Ships
- USS Bennett (DD-473) Captain, 31 July 1944 – 5 November 1944
Philip Frederick Hauck was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 23 August 1913. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1935 and was commissioned an ensign on 6 June of that year. He was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) in June 1938 and to lieutenant in January 1942.
At the start of the Pacific war he was assigned to the target ship Utah at Pearl Harbor. Japanese aircraft attacked on 7 December 1941, and the old ship capsized in the harbor. Hauck survived.
He next served as gunnery officer of the destroyer Duncan. On the night of 11 October 1942, off Savo Island in the Battle of Cape Esperance, he controlled her main battery. Salvo after salvo struck a Japanese cruiser, and when that ship began to break up he shifted the guns on his own initiative to a Japanese destroyer and scored further hits. Duncan was sunk in the battle. Hauck came through the loss. For his conduct that night he received the Silver Star, conferred by order of January 1943.
Men from Duncan helped fill out the crew of the new Fletcher-class destroyer Bennett. Hauck joined her as executive officer under Edmund Battelle Taylor, who had commanded the ship from her commissioning in February 1943. Through the spring and summer of 1944 Bennett took part in carrier strikes on the Palau Islands from 30 March to 1 April, in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June, and in the bombardment of Japanese-held Guam on 20 July. A gold star in lieu of a second Silver Star, issued in January 1946, honored the skill and courage with which Hauck handled the destroyer in those operations.
He was captain of Bennett from 31 July 1944 until 5 November 1944, in the rank of lieutenant commander. In those months the ship worked with minesweepers in the Palau Islands, including the waters near Babelthuap, and then started back across the Pacific for overhaul in the United States. Jasper Newton McDonald relieved him on 5 November 1944. Bennett was at Hunters Point in San Francisco the following month.
Hauck remained in the Navy and rose to the rank of captain. He died on 6 November 1961, at the age of forty-eight, in the District of Columbia, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His son, Frederick H. Hauck, born in 1941, followed him into the Navy, became a captain and a test pilot, and later commanded two missions of the space shuttle Discovery.