Ships
- USS Minneapolis (CA-36) Captain from 16 June 1945 · Relieved in January 1946
Roy Clare Hudson was born on 19 November 1897 and was a member of the United States Naval Academy class of 1921. He became a lieutenant commander on 1 July 1936 and a commander on 1 January 1941. On 18 June 1942 he was made a temporary captain, the rank he held through the last year of the Pacific war. He died in 1955.
His recorded command was the heavy cruiser Minneapolis. He took her as captain on 16 June 1945 and was relieved in January 1946. Minneapolis was a New Orleans-class cruiser built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, launched in September 1933, and commissioned on 19 May 1934 with Gordon W. Haines as her first commanding officer.
Before Hudson's tenure the cruiser had already fought almost the whole Pacific war. She was at sea off Pearl Harbor when Japan attacked in December 1941, screened carriers at the Coral Sea and at Midway, and served off Guadalcanal, where two torpedoes at the Battle of Tassafaronga in November 1942 tore away her bow and sent her to Mare Island. Back with the fleet in 1943, she spent the next twenty months in the Central Pacific and the Philippines, from the Gilberts and Marshalls through the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, Lingayen, and the bombardment of Okinawa.
In April 1945 her worn main-battery guns forced her off the Okinawa line. On 12 April she helped fight off a heavy air attack, and that night she sailed for Bremerton, Washington, to have the barrels relined. Hudson assumed command on 16 June 1945 during that refit and the return west. When hostilities ended in August, Minneapolis was at Subic Bay in the Philippines.
Under Hudson she flew the flag of Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid for the Japanese surrender in Korea on 9 September 1945, then patrolled the Yellow Sea and covered Marine landings at Taku and Chinwangtao on the China coast. She carried Pacific veterans to the west coast, and on 14 January 1946 sailed for the Panama Canal and Philadelphia. Hudson was relieved that month. At Philadelphia the cruiser was placed in commission in reserve on 21 May 1946 and left commission on 10 February 1947. She was sold for scrap on 14 August 1959. Her wartime service brought her sixteen battle stars.