Ships
- USS Craven (DD-382) Captain from 10 July 1945
The name without the numeral belongs first to another man, and he has to be set aside before the officer can be seen at all. Robert Somers Brookings, born 22 January 1850 in Cecil County, Maryland, and dead in Washington on 15 November 1932, was the St. Louis merchant who chaired the Washington University board and whose name went onto the Brookings Institution. He was a bachelor until 1927, when he married Isabel Valle January. No source read here gives him a child, a Navy commission, or a destroyer. His war was the War Industries Board. The officer in the Navy Register is printed "Robert Somers II," and in the 1949 index "Robt S 2d." The numeral is the Navy's way of saying he was the second of the name on its books. It is not a birth certificate, and it is not proof that he was the philanthropist's son, nephew, or grandson. That kinship was not found.
Two other Navy men with the name have to be kept off this ship as well. Robert Brookings Smith, Princeton 1926, died 30 December 2002 in Ladue, Missouri. His class memorial says he entered the Navy in 1942, served as lieutenant commander and navigator of the escort carrier White Plains, and was decorated for heroism in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and it calls the philanthropist his great-uncle. He is a Smith. Henry Nason Kinney Brookings, Princeton 1939, died 1 March 1993 in Shreveport. His class memorial says he joined the Navy in the war, served in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and retired from the Naval Reserve a commander. The Reserve Register of 1 July 1955 lists a Henry N. K. Brookings as a lieutenant commander, designator 1105, and also a Gardner T. Brookings, ensign, and a Walt D. Brookings Jr., lieutenant. None of those lines is Robert Somers II. File number 74712 belongs to one man.
Origins
What the Navy printed for him, and would stand behind in a letter, is short. In the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps of 1 July 1947 he is on the active list of line officers, signal number 4547, in the lieutenants (junior grade). The name on that line is Brookings, Robert Somers II. The permanent-rank column is LTJG. The date-of-rank cells under that permanent rank are blank. The date-of-temporary-rank column is 1 November 1945. The date of birth is 27 June 1912. The pay-entry base date is 20 June 1935. The qualification column is empty: the book does not mark him a naval aviator, a submariner, or an engineering-duty officer. The name index of the same register points at printed page 61, which is this line, and gives the file, or jacket, number as 74712. The rank column of that index reads commander. The corps column is not clean on the scan. It is not a second man. It is the same file number and the same page.
The Register of 1949, commanders, line, printed page 60, has him again. The index there reads "Brookings Robt S 2d," rank CDR, file 074712, signal 4438, page 60. On the commander page itself the permanent rank is lieutenant commander, the date of present rank is 1 November 1945, the birth date is again 27 June 1912, and the pay-entry base date is again 20 June 1935. The page header says commanders. The men in the rows around him are also printed LCDR, and they carry the same 1 November 1945 in the date-of-present-rank column. That date is his, in the sense that the book assigns it to him. It is not evidence of a ceremony that was his alone. Half the page has it.
The 1947 book explains the pay-entry base date in a note: it is the date that reflects all service for pay purposes under the act of 16 June 1942. It is not, by itself, the day he was commissioned, and it is not a town. Born in the summer of 1912, he had creditable service running from the summer he turned twenty-three. Where that service was, the officer registers searched for this essay do not say. He is not in the regular Navy Register of 1 July 1942, 1 July 1943, 1 July 1944, or 1 July 1945, under Brookings or under the near-miss Brooking. He is not in the Naval Reserve Register of 1943, nor in the one dated 31 July 1944, nor in the Reserve Registers of 1 April 1949, 1 April 1951, or 1 July 1955. Alvin Vivian Brooking and Sherman Purnell Brooking are in the 1945 regular book. They are not this officer. The 1935 date therefore sits on a man the wartime officer lists do not carry. Enlisted service, a reserve appointment the searched books missed, or time the pay law counted from somewhere else, are all possible. None of them is printed on his line. No town, no parents, no school, and no wife are printed there either.
He was thirty-three in the summer of 1945. That is the only age the registers will support. They do not say whether he had gone to sea before the war, whether the numeral on his name was a family choice or a bureau clerk's, or whether anyone at home called him by it.
