Ships
- USS Cogswell (DD-651) Captain from 7 April 1945
Reuben Noel Perley, Jr., was born on 8 August 1915 and served as an officer in the United States Navy during the Second World War. He became a lieutenant (junior grade) on 1 June 1942 and a lieutenant commander, in a temporary wartime appointment, on 15 March 1944. He died on 20 June 1989.
On 7 April 1945 he took command of the Fletcher-class destroyer Cogswell (DD-651). Bath Iron Works had launched her at Bath, Maine, on 5 June 1943, and she had entered service on 17 August 1943 under Harold Thomas Deutermann. By the spring of 1945 she was a veteran of the fast-carrier war in the Central Pacific.
Perley relieved Robert Elmore Lockwood, who had commanded Cogswell since 31 October 1944. His own tour covered the last months of fighting and the surrender. On 2 September 1945 the destroyer lay in Tokyo Bay when Japan formally surrendered.
Through the autumn she remained in the Far East for the occupation, operating in Japanese waters and escorting ships to ports in Korea. On 5 December 1945 she sailed from Yokosuka for home, calling at San Diego and Boston on the way to Charleston. Perley stayed in command after that voyage and left the ship on 4 September 1946.
His seventeen months in Cogswell carried a combat destroyer from the close of the Pacific war into the occupation and then back to an American yard. The lieutenant commander who brought her through that passage is recorded as her third wartime captain.