Ships
- USS Dunlap (DD-384) Captain from 5 March 1938 · Relieved on 12 June 1940
Rockwell Justus Townsend was born on 19 April 1897 and served as an officer of the United States Navy. In the late 1930s he was a lieutenant commander, and that was the rank he held when he received his first known seagoing command. On 1 August 1939, while he was still in that command, he was promoted to commander. On 18 June 1942 he became a temporary captain.
On 5 March 1938 Townsend assumed command of the destroyer Dunlap (DD-384). He succeeded Albert Ernest Schrader, Jr., who had commanded the ship from her commissioning on 12 June 1937. Dunlap was new. She had been launched in New York on 18 April 1936 and was named for Brigadier General Robert H. Dunlap of the Marine Corps, who in 1931 was killed in France while trying to free a woman trapped by a landslide. The destroyer displaced about 1,500 tons, measured a little more than 341 feet, could make about 35 knots, and carried five 5-inch guns and twelve 21-inch torpedo tubes.
Townsend spent the spring and summer of 1938 working Dunlap on training duty along the East Coast. In June 1938, at Philadelphia, the destroyer escorted the Swedish liner Kungsholm while that ship brought the Crown Prince of Sweden. On 1 September 1938 Dunlap sailed for the West Coast and began the ordinary life of a Pacific Fleet destroyer based on that shore.
Early in 1939 the cruise westward was interrupted. During the first six months of the year Townsend took Dunlap to the Caribbean and the East Coast for a fleet problem and an overhaul, then brought her back to the West Coast. His promotion to commander, dated 1 August 1939, came while the ship was on that western duty.
On 2 April 1940 Dunlap sailed for Pearl Harbor, assigned as her new home port, as the fleet gathered in Hawaii and war continued in Europe. Townsend completed his tour there. On 12 June 1940 he turned the ship over to Carl Hilton Bushnell. In the Pacific war that followed, Dunlap earned a fighting reputation her peacetime captain did not share in person. At the night Battle of Vella Gulf in August 1943, Frederick Moosbrugger led a destroyer division with Dunlap as his flagship, while Clifton Iverson commanded the ship.
Leaving the destroyer, Townsend next commanded the fleet oiler Kanawha (AO-1) from about the middle of 1940 until about the middle of 1941, already a commander. Kanawha was a much older and larger auxiliary, the Navy’s first numbered oiler, whose daily work was to fuel the fleet at sea. His advancement to temporary captain followed on 18 June 1942.