Ships
- USS Lamson (DD-367) Captain, 31 July 1945 – 24 November 1945
The ship for the end of his war is Lamson. The registers put him in the Naval Reserve, not the regular Navy. He was a lieutenant commander when the compiled lists give him Lamson, and a commander, with date of rank 1 November 1945, while that command, if the end date is right, still had three weeks to run. The start date is not settled. One compiled list says 31 July 1945. Another says 16 August. Both end on 24 November. He is not Wilmon Huntington Ayer, a regular Navy officer who appears in the Navy Registers of those years and who had other ships. A blank uboat.net page titled only “Robert Ayer, USNR,” with no birth date and no commands, is not this man either.
The registers spell him Robert M. Ayer. The middle name McCormick is the form on the Cruising Club of America’s award pages, on uboat.net, and on the NavSource commanding-officer line for Lamson. It was not printed out in any register page read for this essay. The initial M was.
Origins
The Register of Commissioned Officers, Cadets, Midshipmen, and Warrant Officers of the United States Naval Reserve, dated 1 July 1941, lists him among the lieutenants (junior grade) of the Volunteer Reserve (General Service). He is number 528 in that grade. The class is D-V(G). The date-of-birth columns read month 9, day 20, year 10: 20 September 1910. The same row gives his date of rank as 2 August 1940, and his service for pay purposes, computed as of 1 January 1941, as 8 years, 6 months, and 9 days.
That pay figure and a later register agree with each other. The Register of 1 July 1955, NAVPERS 15009, still has him, file number 071126, and prints a pay entry base date of 23 June 1932. Count forward from 23 June 1932 to 1 January 1941 and the interval is 8 years, 6 months, and 9 days. The Navy was using one service date for him across fourteen years. What that date was in his life — the day he was commissioned, the day an NROTC unit finished him, a constructive date a clerk assigned — the registers do not say.
They do say two things in the explanatory-notes column of the 1941 volume, and the key at the front of that volume says what the numbers mean. Note 7 is “Graduate of Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps.” Note 5 is “Issued commissions in Naval Reserve (acceptance and oath of office not yet received).” Both numerals are printed on his line. He was, on the Navy’s own classification, an NROTC graduate, and as of 1 July 1941 a commission had been issued for which the Bureau of Navigation had not yet received the oath. The date of rank in the same row is 2 August 1940, eleven months earlier. The register does not say whether the missing oath belonged to the rank he already held or to a commission that had not yet taken effect. It does not name the college. It does not name a city.
Uboat.net prints “Madison, Wisconsin” as the birthplace and does not tie that place to one of the registers it cites. No birth record was opened for this essay. Madison is not used here as fact. His parents’ names were not found in any page read through. A user-submitted memorial for a Chicago lawyer, Walter Ayer, lists a son Robert McCormick Ayer with the years 1910–1992 and a mother Phoebe Lord McCormick. That page could not be opened, and it is not a Navy record. It is not used.
Eight years of pay service by the first day of 1941 means he was not a man the Navy invented in the summer of 1940. The 2 August 1940 date is the date of his rank as lieutenant (junior grade), not the start of his time on the Navy’s books. He was twenty-nine that August, thirty the next month. D-V(G) is the Volunteer Reserve’s general-service deck class: commissioned deck officers “qualified for general detail afloat or ashore.” That is a category, not a portrait. Nothing in the register says what he did ashore in the 1930s, whether he drilled, or what he lived on. The missing oath in the summer of 1941 is the one private fact the printed page allows. A commission was out. The paper that would finish it had not come back.
The rank he actually held
He is not in the regular Navy Registers searched for 1944, 1945, 1955, 1960, or 1961. Wilmon Huntington Ayer is. Robert M. Ayer is in the Reserve registers.
On 1 July 1941 he is a lieutenant (junior grade), file number 71126, the same number the 1955 register prints as 071126. The index OCR of the 1941 volume once reads his class as D-VC. The body of the page, which was looked at, reads D-V(G). The body is the one to keep.
Uboat.net, citing the Reserve Register of 1 January 1943 and the Reserve Register of 31 July 1944, gives him lieutenant on 15 June 1942 and lieutenant commander on 1 July 1943. Those two volumes were not opened line by line for this essay. The dates are that site’s reading, not a column re-read here. What was re-read is the other end. On 1 July 1955 he is a commander, designator 1105, date of rank 11/01/45. In that register’s own key, 110 is a line officer and the fourth digit 5 is an officer of the Naval Reserve whose permanent grade is ensign or above. Digit 9 would have meant the retired list. He was not on it. His register number in that volume is 001142. His year-of-birth column is 10, which is 1910, the year already printed in full in 1941.
