Ships
- USS Aylwin (DD-355) Captain, 11 October 1943 – 31 May 1944
Robert Orris Strange was born in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, on 28 December 1905. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1928 and was commissioned in the Navy. Promotion came slowly in the peacetime fleet. He was a lieutenant by 1 July 1936. Wartime advancement then moved faster: temporary lieutenant commander on 1 January 1942, lieutenant commander on 1 March 1942, and temporary commander on 15 September 1942, the grade he held when he was given a destroyer of his own.
On 11 October 1943, Commander Strange took command of the Farragut-class destroyer Aylwin. Built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and commissioned on 1 March 1935 under Clarence Gulbranson, she was already a Pacific veteran when he came aboard. On 7 December 1941 she got underway from Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack while her commanding officer, Robert Henry Rodgers, was still ashore. She had since been in the Coral Sea and at Midway and had served through the Aleutian campaign. Strange relieved Ray Edward Malpass, who had commanded her since January 1943.
From that autumn into the spring of 1944 he took Aylwin into the Central Pacific drive with the fast carrier forces. In November 1943 the destroyer was with the carriers covering the Gilbert Islands landings at Tarawa and Makin. In January and February 1944 she stayed with that force through the Marshall Islands operation, including the seizure of Kwajalein and Eniwetok, and through the mid-February carrier strike on the Japanese base at Truk. Late in March the same ships raided Palau and other islands in the western Carolines.
In April 1944 Aylwin was working from Majuro. On 13 April she sortied in the screen of Rear Admiral Alfred E. Montgomery's Task Group 58.2. From 21 through 24 April she guarded the carriers while they covered Army landings at Aitape, Tanahmerah Bay, and Humboldt Bay on New Guinea. At the end of April the carriers struck Truk again, and Aylwin remained with that fast-carrier work into May. On 31 May 1944 Strange turned the ship over to William Kittridge Rogers, as the fleet was about to move on to the Marianas.
He was soon at sea in a new destroyer. On 4 November 1944 he took command of Compton. The ship left Norfolk for the Pacific on 17 February 1945, reached Pearl Harbor on 16 March, and on 5 April sailed for Ulithi. On 25 March 1945, while she was still at Pearl Harbor, the Navy advanced him to the temporary rank of captain. Compton left Ulithi on 20 April to join the Okinawa campaign. Strange kept command through the first month of that fighting and left the ship on 21 May 1945.
He married Martha Bowen. Their son John Bowen Strange was born in Washington, D.C., on 1 April 1944, while Aylwin was in the Pacific. Robert and Georgia were the other children, and the family made its home in Arlington, Virginia. Captain Robert Orris Strange died in Arlington on 5 October 1955, at the age of forty-nine.