Ships
- USS Hudson (DD-475) Captain from 13 April 1943
Richard Rockwell Pratt was born in San Diego, California, on 17 October 1914, the son of Colonel Harold Pratt of the Marine Corps and Marguerite Rockwell Pratt. He attended the Severn School in Severna Park, Maryland, and in 1932 received an appointment to the United States Naval Academy from Indiana. He graduated in June 1936 and was commissioned an ensign. His first ship was the heavy cruiser Chester. After a short tour in the destroyer Sicard, he joined the Asiatic Fleet in October 1938 and served in the cruiser Augusta through the outbreak of the Second World War.
Soon after the United States entered the war he reported to the new destroyer Lansdowne, fitting out at Kearny, New Jersey, and served as her first gunnery officer. In January 1943 he moved to another Fletcher-class destroyer still building, Hudson, as executive officer and navigator. Hudson went into commission at the Boston Navy Yard on 13 April 1943. Pratt took her through shakedown and Atlantic escort duty, then out to Efate in the New Hebrides. He was aboard as executive officer for the landings at Empress Augusta Bay on Bougainville on 1 November 1943, and for the heavy air attack a week later, when the ship was credited with two Japanese aircraft and a share in a third. Late that November the crew had a week in Sydney, their first real rest of the cruise.
On 23 December 1943, in Purvis Bay, Pratt relieved William R. Smedberg III and took command of Hudson. He was the first man of the Naval Academy class of 1936 to command a 2,100-ton destroyer, and he was then a lieutenant commander. The night he assumed command the ship was ordered out after a submarine reported off the harbor, and she came back without a contact. Through the early weeks of 1944 he kept her with Destroyer Squadron 45 for further work around Bougainville, the landings on the Green Islands, and bombardments of Kavieng and Rabaul. On 31 January 1944, on the way to the Green Islands, Hudson attacked and sank a Japanese submarine. He was promoted to temporary commander on 15 March 1944.
After a short stay in Australia, Hudson joined the force gathering at Kwajalein for the Marianas campaign. Pratt carried her through the shore bombardments that opened the landings on Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, and into the Battle of the Philippine Sea on 19 June 1944, where her guns were credited with two aircraft in the fighting later called the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Off Guam in mid-July she screened transports, brought down another aircraft, and recovered three Navy pilots and a Japanese aviator. In September she supported the landings on Peleliu and Angaur. The Silver Star later awarded to Pratt covered his conduct in the Philippine Sea, off Guam on 20 July 1944, and in operations against the Palau Islands. Hudson sailed from Manus on 4 October and reached San Francisco two weeks later for overhaul.
After refresher training at Pearl Harbor she was back in combat off Iwo Jima on 19 February 1945, on radar picket duty for the opening assault. At Okinawa she worked as a fighter-director ship on the picket line from 1 April into the first days of May, under repeated day and night air attack. In one attack seventeen suicide planes came at her. Pratt handled the ship so that she stayed in action and came through undamaged. On 22 April a kamikaze passed close enough for a wingtip to strike a chief petty officer, the only member of her wartime crew to be hurt, and still missed the hull. In a depth-charge hunt on 4 and 5 April, Hudson was credited with the sinking of the Japanese submarine RO-49. Pratt received the Legion of Merit with Combat V for that action, and the Navy Cross for the picket fighting from 1 April to 5 May.
On 4 May 1945 a suicide plane set the escort carrier Sangamon ablaze near Okinawa. Pratt brought Hudson alongside the burning, still-moving carrier three times and passed fire hoses across while ammunition cooked off aboard the larger ship. The carrier’s flight deck tore away the destroyer’s port bridge wing, knocked a searchlight off its mount, and smashed a 40-millimeter gun. A plane shoved over the side started a fire among Hudson’s own depth charges. He held the destroyer there until the carrier’s fires were beaten down, and a second Navy Cross followed for that day. He remained in command until 8 August 1945.
Pratt stayed in the Navy after the war and retired as an admiral. With his wife, Ann Virginia Pratt, he later wrote an account of the family’s life in the service, including the Hudson years. He died on 25 May 2006, at the age of ninety-one.