Ships
- USS Remey (DD-688) Captain, 30 September 1943 – 1 May 1945
Reid Puryear Fiala was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 14 January 1909, the son of Anthony and Mary Clare Puryear Fiala. He attended Manual Training High School in Brooklyn and William Leonard Preparatory School in New York, then entered the United States Naval Academy in the summer of 1927. He graduated with the Class of 1931 and went to sea as a surface officer.
In the first part of 1943 he commanded Goldsborough, a destroyer fitted out as a seaplane tender. In that duty he escorted the large tender Albemarle from Norfolk to Recife, Brazil, and back. He was then ordered to a new destroyer still on the building ways at Bath, Maine.
The Fletcher-class destroyer Remey (DD-688) was commissioned on 30 September 1943 with Fiala, a lieutenant commander, as her first commanding officer. She sailed as flagship of Destroyer Squadron 54, left Boston on 5 December, passed through the Panama Canal, and reached San Diego before the end of the month to join the Fifth Amphibious Force. In the Marshalls she took part in the occupation of Kwajalein and Majuro. Off Saipan on 14 and 15 June 1944, working as a close-in fire-support ship, he handled her in difficult water under Japanese shore-battery fire and directed heavy gunfire onto the beach defenses. For that action he received the Bronze Star Medal with Combat V.
Remey stayed with the advance through Tinian, the southern Palau Islands, the Leyte landings, attacks on Luzon, and the move into Mindoro. On the night of 24–25 October 1944, in Surigao Strait, a Japanese column of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers came north in the dark toward the American battle line. Fiala, by then a commander, took Remey in with the destroyers on the flank, closed to torpedo range under star shells and enemy fire, and launched torpedoes in the first coordinated attack of the night. The ship then drew clear without being hit. The strait action ended with two Japanese battleships and three destroyers sunk, and his leadership in it was recognized with the Navy Cross.
He remained in Remey for the Lingayen Gulf landings, the assault on Iwo Jima, Fifth Fleet raids against Honshu and the Nansei Shoto, and the fighting off Okinawa. On 1 May 1945 he turned the ship over to John Bernard Balch. In nineteen months he had taken her from a new hull at Bath through the Central Pacific and the Philippines.
After the war he commanded the new destroyer Harwood on occupation duty in the China Sea and the Yellow Sea, then returned to Annapolis. He taught in the Department of Mathematics and later served as its executive officer, leaving in June 1949. A year as commander of Destroyer Division 602 was followed by duty on the staff of the Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. He completed the Naval War College, commanded the attack transport Bottineau until May 1954, and served at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk. In November 1956 he took Destroyer Squadron 15, and the following year joined the joint staff of the United Nations Command and United States Forces in Korea.
His last command was the naval station at Terminal Island, in 1958. He retired in 1959 as a rear admiral. Fiala died at his home in Rolling Hills Estates, California, in late July 1987, at the age of 78. He was survived by his wife, Elizabeth, two daughters, a son, twelve grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.