Ships
- USS Sproston (DD-577) Captain from 2 November 1945
Robert Duane Karl, born on a farm near Aberdeen, South Dakota, on 18 March 1920, went to the Naval Academy in 1939, graduated an ensign in 1942, and spent the war as a fire-control officer in destroyers: first in Sigsbee in the central Pacific, then in Sproston from the Aleutians to Leyte, Luzon and Okinawa. After Japan surrendered he commanded Sproston from 2 November 1945 until she was placed out of commission on 18 January 1946, when he was twenty-five. He then became a naval engineer, working on ship repair and carrier construction, and spent the second half of his life in business and in Masonic and civic work in Pacific Palisades, California.
He was born at home, on 18 March 1920, on a farm near Aberdeen, one of five children of Arthur and Emma Karl; his grandparents on the German side had homesteaded in Dakota Territory. His sisters were Dorothy and Eleanor, and his brothers Lincoln and Wilfred. He attended Central High School in Aberdeen, and then Northern Normal and Industrial School in the same town, where, according to his obituary, he "developed a keen desire to attend the U.S. Naval Academy." He won an appointment in 1939 by passing the entrance examination.
The 1943 Lucky Bag is the only contemporary description of him. It places his arrival "in the summer of '39" and says that "there emerged from the badlands of South Dakota a blonde, genial farmer preferring the call of the sea to a career in the cornfields." He was nineteen. His classmates called him "Swede." The sketch says he "made a wonderful wife," always willing to lend a hand "whether it be on a juice prob or financing our dragging weekends," that he "never was much of a snake at the academy," so that they seldom saw him "favoring one of the fair," and sums him up as "a thorough student of Nimrod, a lover of soft and sentimental music, an able but indifferent athlete, and a sincere and highly valued friend."
His class, the Class of 1943, graduated in 1942, ahead of the usual four years, and he went out an ensign at twenty-two.
His first assignment, as his obituary tells it, was not to sea. He went to the University of Notre Dame as an instructor in the V-7 program, the Navy's course for training reserve officers, and then attended fleet schools, including fire control at Anacostia, Maryland. At Anacostia he met Alice Morris Elmore, whom he would marry. Meanwhile he was assigned to the commissioning crew of the destroyer Sigsbee at the Brooklyn yard, as a member of her fire-control group. He supervised the loading of ammunition at Buzzards Bay, then the training at Casco Bay and the shakedown at Guantánamo Bay, before Sigsbee went to the Pacific.
The obituary lists what the ship did there: a raid on Marcus Island, "the Sigsbee's first contact with the Japanese"; a screening action at Wake Island; fire support at the invasion of Tarawa; the pre-invasion bombardment of Kwajalein; and fire support at Kavieng, New Ireland. When the ship returned to Hawaii for replenishment, Karl applied to become a naval aviator. On his way to flight school in Dallas he stopped in Washington and, on 5 April 1944, married Alice there. His flight training was short-lived, the obituary says, "owing to an overabundance of aviation candidates," and he was transferred to another destroyer, Sproston, some time after April 1944.
Sproston was a Fletcher-class destroyer, commissioned at Orange, Texas, on 19 May 1943. She had gone north to the Aleutians in late 1943 and spent the winter and spring of 1944 shelling the Kuril Islands and patrolling for submarines; on 8 August she left Adak for San Francisco and the South Pacific. In October she was assigned to screen transports off Dulag, Leyte, and on 25 October shot down her first plane. Karl served in her as fire-control officer. His obituary says he took part in "many naval actions," including the fight at Leyte, the support of the Philippine landings, and the bombardment at Okinawa. The ship's history agrees with the general outline: she downed two "Zekes" in San Pedro Bay on 18 November; patrolled the Lingayen area in December and January; entered Subic Bay on 29 January 1945, believed to have been the first American warship to do so since the Japanese occupation began; and from 26 March did picket and patrol duty at Okinawa, where on 4 April a near miss damaged her sonar and main-battery computer and her main battery could be fired only by local control until she returned from repairs at Guam.
At Subic Bay, the obituary says, he learned that his brother Lincoln had been killed when an American submarine accidentally torpedoed a Japanese ship carrying American prisoners of war. The record does not say which ship, nor in which service Lincoln had served.
The last episode that the obituary describes is also the last in the ship's wartime history. On 28 June 1945, while Sproston was steaming alone toward the United States for overhaul, between Saipan and Eniwetok, the supply ship Antares signalled that she was under submarine attack. Sproston found a sonar contact at 1,000 yards, tried and failed to ram, and expended all her depth charges. A torpedo wake was seen sixty degrees off the port bow; the ship turned hard left and it passed along her port side. A periscope then appeared off the port quarter, belonging to a kaiten, the Japanese crewed torpedo, and the main battery fired. One salvo hit and a large explosion followed. The ship's history says the kaiten had been released by the submarine I-36. The obituary has "Lt. Robert Karl, manning a 5′ gun battery" sinking a midget submarine that was "preparing to launch a torpedo at the Sproston." He was twenty-five.
Sproston reached San Francisco on 14 July 1945 for overhaul and was being prepared for inactivation when the war ended. She moved to San Diego in mid-December and was placed out of commission on 18 January 1946. Command lists give Karl as her commanding officer from 2 November 1945 to that date, as a lieutenant. His obituary puts it more simply: "Following Japan's surrender, Robert became commanding officer of the USS Sproston as it entered the reserve fleet."
The rest of his naval career, as the obituary gives it, was in engineering and shipbuilding. He earned a master's degree in naval engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949. He went from there to the Portsmouth shipyard, where he "gained experience with the construction of new ships," and then to SURFPAC, the Pacific Fleet's surface force, in Honolulu, where he was responsible for the repair of major combatant ships bound for Korea. At Newport News, Virginia, he was a design superintendent in the construction of the carriers Forrestal and Ranger. His last posting was the Bureau of Ships in Washington, where he stayed until 1964. The obituary counts twenty-five years of naval service and lists his decorations as the American Defense, Asiatic-Pacific (seven stars), Philippine Liberation (two stars) and National Defense medals.
The Karls settled in Pacific Palisades in 1966. For twenty-one years he worked for the International Marine Oil and Development Company, supervising the construction of ship-to-shore oil delivery systems in Mexico, China, Singapore, Austria, New Zealand, Nigeria and Tanzania, and retired as a vice president in 1985. He hunted elk, deer and pheasant with his brother Willie in South Dakota, and fished in British Columbia and Alaska. He was president of the Will Rogers Cooperative Association and of the Masonic Service Bureau, active in American Legion Palisades Post 283, three times Master of Riviera Masonic Lodge 780, and a member of the Shrine and the Scottish Rite. He and Alice were members of the parish of Saint Matthew.
He died at his home in Pacific Palisades, after a long illness with a brain tumor, on his sixty-first wedding anniversary, 5 April 2005, a few weeks after his eighty-fifth birthday. Alice survived him, along with a son, Robert Jr., and daughters Betty and Krys, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. A service was announced for 9 April 2005 in Santa Monica.