If the 1 July 1943 lieutenant-commander date is right, he was already a lieutenant commander when he went to sea in command. If it is wrong, the 1955 register still does not make him a commander until 1 November 1945. No medal, no letter of commendation, and no Navy Cross appears in the notes of the 1941 row or in the 1955 line. That is not proof he never received one. It is proof that these two registers, as read, do not record one.
An escort in the Atlantic
The other ship, the one he had for the year that still had fighting in it, is not Lamson.
NavSource’s commanding-officer list for Thomas J. Gary (DE-326), credited to Wolfgang Hechler, gives the ship to “Lcdr. Robert Ayer, USNR” from 10 July 1944 to 4 July 1945, between William Henry Harrison and Richard H. Smith. The list does not print the middle name. Uboat.net’s officer page, which does print Robert McCormick Ayer, gives him Gary from “mid 1944” to June 1945, and its convoy narratives name “Lt.Cdr. R.M. Ayer, USNR” as her commanding officer on 3 January 1945 and again on 19 February 1945. No deck log and no Navy Directory page putting him on her bridge were opened here. The identification is the full name on one compilation, the initials R.M. on the convoy write-ups, and the shorter “Robert Ayer, USNR” on the other list, in the same months, on a ship whose file in the registers matches the man on Lamson. It is strong enough to use, and it is not a log.
Gary was an Edsall-class destroyer escort, diesel, built at Consolidated Steel in Orange, Texas, commissioned 27 November 1943 with Harrison in command. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships sends her from Bermuda and Charleston to convoy work in the Atlantic. Until May 1945 she screened convoys between the East Coast and ports in the Mediterranean and the United Kingdom. DANFS says eight such convoys. A later retelling says eleven. The dictionary does not name the captains who had her on those passages, and it does not say which of the eight fell after 10 July 1944. The ones before that date were Harrison’s, if the compiled relief is right. The ones after it, through the spring of 1945, were Ayer’s, on the same condition.
Two of the late ones are written out, on uboat.net, with his initials on them. On 3 January 1945 Gary sailed from Boston with Brister, Finch, and Richey, escorting the Boston section of convoy CU 53. The write-up puts Commander T. G. Murrell, U.S. Coast Guard, Commander Escort Division 57, on board Gary with Ayer. The Boston section joined the New York section the next day. On 14 January, west of Ireland, Gary went with the Bristol Channel portion, in company with Finch and Ramsden. On 19 February she sailed again from New York, still with Murrell embarked, in the escort of CU 59, and the same account has her with the Irish Sea section and then the Liverpool section, which it brings in on the afternoon of 1 March. In that second narrative uboat.net calls the ship Thomas W. Gary. The Navy’s name was Thomas J. Gary. The initial is wrong. The convoy dates are the compiler’s, taken from the sort of Admiralty and convoy records that site uses, and they were not re-checked against a log.
The ship’s own name changed under him, if he had her across New Year’s Day. DANFS says that on 1 January 1945, while she was moored at Boston, Gary became Thomas J. Gary, so the name would be free for a cruiser that was planned and not, in the end, the point of his story. He would have taken over a ship called Gary and given up a ship called Thomas J. Gary. That is a clerk’s change. It is also the only renaming this essay can put on his watch.
The one episode DANFS tells inside those months, and tells without naming a captain, is not a submarine. In December 1944 she left the homebound convoy she was escorting from British ports to help Huron (PF-19), which had collided with a merchantman. On the 9th she took on board more than a hundred Coast Guardsmen from the damaged patrol vessel and screened Huron while she was towed to Bermuda. If Ayer was in command from 10 July 1944, that was his deck. DANFS does not say so. The sentence in the dictionary is about the ship. The sentence in this essay is that the ship’s history places the rescue inside the window the compiled lists give him, and that no report in his name was found.
What the convoy pages do make plain, if they are right about the flag, is the shape of the job. He was commanding officer of the ship. A division commander rode her. Murrell, a Coast Guard commander, was Commander Escort Division 57. Ayer was not that officer. He had the hull, the watch bill, and a senior man in his cabin or on his bridge, and he took tankers and transports across in the last winter of the Atlantic war. CU 53 and CU 59 are fast convoys of the CU series, the sort that ran between New York and the United Kingdom. No attack on either convoy, under his name, is in the narratives read here. DANFS’s summary for the whole Atlantic tour is that the ship screened her convoys and got them in. “Safely” is the dictionary’s word for the ship’s record, not a judgment of one captain’s nerve. There is no page here that says whether he ever had a contact he believed was a U-boat, or what he thought of a winter on the western approaches. That silence should not be filled.
