Ships
- USS Aulick (DD-569) Captain, 27 October 1942 – 16 March 1944
Olin Perry Thomas, Jr., was a career officer of the United States Navy. He was born on 15 February 1905 and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1926. He was promoted to lieutenant on 30 June 1936 and to lieutenant commander on 1 April 1941. On 15 August 1942 he received a temporary appointment as commander. He died on 16 February 1959, the day after his fifty-fourth birthday.
His first wartime command was the destroyer Goff (DD-247), which he held from 15 December 1941 until September 1942. On 24 May 1942, while the ship was operating in the Caribbean, Goff took aboard forty-eight survivors of the American tanker Samuel Q. Brown. The German submarine U-103 had torpedoed the tanker the day before, about a hundred miles south of Cape Corrientes, Cuba, and the ship had sunk.
He next commissioned a new Fletcher-class destroyer. Aulick was built by Consolidated Steel at Orange, Texas, laid down on 14 May 1941 and launched on 2 March 1942. Mrs. Thaddeus A. Thomson, wife of the acting commandant of the Eighth Naval District, sponsored the ship at the launching. Thomas, a lieutenant commander with the temporary rank of commander, placed Aulick in commission on 27 October 1942 as her first commanding officer.
The destroyer spent her opening months in shakedown, working in the Gulf of Mexico and out of Casco Bay, Maine. She left Philadelphia on 23 January 1943 for the South Pacific, passed through the Panama Canal, called at Bora Bora in the Society Islands, and reached Noumea, New Caledonia, on 12 February. After about a week of antisubmarine patrol off New Caledonia, Aulick joined Task Force 64 in the Coral Sea and stood by for the American landing in the Russell Islands. The force returned to Noumea on 25 February, and Aulick was detached. On 1 March she sailed for Espiritu Santo as escort for the British ship Athene.
Thomas remained captain of Aulick through that first Pacific year and into 1944. On 16 March 1944 he turned the ship over to John Douglas Andrew, who commanded her for the next year. William Reese Hunnicutt later commanded Aulick, from March 1945 until the destroyer was decommissioned in April 1946. Thomas was advanced to temporary captain on 1 March 1948.