Ships
- USS Dayton (CL-105) Captain from 7 January 1945 · Relieved on 21 December 1945
Paul William Steinhagen commanded Dayton (CL-105) from her commissioning on 7 January 1945 until 21 December 1945. NavSource lists him as a captain and leaves the final-rank column blank. His gravestone at the Naval Academy Cemetery reads Rear Admiral, United States Navy.
Uboat.net and Find a Grave agree on a birth date of 11 February 1897. Find a Grave places the birth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the death on 14 January 1968 in Annapolis, Maryland, at 70. The burial is the United States Naval Academy Cemetery, Section 07, Lot 1726. The same memorial names his parents as Gustav Carl Freidrich Steinhagen and Margaret Therese Dunn Steinhagen, the spelling Freidrich as the page prints it, and his wife as Cecilia R. Steinhagen.
Uboat.net dates him as a commander from 1 November 1939 and a temporary captain from 18 June 1942. It prints no decorations and no earlier command. It gives no Naval Academy class. The cemetery is the Naval Academy's, and the page does not say he was a graduate.
Dayton is the only ship on his uboat.net command list, as a temporary captain, from 7 January 1945 to 21 December 1945. Those dates match NavSource and the DANFS commissioning. He had her through shakedown, the passage to Pearl Harbor, and the Third Fleet strikes off Japan, including the 18 July bombardment of electronic installations near Tokyo. He was relieved at Terminal Island, San Pedro, on 21 December 1945. DANFS names him Paul W. Steinhagen.
Not in the sources fetched beyond the gravestone's rear admiral and the family named on it. NavSource does not give a relief rank.