Ships
- USS Helena (CL-50) Captain, 29 March 1942 – 25 September 1942
Oliver Middleton Read was born on 12 January 1889 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1911. He made his career in the United States Navy and was promoted to captain on 1 July 1939. In the spring of 1942 he was fifty-three, a long-service surface officer, and next in line for a light cruiser already scarred by the opening day of the Pacific war.
On 29 March 1942 Read took command of Helena (CL-50). He relieved Robert Henry English, Jr., who had been her captain since July 1941 and had her at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, when a Japanese aerial torpedo tore into the ship as she lay inboard of the minelayer Oglala. Helena had been commissioned at the New York Navy Yard in September 1939 under Max Burke DeMott. Read's tour opened while the cruiser was still recovering from that first blow.
Emergency repairs at Pearl Harbor were followed by permanent work at the Mare Island Navy Yard. Helena was still there in late June 1942. When the yard finished with her, Read took the ship back to the South Pacific. She escorted a carrier ferrying aircraft and a detachment of Seabees, then made two fast trips from Espiritu Santo down to Guadalcanal as the struggle for the island was beginning. Those passages put the cruiser on the supply line that kept the Marines ashore.
Helena next joined the task force formed around the carrier Wasp. On the afternoon of 15 September 1942, about 125 miles southeast of San Cristobal, that force was covering six transports loaded with Marine reinforcements for Guadalcanal when a Japanese submarine struck Wasp with three torpedoes. The carrier burned out of control. Read held Helena in the rescue. Her crew took off nearly four hundred of Wasp's officers and men and carried them to Espiritu Santo. That salvage of a stricken carrier's company was the hardest test of his months in command.
Read turned Helena over on 25 September 1942 to Gilbert Corwin Hoover. Under Hoover, and then under Charles Purcell Cecil, the cruiser fought the night battles off Guadalcanal and in the central Solomons that brought her the first Navy Unit Commendation awarded to a ship. Cecil was still in command when Helena was lost in Kula Gulf on 6 July 1943. Read had already gone on to flag duty.
As a rear admiral he commanded a task group in the South Atlantic. On long patrols, ships under him intercepted German blockade runners and sank them, a campaign recognized with the Legion of Merit. From September 1944 through August 1945 he commanded Destroyers, Atlantic Fleet, and received a Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit. He was also awarded the Navy Cross. Read retired as a vice admiral and died on 14 March 1972.