Ships
- USS Lewis Hancock (DD-675) Captain from 15 May 1945 · Relieved on 25 October 1945
Lewis Hancock is the ship the compiled lists give him from 15 May 1945. That names the right man and the right ship. It places him on a destroyer whose Pacific fighting, by the Navy’s own ship history, was already finished. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships says Lewis Hancock headed for home on 10 May 1945, five days before that date. She had earned her battle stars under other captains. What Babb got, if the compiled change-of-command date is right, was the voyage back, the yard, and the surrender.
Origins
The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of 1 July 1936, in the column that carries date of birth, state of birth, date of entry, and the state from which an officer was appointed, gives him as born 4 September 1913 in West Virginia, entered 9 July 1931, appointed from Kentucky. The same birth date and the same 9 July 1931 entry, marked with the Register’s asterisk for a Naval Academy midshipman, sit beside his name in the Registers of 1 July 1943 and 1 July 1944. No town in West Virginia, and no town in Kentucky, appears in those columns. No parent’s name has been found. The class yearbook, the Lucky Bag of 1935, was not recovered in a form that could be quoted for him; a page that search engines attach to his name is someone else’s sketch.
Appointed from a state other than the state of birth is ordinary in that generation of midshipmen. It can mean the family had moved, or that a senator from Kentucky named a boy born across the line. The Register does not say which. What it does say is that at seventeen, turning eighteen that September, he left whatever home those two states represent and became a midshipman.
Formation
He stood in the class commissioned ensign on 6 June 1935. In the 1 July 1936 Register his date of rank is the class ditto under 6 June 1935, and his station is USS Pensacola. The Navy Directory had already put Ens. Richard E. Babb — the October 1935 OCR reads “Babh,” the usual smash of that letter — in Pensacola on 1 October 1935, and the ship’s roster lists him among the ensigns under Captain R. S. Crenshaw. The Directory of 1 April 1937 still has him there, signal number 6208, ensign, under Captain G. H. Bowdey. The April 1936 Directory’s text, as digitized, does not show him; the July 1936 Register does. The gap is in the scan or the OCR, not a reason to pull him off the cruiser.
Pensacola was a heavy cruiser, not a school ship in name, but for a new ensign with no special qualification printed beside his name she was the school. He is not listed as navigator, gunnery officer, or communications officer. He is one of the junior officers on a ship whose captain and department heads fill the lines above him. That is the formation the peacetime Navy actually gave most of his class: years of watchstanding on a big ship while the billets that teach a specialty came later, if they came.
By the Directory of 1 January 1938 the specialty had a name. The alphabetical entry, once the OCR’s “Richard B” is set against the roster, is Ens. R. E. Babb, communications, USS Chicago, Cruisers, Scouting Force. The ship’s roster says the same: “5820 Ens. R. E. Babb, commun,” under Captain H. B. Riebe. Sometime between April 1937 and January 1938 he had left Pensacola for another heavy cruiser and been given the radio and signal watch. The Registers do not say whether he asked for it. The Lucky Bag rumor that he tinkered with radios belongs to a different midshipman. What can be said is that the Navy used him as a communications ensign on Chicago.
He was still an ensign on 1 January 1938. On 1 January 1939 the Directory lists him as lieutenant (junior grade), USS Salt Lake City, another heavy cruiser, Captain A. M. R. Allen commanding. The roster gives him no billet title, only the signal number 5656 and the rank. The statutory date for that promotion, three years from his ensign’s date of rank, would be 6 June 1938. The Directories bracket it — ensign in January, lieutenant (junior grade) the next January — and the 1 July 1939 Register indexes him as Lt. (Jr. Gr.) with station Salt Lake City. They do not print the day.
A year and a half later the Navy had moved him from cruisers to destroyers, and given him the guns. The Directory of 1 June 1940 lists Lt. (jg) Richard E. Babb as gunnery officer of USS Mackenzie, flagship of Destroyer Division 69. Commander F. W. Connor commanded both the division and the ship. Mackenzie was an old flush-decker, recommissioned for the emergency, not a new Fletcher. Gunnery officer of a four-piper in the summer of 1940 was a small command inside a small ship: the battery, the drills, the magazines, on a vessel the fleet was using because the new destroyers were not yet enough. It is the first billet in his record that put lives and explosives in his particular charge. No letter and no fitness report in the sources used here says how he did it.
By 1 November 1940 the Directory had taken him off Mackenzie and assigned him to USS Monssen. She was not in commission. DANFS records that Monssen (DD-436) was launched 16 May 1940 and commissioned 14 March 1941, Lieutenant Commander Roland N. Smoot in command. The November 1940 roster already shows Smoot as “comdg” and Lt. (jg) R. E. Babb among the officers under him, with no billet written after the name. Directories of that year listed precommissioning details as if the ship existed. The Directory of 1 April 1941, a little more than two weeks after commissioning, still lists Lt. (jg) Richard E. Babb in Monssen, still without a department title, still under Smoot, in Destroyer Squadron 2 of the Atlantic Fleet. The 1 July 1941 Register prints two dates beside his name, 14 March 1941 and September 1940, in columns the OCR does not label cleanly. 14 March is the commissioning day. September 1940 is consistent with orders to a ship still fitting out, which is what the November Directory already shows. It is not proof of the column headings.
