Ships
- USS Bush (DD-529) Captain, 30 May 1944 – 6 April 1945
Rollin Everton Westholm was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on 16 August 1911. 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. When the Pacific war began he was in the motor torpedo boat force, the small wooden craft sent out at night against Japanese ships running the Solomon Islands. He was promoted to lieutenant commander on 1 March 1943 and to commander on 1 February 1944. The second of those promotions came after a night action off Guadalcanal that had already put his name into the record.
On the night of 10–11 January 1943 Westholm commanded the motor torpedo boat PT-112 off Guadalcanal. He took her out with two other boats against three Japanese destroyers. He closed to very short range and fired, and one torpedo hit home. The official account credited that hit with sinking one of the destroyers or leaving her seriously damaged, and it left the result in those terms. Japanese gunfire then put PT-112 out of action, and Westholm and his crew had to abandon her. After he was rescued he organized a search for the men of another boat that had also been abandoned, close to an enemy coast, and brought off every survivor except two. The South Pacific command awarded him the Silver Star for that night. The citation, dated 9 April 1943, singled out the way he had taken the boat in and the way he had kept the search going after his own command was gone.
On 30 May 1944 Commander Westholm took command of the destroyer Bush (DD-529). She was a Fletcher-class ship, built at San Francisco, launched in October 1942, and commissioned on 10 May 1943, the kind of fast escort the fleet used for screening, gunfire support, and, later, radar picket duty. He relieved Thurmond Augustus Smith, who had commanded her since 12 June 1943. The ship had gone into commission the year before under Wallis Frederick Petersen. Before Westholm came aboard she had already served in Alaskan waters and in the New Guinea landings. In June 1944 she was at the Mare Island Navy Yard in California, and on 11 June she was photographed there in a fresh Measure 32 camouflage pattern. His first weeks in command were spent seeing her through that yard period and back across the Pacific to the forces gathering for the Philippines.
His first decorated action in Bush came in Leyte Gulf. On 1 November 1944 the destroyer was on picket duty, covering a larger force that was already under a partly successful Japanese air attack. Westholm fought the ship through a hard strike. Bush was credited with at least two of the attacking planes, and the damage she took was light, though shell fragments wounded two men, one of them the executive officer. He kept her on the picket station so that further aircraft could not slip past unseen toward the ships behind her. For that day he received the Legion of Merit with the Combat V. The citation described a captain who had broken up the attack and then stayed where the screen needed him.
Late in December he had a longer fight of the same kind. From 27 December 1944 to 2 January 1945 Bush flew the flag of a resupply echelon moving from Leyte Gulf to Mangarin Bay on Mindoro. Japanese aircraft hit the formation across four days. Westholm worked with his unit commander on the conduct of the convoy and ran the destroyer's own defense. The escort's gunfire was credited with thirty-seven Japanese planes destroyed and with damage to others, and the citation gave him a material share in that result. The convoy reached its destination. A Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit, again with the Combat V, followed. In a few months of Philippine duty he had taken Bush through two sustained air battles and brought her out of both still in the line.
On 6 April 1945 Bush was a radar picket off Okinawa, out ahead of the landings that had opened on 1 April. Suicide planes came at her in numbers. Under Westholm's direction the guns brought down four of them. Three others crashed into the ship and left her sinking. He still believed the hull could be saved, and he had the support craft LCS(L)-64 pass a request for two tugs to Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, who commanded the amphibious force. Fire spread through the forward part of the ship, and ammunition there began to explode, driving the remaining men off the bow. About half past six in the evening a heavy swell caught the weakened middle of the destroyer. The hull tore, crunched, and jackknifed. The men still on the stern went into the water, and Westholm left last. Bush then sank about seventeen miles northwest of Iheya Island, taking eighty-seven of her crew with her. The Navy Cross for that day cited the four planes the guns destroyed, the three that struck, the order to abandon, and the fact that he had stayed until the crew was off.
Westholm survived the loss of Bush and remained in the Navy, retiring as a captain. He died on 26 February 1989. His command of the destroyer had run from 30 May 1944 to the evening of 6 April 1945, from a California navy yard through the Philippines to the radar picket line at Okinawa. The Silver Star from the night off Guadalcanal, the two awards of the Legion of Merit from Leyte and Mindoro, and the Navy Cross from the day Bush went down are the decorations the service attached to those actions. The ship herself was stricken from the Navy Register on 28 April 1945 and was credited with seven battle stars for her wartime service.