Ships
- USS Worden (DD-352) Captain, 17 June 1939 – 12 April 1941
Ransom Kirby Davis (27 August 1897 – 24 May 1995) was an officer of the United States Navy from Gainesville, Florida, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1920 and served thirty years in the regular Navy. He was an unusual line officer for his generation, a destroyer and cruiser man who also held a master's degree in radio engineering from Harvard and a law degree from George Washington University, and who served two tours in the Navy's legal office. He commanded the destroyer USS Worden from 1939 to 1941 and the stores ship USS Boreas on the supply run between San Francisco and Pearl Harbor in the first year of the Pacific war. He was then given command of the first recruit ("boot") school for enlisted women in the Navy, at Cedar Falls, Iowa. From there he went to the Mediterranean as chief of staff to a cruiser task force commander, and he received the Legion of Merit twice, for the amphibious landings on the north coast of Sicily in August 1943 and for the invasion of southern France in August 1944. He retired as a captain in 1950 and died in Menlo Park, California, at the age of ninety-seven. He is not the Lieutenant Richard K. Davis who appears in the Navy register of 1950. Wherever the registers give his name in full, it is Ransom Kirby Davis.
The registers of the Navy give Davis's date of birth as 27 August 1897, and the same date appears in the federal death index. Where he was born has not been established. The Naval Academy's register of 1917–18 lists him as a midshipman from Florida, and both the Lucky Bag of 1920 and that of 1921 give his home as Gainesville, Florida. A sketch of his career printed in 1943, presumably drawn from information he supplied, says that before Annapolis he attended the University of Florida, which is in Gainesville. He was appointed a midshipman on 14 June 1917, a little more than two months after the United States entered the First World War, and he was then nineteen.
Nothing more about his family has been found: not his parents' names or occupations, not whether he had brothers or sisters, and not the origin of his given names, which look like family names. Later in life, as far as the surviving record shows, he left very little trace outside official papers. His Academy classmates' sketch of him is the only portrait of the young man that survives.
Davis entered the Naval Academy with the class of 1921, a wartime class whose course was cut to three years. Its members graduated in June 1920, which is why most sources, the 1943 sketch among them, call him a graduate of 1920. The Academy's register for 1918–19 places him forty-sixth in his class in the order of merit for his first year. The register of 1918 lists him among the midshipmen appointed from Florida, and the Lucky Bag of 1920, which printed company rosters of the underclassmen, carries "Davis, R. K., Gainesville, Florida" in the Sixth Company.
His own entry in the 1921 Lucky Bag was written by classmates who called him "Dave". It presents a quiet Southerner with a head for mathematics. "When Dave embarked on his seagoing career," it begins, "he brought with him all the reticent, peaceful, and easy-going mannerisms so common among the soft evening breezes and nodding palms of sunny Florida. These qualities were great assets during Plebe year and he made it easily and smoothly with few pap sheets and little extra duty." English gave him trouble in his second year, but once it "was buried … the rest was fruit for him. Math or Mechanics seemed to emanate from his fertile brain as do the lightning results of a slide rule under deft fingers," and by the end of the year he was "perched among the satellites", the midshipmen who wore academic stars. A summer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on Broadway, the writer reports, turned him into a dancer and a regular at the hops, though "even here his cool calculating brain did not desert him, he fell for none, neither did he dream." The sketch ends with the sentence its writer evidently thought mattered most: "Broad-minded, unselfish, never taking advantage of a less savvy classmate, Dave will find a welcome where'er he goes." The entry records one stripe, a midshipman officer's rank, and a star for academic distinction in his third-class year.
After graduation, according to the 1943 sketch, he went to the battleship Idaho and then spent the early 1920s in the destroyers William Jones, Kennedy and Corry. In 1925 and 1926 he attended the Navy's Postgraduate School, then at Annapolis. The register of 1927 lists him under instruction at Harvard University, and the sketch says Harvard awarded him a master's degree in radio engineering in 1927. Three years of sea duty followed in the light cruisers Richmond and Trenton, serving, in the sketch's words, "with Admiral Blakely". He joined Richmond at Manila, moved to Trenton at Honolulu, and went with her to China, where he spent a year.
In 1930 he came ashore in Washington and took a different turn. He was assigned to the office of the Judge Advocate General, the Navy's legal department; the 1933 register lists him there "under instruction", and he studied law at night at George Washington University, which awarded him the LL.B. in 1933. He then went back to sea. The Navy Directories of 1936 and 1937 place him in the new heavy cruiser New Orleans, first as a lieutenant and then as a lieutenant commander, and the sketch says he served there as assistant gunnery officer. In 1937 he returned to the Judge Advocate General's office for two years; the directories of 1938 and 1939 list him there. By the end of the 1930s he was a seagoing officer with a lawyer's training and an engineer's degree, a combination the Navy would draw on more than once.