He did not take her into the Pacific war. DANFS has Thomas J. Gary finishing her last Atlantic convoy at New York on 7 May 1945, working up, leaving waters off Haiti on 22 June, passing the Panama Canal, and sailing from San Diego on 12 July for Hawaii. The NavSource list relieves Ayer on 4 July 1945, eight days before that San Diego departure. Uboat.net has him off by June, which would put even the Haiti sailing under someone else. Either way the Formosa prisoner rescue in September 1945 — the run into Kiirun with Kretchmer, the minefields, the train of prisoners, the dry sentence in the ship’s report that the outbound track was not the inbound track because the inbound track had crossed minefields — belongs to the captain who had her then. DANFS does not name him. NavSource names Richard H. Smith from 4 July, or from November, depending on which of its own dates one trusts, and the September operation falls after both the July relief and uboat’s June relief. It is not Ayer’s story. Neither is the rest of her long life: the radar-picket years, the Cuban quarantine, Deep Freeze, the transfer to Tunisia. He had left.
The gap between Gary and Lamson is empty. If he left the escort on 4 July and took the destroyer on 31 July, the Navy has three and a half weeks of him with no ship attached in any source read here. If the Lamson date is 16 August, the hole is longer. No orders, no school, no leave address.
Lamson, after the famous part was over
Lamson (DD-367) is a Mahan-class destroyer with a war that does not belong to him, and a last autumn that may.
She was commissioned in 1936. She was at sea when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor. She fought at Tassafaronga. She worked the New Guinea landings. On 7 December 1944, off Ormoc Bay, a kamikaze crashed into her superstructure. DANFS says twenty-five of her crew were killed and fifty-four injured. She reached the Puget Sound Navy Yard on 16 January 1945. She was back at Eniwetok on 10 May and, in the dictionary’s words, “operated for the rest of the war on patrol and air-sea rescue work off Iwo Jima.” NavSource’s commanding-officer list, credited to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, gives her to Commander John Vavasour Noel Jr. from 1 May 1944 to 31 July 1945. That span covers the kamikaze, the yard, and the Iwo patrol. Ayer is the next name on that list: lieutenant commander, 31 July 1945 to 24 November 1945. Uboat.net starts him on 16 August 1945 and ends him on the same 24 November, and calls him lieutenant commander for the whole of it.
The two start dates cannot both be the day he read his orders. This essay does not have the log that would choose. What both dates agree on is that he missed the blow that nearly burned her, and that he had her only at the end. If the list that says 31 July is right, he had about two weeks of the Iwo air-sea rescue duty before Japan’s surrender, and then the occupation. If 16 August is right, he reported the day after the surrender broadcast, and the Iwo work was entirely Noel’s. Neither date is a deck-log entry seen here. The 31 July date is the NavSource date, not a correction of it.
DANFS, in the wording carried by the destroyer-history reprints, gives the ship’s next movements without a captain’s name. On 3 September 1945 she arrived at Chichi Jima “to supervise the surrender of the Bonin Islands.” She then did occupation duty at Sasebo for one month, left Japan on 29 October, and reached San Diego on 29 November. The signing itself was not on Lamson. The Naval Historical Center’s photograph captions put the ceremony on Dunlap (DD-384), off Chichi Jima, the same day. Lieutenant General Yoshio Tachibana signed. Commodore John H. Magruder Jr. accepted the surrender. Ayer’s name is not on those captions. “Supervise,” in the dictionary, is what the ship’s history claims for Lamson. It is not a signature. If he was her captain that morning — and both compiled dates would put him there — he was captain of a destroyer in the group, not the officer who took the islands’ surrender. The dictionary’s word is the Navy’s. The photographs are the Navy’s. They are not the same sentence, and they should not be forced into one.
The end date, 24 November, falls five days before the San Diego arrival DANFS gives the ship. NavSource gives her next to Lieutenant Commander George Gill Ball on 24 November 1945, and Ball keeps her until 1 June 1946. If those dates are right, Ayer turned her over during the passage home, or just before the port, and did not take her alongside in San Diego. Nothing says whether that relief was planned, or resented, or simply the next set of orders. The 1955 register’s date of rank as commander is 1 November 1945. If he was still on Lamson that day, the Navy made him a commander in the middle of the command, and the photo index went on calling him lieutenant commander because that was the rank at which he had reported. Uboat.net’s own tables do the same thing: commander from 1 November, and the Lamson line still headed “Lt.Cdr.” through 24 November. The conflict is small, and it is real.