He was a plank-owner officer of a new destroyer, or at least an officer of her commissioning crew, in the rank of lieutenant (junior grade). That is as far as the Directories go. The Directory itself stopped in 1941. Wartime Registers dropped the station column that had made the 1930s books useful. DANFS then takes Monssen through neutrality patrol, the Doolittle raid screen, the Coral Sea approaches, Midway, Guadalcanal, and the night of 13 November 1942, when she was shelled, abandoned, and sunk in Ironbottom Sound. Nothing in the Registers, the Directories, or DANFS puts Richard Edward Babb on board for any of that. A seaman named Richard Clement Babb died in Monssen. He is a different man. To give the officer the ship’s famous last fight because he was in her in April 1941 would be a guess, and a confusion of two Babbs. The honest sentence is that he helped take her to sea, and that the published record loses him before she reached the Pacific war that killed her.
The war as it can be dated
The Registers still have his ranks, which are the part of a wartime career that did not depend on a station list.
On 1 July 1942 he is a lieutenant. On 1 July 1943 he stands in the block of lieutenant commanders whose page heading gives temporary rank from 1 May 1943 and permanent rank as lieutenant from 1 January 1942; his own line is ditto under those headings, with birth 4 September 1913 and entry 9 July 1931. On 1 July 1944 he is still a lieutenant commander, file 75064, signal number 4951. On 1 July 1945 he is listed among the commanders. The day the commander’s rank began is not securely readable next to his name. A block of commanders earlier in that same 1945 list carries the temporary date 1 March 1944, and uboat.net repeats 1 March 1944 as his date of rank as commander. That date cannot be his. The Register of 1 July 1944, four months later, still carries him as a lieutenant commander. Whatever day he became a commander fell after 1 July 1944 and by 1 July 1945. A compiled date calls him commander on 15 May 1945. That may be right. The July Register, six weeks after 15 May, is the proof that he was a commander by midsummer, not proof of the day in May.
The two commands that compiled officer lists give him sit in that same poorly lit middle of the war, and they are not in DANFS under his name.
NavSource, crediting Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and uboat.net, which draws on the same sort of list, say he commanded USS Kennison (DD-138) from 31 August 1943 to 21 September 1944, first as lieutenant commander and, on uboat’s rank table, as commander after 1 March 1944. The commander date has already been set aside. The command dates have not been confirmed from a deck log, a Navy Register station entry, or DANFS. DANFS for Kennison does not name him. What DANFS does say is that from early 1942 until 22 September 1944 she worked the California coast: antisubmarine patrol, convoy escort, and escort of submarines between California ports. On 22 September 1944 she sailed for Bremerton to be converted to a target ship, later AG-83. The compiled end of his command is the day before that sailing. Uboat.net attaches several early-1944 exercises off San Diego and escort passages toward San Francisco — Tilefish, Tang, and others — to Kennison under his name. Those event lines were not rechecked here against the submarines’ war diaries. If the command dates are right, his year in Kennison was the unglamorous West Coast war: old destroyer, practice and escort, no fleet action, and relief on the eve of her leaving for the yard. If the dates are wrong, this essay has no other ship for him between Monssen in the spring of 1941 and Lewis Hancock in May 1945. That hole is large enough to matter, and it is marked as a hole.
Lewis Hancock is the command the compilations agree on at the start. NavSource and uboat.net both give 15 May 1945. DANFS, again, does not name him. It does fix the ship. Laid down 31 March 1943 at Federal, Kearny, launched 1 August, commissioned 29 September 1943 under Commander Charles H. Lyman III. Through 1944 and the first months of 1945 she screened the fast carriers: the Marshalls, Truk, Hollandia, the Marianas, the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, the Tokyo and Kobe raids, then Okinawa from the landings of 1 April until, DANFS says, she headed for home on 10 May. She had come through sixteen months in the Pacific undamaged, with four casualties. She steamed into San Francisco on 6 July, left dry dock on 30 August, and was preparing to go back when Japan surrendered. She reached San Diego on 7 September and decommissioned on 10 January 1946.
If Babb relieved William Marvin Searles on 15 May 1945, he relieved him on a ship already pointed at the United States, or within a few days of her being so pointed. DANFS does not say where the change of command was held — at sea, at Leyte, at Ulithi, at Pearl Harbor. It does say the fighting was over for her. The battle stars, nine of them by the end of the war, were earned under Lyman and under Searles. Babb’s months, on this reading, were the long passage to San Francisco, the overhaul, the week in which the war ended while the ship was “girding herself to return,” and the move down to San Diego. Command of a Fletcher in the summer of 1945 was still command: a crew that had been under fire, a yard period, the discipline of a ship that had expected to go back and then did not. It was not the Okinawa picket line, and it should not be written as if it were.