Formation
There is no Lucky Bag sketch, because he was not found in a Naval Academy class list in any register read here. Academy entry, for the classes that would fit a man born in 1912, would have put him on the regular list years before 1945. He is not on that list until the 1947 book. The formation the Navy usually records for a destroyer captain, the midshipman years, the first ensign cruise, the school, is a blank for him.
What can be said is negative, and it matters. A commander of the regular Navy, already commissioned, would ordinarily be in that book. He is not. The 31 July 1944 Reserve Register does not contain him either. If he was an officer in the summer of 1945, he was an officer those two books did not yet list, or listed under a reading this search missed. The optical text of both books was searched for the surname and for the near spellings. The gap is more likely real than a missed line.
The 1947 register is the first time the Navy, in a book in hand, is willing to print the whole name, the birth, and a rank. By then the war was over. The rank it is willing to call permanent is lieutenant (junior grade). The index of the same book is willing to call him a commander. The 1947 notes say, in so many words, that reversions in rank will make the printed lineal list differ from the list the law was about to freeze. They do not say that his reversion, if that is what the gap between CDR and LTJG was, happened on a particular day, or that he asked for it, or that it cost him the ship. They only warn the reader that the two ranks can both be true of one officer in that year.
The war, as the dates allow it
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships tells her war and never names him. It names her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander W. O. Bailey, and then it follows the ship. It gives LCDR Robert Edward Sinnott the ship from 1 February 1945 to 10 July 1945, and CDR Robert Somers Brookings II from 10 July 1945 to 19 April 1946. The same compilers, on the page for Laws (DD-558), give Sinnott that ship from 24 September 1945 to 10 December 1946. Those two lists agree with each other. Sinnott leaves Craven in July and appears in Laws in September. Brookings is the name they put in the gap, and they keep him there until the day DANFS says Craven was decommissioned.
uboat.net does not agree. Its Craven page gives Sinnott the ship from 1 February 1945 to 18 April 1946 and does not mention Brookings. Its page for Sinnott then also gives him Laws from 24 September 1945. Both cannot be true. A man cannot be commanding officer of Craven through the spring of 1946 and commanding officer of Laws from the autumn of 1945. The uboat.net Craven tenure is the one that breaks. That does not make the Hechler list a deck log. No deck log, no muster, and no war diary for July 1945 were in hand. DANFS does not confirm the relief.
If the date is right, he was not her captain for the war the ship is remembered for. DANFS has Craven in the Pacific from before Pearl Harbor, through the carrier screens, and back to Pearl Harbor on 11 October 1944. She sailed from Pearl Harbor on 2 January 1945, reached New York on 26 January, and worked exercises and antisubmarine patrol on the east coast until 2 May, when she escorted a convoy to Southampton and returned to New York on 29 May. On 22 June she left Portland, Maine, carrying the United States minister to Tangier, and went on to Oran. From there DANFS has her "throughout the Mediterranean on escort, training, and transport duties" until 14 January 1946. None of that narrative names a captain after Bailey. The nine battle stars DANFS gives her are the ship's, for the war already fought. They are not his. Nothing read here awards him a decoration of any kind.
Where she was on 10 July 1945, DANFS does not say. She had left Maine on 22 June. She is next described as ranging the Mediterranean until January. The change of command, if it happened on the tenth, happened somewhere on that passage or after she had reached the far shore. The place is not in the history, and it is not guessed here. What the dates allow, and only allow, is that the months the compiled list gives him are the Mediterranean duties and the voyage home, not the Pacific battles that put the ship on this list.
DANFS then brings her back without a name on the bridge. She cleared the Mediterranean for New York on 14 January 1946 and arrived on 28 January. She sailed on 20 February for San Diego and Pearl Harbor and arrived at Pearl Harbor on 16 March. She was decommissioned there on 19 April 1946 and sold on 2 October 1947. NavSource ends Brookings's command on 19 April 1946, the decommissioning day. If that list is right, he was the last commanding officer, and the last thing the ship asked of him was to take her out of commission. uboat.net's end-of-service date is 18 April 1946, one day earlier, and it still has Sinnott in the chair. The official history's day is the nineteenth. Who signed the log that morning was not read.
