1935, and served as a line officer in the United States Navy. The duty that places him with the battleship South Dakota (BB-57) came at the end of her active life, and he held it as a commander.
On 1 March 1944 he became a temporary commander. He commanded the destroyer Stembel (DD-644) from 2 January 1945, through the last months of the Pacific war. In the spring of 1946 he moved to the new destroyer New (DD-818). Stembel was decommissioned at the end of May 1946.
South Dakota was a different ship, and her fighting career was already finished before he came aboard. She went into commission in March 1942 and was in the Pacific by autumn. In the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands that October, a bomb damaged her while her guns engaged Japanese aircraft. On the night of 14-15 November 1942, in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, electrical failures left her poorly able to fight a sudden close-range action, and Japanese gunfire wrecked much of her upper works. Schmidling was not in command that night. Her captain was Thomas L. Gatch. Washington sank Kirishima. South Dakota did not. She lost many men killed or wounded, returned to the United States for repairs, and later went back to the Pacific.
After Gatch, South Dakota was commanded in turn by Lynde D. McCormick, Allan E. Smith, Ralph S. Riggs, Carl R. Stillman, Charles B. Momsen, Emmet P. Forrestel, Carlton R. Todd, and William K. Parsons. Through the rest of the war she screened fast carriers and bombarded shore targets in the campaigns that ended with Japan's surrender.
Schmidling became commanding officer of South Dakota on 21 December 1946, with the fighting over and the Navy laying up its big ships. He was in command when she was decommissioned on 31 January 1947. In those few weeks the crew left and the battleship was inactivated for reserve. She did not return to service. Years later she was sold for scrap, and pieces of her were set aside for a memorial in Sioux Falls.
He died in Pennsylvania on 12 August 1975, at the age of sixty-one.