Ships
- USS Chauncey (DD-667) Captain, 2 March 1945 – 19 December 1945
Preston Bennett Haines was a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and the commanding officer of the destroyer Chauncey (DD-667) from 2 March 1945 until 19 December 1945. Those ten months covered the last campaigns of the Pacific war and the first months of peace.
Chauncey was a Fletcher-class destroyer, one of the fast fleet escorts built in large numbers for the war against Japan. She was laid down at the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Kearny, New Jersey, launched in the spring of 1943, and commissioned on 31 May 1943. With five 5-inch guns, torpedo tubes, depth charges, and a heavy antiaircraft battery, she was built to screen aircraft carriers, fight submarines and aircraft, and stand inshore when the fleet closed an island.
She went to the Pacific that summer. Under Merle Van Metre, who had her at commissioning, and later under Lester Cameron Conwell, she worked with the fast carrier task forces. Her track ran through the raids and landings of 1943 and 1944: the Gilberts and Marshalls, strikes in the Carolines and on New Guinea, the Marianas and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Palaus, Leyte Gulf and the Philippines, and, early in 1945, Iwo Jima. That was the ship Haines inherited, already a veteran of the drive across the Central Pacific.
He took command on 2 March 1945, as the Fifth Fleet gathered for Okinawa. Through the spring Chauncey screened the fast carriers while they struck the Ryukyus and the Japanese home islands, then rotated onto the radar picket line off Okinawa, where destroyers took the first blow from kamikaze attacks aimed at the transports and the beaches. She came through that duty and stayed with the carrier force into the summer. In July and August she was again in the screen as the Third Fleet worked along the coast of Japan, striking airfields, shipping, and shore targets up to the surrender.
After Japan capitulated, Chauncey entered Tokyo Bay on 16 September 1945 and stayed for the early occupation. She then turned for home, reached San Diego in November, and was decommissioned there on 19 December 1945, the same day Haines's command ended. He had brought her out of the war and laid her up. The Navy brought Chauncey back for a second commission in the 1950s, but that later service lay outside his time in the ship.