That is what the 1947 and 1949 indexes say, and what NavSource says for the whole tour. It is not what the 1947 lineal list calls permanent. Permanent, in the book dated 1 July 1947, more than a year after he would have left the ship, is lieutenant (junior grade), with no date filled in beside it. Permanent, in the 1949 book, is lieutenant commander, dated 1 November 1945, which is after 10 July 1945. A man can hold a temporary grade above his permanent grade, and the 1947 book is built to show exactly that. It does not print the words "temporary commander" on his line. It prints a temporary-rank date, 1 November 1945, in a column that the officers above and below him also carry, and it prints commander only in the index. It is not a citation, and it is not the permanent grade of the first register that contains him.
Nothing in any of these books says what he was like on the bridge, whom he relieved in person, or whether Sinnott's departure in July and his own arrival were the same hour. The Mediterranean work DANFS describes, escort and training and transport, is the work of a destroyer after the fighting had moved away from her. If he had her, that was the war he was given: a ship that had already collected her stars, a sea that was still full of the last convoys, and then the long trip back to Pearl Harbor to put her away. Whether he wanted that duty, or felt the smallness of it, or was simply the officer on the list when the bureau needed a name, is not written down.
What it cost, and what it did not
There is no letter, no oral history, and no citation that says the command cost him anything. The things a biography usually counts as cost are absent, and the absence is the fact. No wife is named. No child is named. No wound is named. No court-martial, no letter of censure, and no letter of commendation turned up in the registers, which print distinctions through 1 May 1947 and give him none. The qualification column that would have said he was trusted with submarines or aircraft is empty.
If the compiled dates are right, the cost that can be described without inventing a mood is the shape of the job. He would have come to a destroyer whose Pacific war was over, held her through the last weeks of the fighting in a theater DANFS places in the Mediterranean, and then steamed her back across two oceans to the harbor where she was finished. Decommissioning is a kind of ending. The crew scatters. The ship becomes a hulk on a sales list. DANFS sells her for scrap on 2 October 1947. By then, if he had been her captain at the end, he had already been off her for more than a year. The registers do not say that he went to the sale, or that he kept a piece of her, or that he never wanted to see her again.
The other cost is the one the rank columns suggest and do not explain. In July 1947 the index calls him a commander and the lineal list calls him a lieutenant (junior grade). In 1949 the index still says commander and the page of commanders gives him the permanent rank of lieutenant commander. Men around him carry the same dates. His case is not singled out in a note. Reversion after the war was ordinary. Ordinary is not the same as painless, and this essay will not pretend to know which it was for him. It will only say that the Navy's own books, two years apart, do not let the wartime title sit still.
What he left a family cannot be written, because the family was not found. The philanthropist's widow, Isabel, lived until 1965 and is buried beside her husband in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. She was not this man's wife. Robert Brookings Smith's survivors, in the Princeton memorial, are a wife named Nancy, two daughters, and a grandson. They are Smith's. Henry Kinney Brookings left a wife, Frannie, a daughter, and two sons. They are his. Robert Somers Brookings II's people, if he had them, are not in the registers and not in any obituary this search reached.
After
The 1949 register is the last book in hand that prints him. He is on the active commanders' list, permanent rank lieutenant commander, file 74712, born 1912, pay entry 1935. There is no duty station in that line. The register of that year does not say whether he had a ship, a desk, or a set of orders to shore. It says he was still a line officer of the regular Navy, still the second of the name, and still in his thirties, with years of a career left if the Navy kept him.
He is not in the Reserve Registers of 1949, 1951, or 1955, which do list other men named Brookings. That is consistent with his being regular rather than reserve in those years, and it is not proof he was still alive, still commissioned, or still in the 1949 grade after that book. No later regular register was searched past 1949 except the negative result in the reserve books. No death date, no retirement date, and no resignation were found. The Navy Department's officer biography file was not opened. A newspaper obituary under his name, as distinct from the philanthropist's death in 1932, was not found.
So the afterlife of the man, in the sources that could be read, stops on a printed line in 1949. The ship he may have commanded had already been sold. The name he carried belonged, in every public sketch, to a man who had died before he was twenty-one. What he did with the years after the Navy printed him a lieutenant commander, and where he died, and who stood at the grave, are not in the books that identify him.