NavSource’s commanding-officer table dates his tour “May 15 1945 – Oct 25 1946” and then dates the next officer, Lieutenant Commander John B. Wilkes, from 25 October 1945. The two dates on that one page disagree by a year. Uboat.net ends Babb on 25 October 1945, the day Wilkes begins. The later officers on the same NavSource list — Wilkes, then Louis L. Lesesne, then Floyd Charles Lawrence — carry her to the decommissioning of 10 January 1946. The 1946 end-date is the typo. He had the ship for about five months, and he did not decommission her.
No award citation, no Bronze Star symbol securely attached to his name, no letter of commendation, has turned up in the Registers read for this essay. The 1945 commander list, in the OCR, prints decoration marks beside many of his classmates and prints his name in a run with John Henry Theis and Harrison Perry McIntire without a mark that can be trusted as his. Absence in a smashed column is not proof he received nothing. It is proof this essay cannot name a decoration.
The cost
The record is stingy about what command cost him, because it is stingy about him.
He did not, on the evidence, command in a battle that has a name. The cost that can be described is the shape of the service itself. Four years a midshipman. Then the long apprentice years on Pensacola, the communications job on Chicago, a lieutenant (junior grade)’s berth on Salt Lake City, the gunnery department of an old destroyer in 1940, and the commissioning crew of Monssen, after which the paper trail breaks across the two years when his shipmates, if he was still among them, went to Midway and Guadalcanal and died, and if he was not, he was somewhere the Registers do not bother to say. Then, if the compiled list is right, a year in command of Kennison on the California coast, the sort of command that got little mail and no citation, and that ended when the ship went north to be made into a target. Then Lewis Hancock, a famous destroyer, handed over when the fame had already been earned by other men, and given up five months later to a lieutenant commander while the ship waited at San Diego to be laid up.
He made commander in that last year of the war and, on the Registers of 1 July 1947, 1 January 1950, 1 January 1955, and 1 January 1957, he was still a commander. File 75064. Designator 1100, the unrestricted line, in the 1957 list. He did not become a captain in the twelve years after the war that those books cover. For a 1935 man who had commanded two destroyers, if both commands are real, that is a ceiling. The Registers do not say whether it was selection, health, a fitness report, or simply the postwar shrinkage. They say the rank stopped.
No wife is named in any source used here. No child. No address before the one the College of William & Mary printed in 1964. The household he left, and what he brought home to it, is blank.
After
He stayed in. That is the clearest postwar fact. A commander of the Naval Academy class of 1935, still on the active list on 1 January 1957, living long enough in uniform that the wartime temporary ranks had hardened into the permanent rank of commander and had not gone higher.
Uboat.net says he retired on 1 September 1958. The 1 January 1959 Register’s digitized text did not yield a readable retired-list entry that could be checked against that date; his name appears in an index, and the file number 75064 appears in numerical indexes, without a clean “retired” line beside a date. The retirement date is reported, not confirmed here. He was fifty-four in September 1958 if the date is right, and he had been a commander for about thirteen years.
On 15 August 1964 the College of William & Mary, at Williamsburg, conferred degrees. The program places Richard Edward Babb of Norfolk under the Latin heading Docendi Scientiam Magistri, records his previous degree as “BA., United States Naval Academy, 1935,” and prints the field “(Physics).” The same program uses other headings, Educationis Magistri and Artium Magistri, for other master’s candidates. This essay does not translate the Latin into an English degree title it cannot document from the program itself. What the program does document is that six years after the reported retirement, a man of that name, residence Norfolk, Naval Academy 1935, stood for a graduate degree whose classmates on the page were schoolteachers taking a subject — physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics. The Academy in 1935 awarded a bachelor of science, not a bachelor of arts; the program’s “BA.” is the program’s word, and it may be loose. The physics in parentheses is the first intellectual interest, other than the communications and gunnery billets, that any source attaches to him. It is late. He was fifty.
He died on 23 May 1983. Uboat.net says at Portsmouth, Virginia. A Find a Grave search returns one matching memorial: Richard Edward Babb, veteran, 4 September 1913 – 23 May 1983, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, Section 65, Site 802. No obituary text was found to confirm the place of death, a widow, or children. Portsmouth is where the naval hospital serving Norfolk stood; that is a geographical note, not a cause of death. He was sixty-nine. The burial at Arlington is the last official sentence. The years between a Norfolk commencement in 1964 and a grave in 1983 are otherwise empty in the sources read for this essay.
What survived is a thin official life. A West Virginia birth and a Kentucky appointment. A class of 1935 ensign who learned cruisers first, then destroyer gunnery, then the commissioning of a ship that later became famous without any proof he was still in her. A reported year in command of a West Coast four-piper. Five months in Lewis Hancock after she had left the war. A commander’s rank that lasted, and did not rise. A physics credential taken in Norfolk when he was past fifty. A grave at Arlington. The man who stood on those bridges — what he was like when a contact was reported, what he said to a crew that had already fought its war, whom he went home to — is not in the Registers. They were not written to hold that.