Ships
- USS Lamson (DD-367) Captain, 1 April 1940 – 1 April 1941
Perley Earl Pendleton was born in 1897 in Concord, New Hampshire, the son of Fred and Nellie Pendleton. He entered the United States Naval Academy in 1916, while the First World War was still being fought, and graduated with the Class of 1920. At Annapolis he played football and lacrosse. On 26 May 1923 he married Mary E. Willis in Concord. Their twins, Brian Willis Pendleton and Mary Lois Pendleton, were born on 16 March 1931.
He spent the interwar years in the peacetime Navy and was promoted to lieutenant commander in 1936. On 1 April 1940 he became captain of the destroyer USS Lamson (DD-367), still in the rank of lieutenant commander. He relieved Byron Hall Hanlon. Lamson was a Mahan-class destroyer built at Bath, Maine, commissioned in October 1936, and sent to the Pacific in 1937. From the autumn of 1939 she worked from Pearl Harbor, and Pendleton’s year in her was given to fleet exercises, patrols, and the upkeep of a destroyer at that advanced base.
His command of Lamson ended on 1 April 1941, the day he was promoted to commander. Preston Vigginius Mercer relieved him. The United States was still at peace. Lamson was at sea under Mercer when the Pacific war opened eight months later, and her later combat, from the Guadalcanal campaign through the Philippines, belonged to the captains who followed Pendleton.
In 1941 he joined the submarine tender USS Holland (AS-3) as executive officer. He took command of Holland on 5 April 1942 and was promoted to captain on 20 June 1942. He remained in the ship until October 1943, a long tour spent on the repair, supply, and daily support of submarines.
He left Holland for command of Submarine Squadron Two. In 1944 he served in the Bureau of Ordnance, and in 1945 he commanded Transport Division Forty-One. For extraordinary achievement in the Second World War he received the Bronze Star. After the fighting ended he stayed on active duty, and from 1947 he served in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Pendleton retired in 1950 as a rear admiral. He died on 9 December 1964. Mary Pendleton lived on until 1996.