Ships
- USS Stack (DD-406) Captain, 5 February 1944 – 25 March 1945
Robert Edward Wheeler was born in South Carolina on 22 May 1912. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1934 and was commissioned an ensign on 31 May of that year. He became a lieutenant (junior grade) on 31 May 1937 and a lieutenant on 1 July 1941. On 1 February 1944 he received a temporary appointment as commander. As a lieutenant commander he went on to command a destroyer in the Pacific war.
He became captain of Stack (DD-406) on 5 February 1944, relieving Philip Kingsland Sherman. Stack was a Benham-class destroyer, laid down at the Norfolk Navy Yard in 1937, launched in 1938, and commissioned on 20 November 1939. The ship was named for Edward Stack, who had served under John Paul Jones. Isaiah Olch was her first commanding officer. Alvord John Greenacre and Roy Arthur Newton commanded her before Sherman.
Wheeler took Stack in the Marshall Islands, where she had been working with the fast carrier force. On 17 and 18 February 1944 that force raided the Japanese base at Truk, and on 20 February it struck Jaluit. In March the destroyer went to the Mare Island Navy Yard in California. The overhaul ran from 22 March to 27 May 1944, and Wheeler remained in command while the ship was refitted.
In the summer of 1944 Stack returned to the fighting off New Guinea. She supported the landing on Morotai in September. By the middle of October she was in Humboldt Bay with other ships making ready for the invasion of Leyte, and she took part in that assault in the Philippines.
On 30 December 1944 Stack sailed from Sansapor, New Guinea, in Task Group 78.5 for Lingayen Gulf on Luzon. From 5 to 12 January 1945 she guarded the ships against submarines and aircraft and fired in support of the troops ashore. She then escorted convoys between Leyte and Lingayen Gulf. Wheeler left the ship on 25 March 1945, when Sam Johnston Caldwell relieved him. His command had lasted a little more than thirteen months, from the strike on Truk through the opening campaign in the Philippines.