On 17 June 1939 Lieutenant Commander Davis took command of the destroyer Worden, a Farragut-class ship then operating out of San Diego. War broke out in Europe ten weeks later. In September the Navy formed a Hawaiian Detachment of cruisers, destroyers and a carrier, the first step toward basing the fleet at Pearl Harbor, and on 5 October 1939 Worden sailed with it for Hawaii. A photograph of Davis with his crew in blue uniforms is thought to date from those last months in San Diego. For the next eighteen months his ship worked mostly in Hawaiian waters, with periodic upkeep on the West Coast, through the type training and task-force exercises of a fleet preparing for a war it expected but could not date. Worden took part in Fleet Problem XXI in the spring of 1940, after which the whole fleet stayed in Hawaii. The 1940 register lists him as commanding Worden, and the Navy Directory of 1 April 1941 shows him still in command, by then as a full commander; he is recorded as promoted on 1 July 1940. He was relieved on 12 April 1941 by Lieutenant Commander William Grady Pogue.
What Davis left behind in Worden can be seen eight months later. A history of the ship compiled from her rosters describes her pre-war company as experienced, almost without reservists, with unusually low turnover; on 6 December 1941 only one enlisted man had been on board for less than a hundred days. Most of the crew that took Worden out of Pearl Harbor under fire the next morning, after one of her gunners had shot down a Japanese aircraft from the middle of a nest of destroyers, had served under Davis. No account of his command in his own words, and no fitness report, has been found to say how he ran the ship.
The 1943 sketch says that from 1941 to 1942 he commanded the stores ship Boreas, which "operated between San Francisco and Honolulu". Ship-history compilations date his command from December 1941, the month of the Pearl Harbor attack. Boreas was an eleven-knot stores ship converted from a freighter built in 1919, and according to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships she made ten round trips between San Francisco and Pearl Harbor between June 1941 and December 1942. In the first months of the war that run carried food and stores to a battered base and to a fleet that had to be fed before it could fight. A later account of his career calls this period "convoy duty in the Pacific". It was necessary, unglamorous work, and it was not the command of a fighting ship. He was promoted temporary captain on 20 June 1942. The sketch says that he then spent five months at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
His next orders took him about as far from the sea as the Navy could send him. In the autumn of 1942 the Navy, which had begun admitting women to its reserve that summer, set up its first "boot" school for enlisted WAVES on the campus of Iowa State Teachers College at Cedar Falls, and gave Davis command of it. A history of the station published by the college repeated a story that he had glanced at his orders, seen the word "Iowa", and thought he had been given the new battleship of that name. "In spite of his initial disappointment, however," the history adds, "he developed a decided affection for this command."
The first 1,050 recruits arrived from 15 December 1942 onward. Officers met every train, day and night, and the women came in from every state, some of them in the small hours, to sleep on mattresses on the floor until bunks could be put up. Davis set the tone from the start. "To the Navy," he told them, "each one of you represents a fighting man." He organised the trainees on a naval pattern of battalions, companies and platoons, and from then on they moved in formation. A campus newspaper photograph of January 1943 shows him holding an inspection in the cold. A class magazine's diary for March records the routine of inoculations, drills and inspections, and, for one Friday, "Captain Davis tells sea stories." When the first class graduated on 14 January 1943 he expressed his satisfaction with their work. In a message printed in the magazine of a later class he wrote that the trainees had "been abruptly called from your normal way of life, from your old homes and friends to participate more directly in a tremendous national effort," that "this is all the more meaningful because you have done this voluntarily," and that "it is expected that you will demonstrate to the world what the women who serve their country in Navy blue can do."
He turned the command over to Commander E. E. Pettee, his executive officer, on 10 May 1943, after a little under five months. The campus paper reported that he was leaving "for active duty". In his farewell he said: "I have seen the spirit with which class after class of trainees have responded to their training. I have come to realize how really capable, enthusiastic, loyal, and patriotic the WAVES are, and I hope to spread the good word about them wherever I may go." Pettee answered with a seaman's compliment: a ship might have the best crew in the fleet, "but in its normal and battle operations its efficiency is directly dependent upon the leadership and inspiration of its commanding officer." The trainees' pledge to him, printed in the May issue of their magazine, used his own words: "The WAVES will be the best, and the best of the WAVES will be IOWAVES."
Within three months he was in a war zone. By August 1943 Davis was chief of staff to a naval task force commander off Sicily. A Navy photograph in the National Archives captions him as "COMCRU Chief of Staff", the staff of a cruiser commander, and shows him receiving the Legion of Merit from Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt aboard the light cruiser Philadelphia. Philadelphia was the flagship of Rear Admiral Lyal A. Davidson, commander of Cruiser Division 8, who in the summer of 1943 commanded Task Force 88, the small naval force that General Patton used as his "Navy" along Sicily's northern coast. Davidson had enough landing craft to lift one reinforced infantry battalion at a time, and with them the Seventh Army attempted a series of amphibious "end runs" behind the German rearguards falling back on Messina.