She was not done when he left. In May 1946 she went to Bikini for the atomic tests. The accounts do not agree on the day Test Able sank her — 1 July or 2 July — and the disagreement does not matter for him. Ball had her, and then, on the NavSource list, Commander William Henry Watson Jr. from 1 June 1946. Ayer was not her captain when she was expended. The five battle stars DANFS gives the ship are the ship’s. They are not his.
What it cost, as far as the paper goes
The costly things in his two ships happened on either side of him.
On Lamson the kamikaze was seven months before the earliest date anyone gives him the ship. Twenty-five dead and a superstructure burned out were Noel’s, or whoever the log eventually names. Ayer took over a repaired destroyer, or a destroyer still on the Iwo patrol, in the last days of a war he had spent on the Atlantic. On Gary the Formosa run, which is the episode a later reader wants — mines, a harbor that had not been swept, prisoners on a train at half past four — was two months after the latest date anyone gives him that ship. He did not get the story. He got the winter convoys, a Coast Guard division commander living in his ship, a rename at a Boston pier, and, if the December 1944 window is his, a hundred Coast Guardsmen taken off a wrecked frigate and a tow screened into Bermuda.
That is a real command. Lamson’s name means Tassafaronga, Ormoc, and a kamikaze. He arrived after those things. The dates are silent about everything else, and the silence is where a reader will supply the earlier war if nobody stops him.
No letter, no oral history, and no newspaper interview was found in which he said what he thought the work was. The 1941 register’s note 5 is the nearest thing to a choice that cost him something on paper: a commission issued, and the oath not back, eleven months after his date of rank as lieutenant (junior grade). Why the oath was late, and whether the lateness was his or the bureau’s, is not in the key. It is only in the number. There is no decoration in the sources read here to set against it, and no court-martial either. The war, as the documents show it, did not break him and did not distinguish him. It used a reserve deck officer of the 1932 service date for a year of escort duty and then for the last autumn of a destroyer that had already done its fighting.
After
On 1 July 1955 he was still a commander in the Naval Reserve, still file 071126, still a line officer, not retired. The register does not say where he lived or what he did for work. It says the Navy had not let go of the name.
The Cruising Club of America did something with the name that the Navy registers never do. Its page for the 1965 John Parkinson Memorial Trophy says the award went to Robert McCormick Ayer for a transoceanic passage aboard Premise. The trust that governs the trophy, printed on the same site, limits it to a member who makes the passage in his or her own yacht, predominantly under sail, and not in an organized race. The 1969 award page uses the same sentence and the same yacht: Premise. The club’s running list of recipients also prints him in 1977, as Robert M. Ayer, and in 1979, as Robert McCormick Ayer, with the spacing of the middle name broken by a gap. Those later pages, as retrieved, do not repeat the yacht’s name in the sentence this essay could read. The ports of departure and arrival, which the trophy’s own rules say are to be inscribed on the plaque, are not on the web pages. Premise’s rig, length, and designer were not found in a source read here.
So much is solid, and it is the only after-war life that is solid. He owned, or the club treated him as owning, a yacht named Premise, and in 1965 and again in 1969 he took her across an ocean under sail, outside a race, and the club wrote it down. A man whose Navy time, on the evidence, was convoy screens and a repaired destroyer at the surrender spent the years afterward crossing oceans with no escort and no senior officer embarked. That is a fact about the passages the club recorded. It is not a theory about why he wanted them. Nothing says whether Premise was restitution, or habit, or simply the boat he had.
Uboat.net says he died on 23 January 1992, aged 81, at Bar Harbour, Maine. The spelling is the site’s. No obituary, no Maine death record, and no Social Security entry was opened to test it. The age fits a man born in September 1910, which is the one date that is secure. The place is not, until a better page is found. A chart collection at the Penobscot Marine Museum is titled “Robert M. Ayer.” Charts in it, as indexed, include the Maine coast, Bermuda, and the Thames entrance. The museum’s public page, as retrieved, does not say that the collector was the officer, or the yachtsman, or both. The name is common enough that the collection stays outside the biography.
No wife is named in any source read through. No child is named. What he left them cannot be written. The Navy left a file number, a service date in June 1932, two ships at the end of the war, and a commander’s rank that was still on the reserve list in 1955. The Cruising Club left Premise and two ocean passages it was willing to put his full name on. The rest is blank.