Ships
- USS White Plains (CVE-66) Captain from 15 November 1943
Oscar Arthur Weller was born in Beeville, Texas, on 2 December 1896, and was known as Tex. He finished the Naval Academy’s accelerated wartime course on 6 June 1919 and was graduated with the Class of 1920. He became a commander on 1 May 1940 and a temporary captain on 18 June 1942. He eventually retired from the Navy as a rear admiral.
On 15 November 1943 he commissioned the escort carrier White Plains (CVE-66) at Astoria, Oregon, and became her first commanding officer. The Casablanca-class ship had been built by the Kaiser yard at Vancouver, Washington. Laid down that February as Elbow Bay, she was renamed in April, launched on 27 September, and delivered to the Navy the same day Weller took command. He put a newly assembled crew to work making her ready for sea.
White Plains finished outfitting at Astoria on 4 December 1943 and began shakedown four days later. She entered San Diego on 21 December. On the 30th she sailed for the Gilbert Islands by way of Pearl Harbor, reached Tarawa Atoll on 11 January 1944, and landed the aircraft she had ferried out. She left on the 17th and was back at Pearl Harbor six days later. Most of the officers and men who had commissioned her had come straight from their first naval training, with a smaller group of engineers and flight-deck sailors already practiced in her machinery, catapults, and arresting gear.
Weller remained in White Plains through the first half of 1944. During the Marianas campaign he commanded the ship and, at the same time, Escort Carrier Unit 2, Task Unit 52.14.2, a force that included White Plains, Kalinin Bay, and the destroyers Callaghan, Longshaw, and Porterfield. Captain Dennis Joseph Sullivan relieved him on 16 July 1944. Under Sullivan the carrier fought in the Battle off Samar that October and received the Presidential Unit Citation for that action. Over her whole wartime service White Plains earned five battle stars.
On 22 July 1944 Weller took command of the fleet carrier Wasp (CV-18). From 29 August to 30 October 1944, with Wasp serving as flagship of her task group, he led her through the long run of strikes that carried the fast carriers into the Philippines campaign. He received the Navy Cross for that command.
He was still captain of Wasp the next winter. From 10 February to 22 March 1945 the carrier covered the landings on Iwo Jima and struck Chichi Jima, Okinawa, Miyake Jima, Ishigaki, Hachijo Jima, and targets on Kyushu, at Kure, and around Tokyo Bay. On 19 March a Japanese bomb exploded just below the hangar deck and killed or wounded many of the officers and men he relied on to fight the ship. Weller kept Wasp in action and sent her aircraft on the strikes still scheduled. A Gold Star in lieu of a second Navy Cross followed. He left Wasp on 7 June 1945. Oscar Arthur Weller died on 25 November 1974.