Davis's Legion of Merit citation credits him with assisting "in the planning and subsequent execution" of two of those landings. The first went in before dawn on 8 August 1943, when a battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division was put ashore behind the San Fratello line. It was aimed at a beach east of the Rosmarino River near Terranova, landed instead west of the river nearer Sant'Agata; the San Fratello position fell that day all the same. The second, at Brolo on 11 August, was harder. The battalion got ashore and onto high ground behind the enemy, but the army's official history describes the cruiser and her destroyers leaving the area three times during the day: once because Davidson judged the prearranged fire missions done and feared air attack after his promised air cover ran out at noon, once when the radio link to the fire-control party ashore failed, and once after a bombing attack on the ships late in the afternoon. In between, the ships twice raced back to fire on German troops and tanks closing on the beachhead. The landing force was badly cut up before the main body of the division reached it on 12 August. The sources consulted do not say what Davis advised on those decisions or where he stood while they were made. His citation, issued by the commander of United States naval forces in northwest African waters on 15 November 1943, says only that his work "contributed materially to the rapid and successful advance of the SEVENTH Army toward Messina."
He was still a chief of staff, and evidently still Davidson's, a year later. For the invasion of southern France in August 1944 Davidson commanded Task Force 86, the Sitka Force, which put French commandos ashore at Cap Nègre and sent other troops to seize the easternmost of the Îles d'Hyères, east of Toulon. He also commanded the Allied gunfire support ships, which spent the following fortnight duelling with the heavy coastal batteries guarding Toulon and Marseilles. The official naval history admits that by 21 August "the face of Admiral Davidson was somewhat red", because the batteries on the Giens Peninsula and Porquerolles were still firing back. They fell over the following days, and the French army took both ports by the end of the month. Davis's second Legion of Merit, a Gold Star in lieu of a second award, was for service as "Chief of Staff of a Naval Task Force Commander, prior to and during the invasion of Southern France." It does not name the commander, but its description fits Davidson's command closely. It praises the way he "coordinated the activities of the staff administrative and planning agencies during the intensive preparations for the conduct of the major assault and bombardment support operations." It credits him with "outstanding tact and skillful application to the solution of complex problems" and "excellent knowledge of amphibious warfare", and says that his advice during the assault bore on "the attack on the coastal defenses commanding the approaches to the ports of Toulon and Marseilles". Both awards carried the Combat "V". Davidson left the Mediterranean in October 1944, and Davis's own movements over the following year have not been traced.
After the war, a Captain R. K. Davis, U.S. Navy, appears in the official minutes of the Intelligence Advisory Board, the committee of service intelligence chiefs that advised the new Central Intelligence Group and then the Central Intelligence Agency. At the meeting of 9 May 1946 he is listed as "Captain R. K. Davis, USN, O.N.I.", the Office of Naval Intelligence. He attended again in November 1946 and in September and November 1947, by then as the Navy's working-level representative. In November 1946 he was named to an ad hoc committee to review a directive on coordinating intelligence collection. In November 1947, when the intelligence chiefs balked at approving directives under the new National Security Act that they said they had had no time to study, Rear Admiral Thomas B. Inglis, the Chief of Naval Intelligence, named "Captain Davis" as the Navy's member of the drafting committee that was sent off to rework them that same afternoon. No document found states this officer's full name. But no other captain with those initials has been found in the Navy registers examined, and the work, drafting and redrafting the rules under which American intelligence agencies would divide their labour, suited an officer trained in law. The award bulletin that announced his second Legion of Merit in December 1947 gave his home as Arlington, Virginia, across the river from Washington.
By the spring of 1949 he was in California. The Stanford Daily of 7 April 1949 identified "Captain Ransom K. Davis" as commander of the university's Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps unit, reviewing an Army Day parade alongside Stanford's newly installed president, Wallace Sterling. The register of 1950 still carries him on the active list as a captain. The 1955 register lists him on the retired list as a captain, with his captain's rank dated 20 June 1942 and his retirement in June 1950, thirty-three years after he entered the Academy. One ship-history compilation gives him the rank of rear admiral, which would imply a promotion on retirement; the retired list examined here shows him as a captain, and no record of such an advancement has been found.
He stayed near Stanford. According to the Social Security death index he died on 24 May 1995 in Menlo Park, California, at the age of ninety-seven. No obituary, record of marriage or children, or place of burial has been found. What survives is a career on paper: the destroyer that went to war in December 1941 with the crew he had trained, the supply ship that carried stores to a damaged base, the women's school in Iowa that he opened and plainly came to care about, and two citations for his staff work in the invasions of Sicily and southern France. His classmates' prediction that "Dave will find a welcome where'er he goes" is about as close as the record comes to describing the man.