Ships
- USS Dortch (DD-670) Captain from 7 August 1943
Lieutenant Commander R. C. Young of the United States Navy became captain of Dortch (DD-670) on 7 August 1943, the day the destroyer was commissioned. He was the officer who took the new ship into naval service and started her life as a fighting unit.
Dortch was a Fletcher-class destroyer from the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company at Kearny, New Jersey. The yard laid her down in March 1943 and launched her in June. She was 376 feet long, about 2,050 tons in her design condition, and built for a speed of about 35 knots so she could stay with the fast carrier groups.
At commissioning her main battery was five 5-inch guns, able to engage ships, aircraft, or a shoreline. She also carried lighter antiaircraft guns, ten torpedo tubes, and depth charges. Her wartime crew ran a little above three hundred officers and men. Young’s immediate work was to train that company, prove the engineering plant, and drill the weapons until a hull fresh from the builder could keep station and shoot.
Ships commissioned in that summer were headed for the Pacific. After trials and the transit to the fleet, Dortch joined the forces gathered for the advance across the central Pacific. A destroyer captain in that role spent long hours on the bridge, holding a screen around the carriers, watching for submarines, and turning with the formation whenever flight operations filled the sea with ships.
Through 1944 and 1945 Dortch served with the Pacific Fleet in the carrier raids and the amphibious landings that moved the war west, among them the Marianas, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. She screened the fast carriers, recovered airmen from the water, and used her 5-inch guns against shore targets. The captaincy Young assumed on 7 August 1943 opened that wartime service for the ship.