Ships
- USS McKee (DD-575) Captain, 19 May 1944 – 4 September 1945
Russell Bowes Allen, United States Naval Academy class of 1934, file number 073573, is the commander the Navy Cross citation names as commanding officer of the destroyer McKee on 14 April 1945. He is not Halle Charles Allan, Jr., and not William Y. Allen. What follows is the life the registers, the Navy Directory, the Academy yearbook, the ship's history, one citation, and one crewman's recorded memory will support. Where they stop, or where they disagree, the blank or the conflict stays in the sentence.
Origins
He was born on 25 January 1910. That date is in the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of 1 July 1945, in the date-of-birth column, beside signal number 4232, Russell Bowes Allen. The same date is printed again as his date of birth on the Register of 1 January 1953, in the commanders' list, beside the file number that later reads 073573. The 1945 register does not give a town. The 1934 Lucky Bag heads his page "Great Barrington, Mass." The Register of 1 January 1934 says he was appointed from Massachusetts. A secondary commanders' list says he was born in Great Barrington. The yearbook's town is the home a midshipman claimed. It is not, by itself, a birthplace. No birth certificate was found. Great Barrington is used here as the place the Academy recorded, not as a proved place of birth.
Nothing in the registers names a father, a mother, brothers, or sisters. "Bowes" is his middle name. It may be a family name. The books do not say whose. No marriage, no wife, and no children have turned up in the sources read for this essay. That is a blank, not a conclusion that he had no family.
Formation
He was admitted to the Naval Academy on 26 June 1929. The Register of 1 January 1930 lists him a midshipman, Russell Bowes Allen, in the block of new men whose dates of admission run through June, July, and August 1929. The Register of 1 January 1934 still has him a midshipman, and it prints an asterisk after his name. On those midshipman pages the register's own key is "* Turned back." The men listed beside him were admitted in June 1930. His date of admission is still 26 June 1929. He had been at the Academy since the summer the class of 1933 entered, and on the first day of 1934 he was a first-class midshipman with the class that would finish that year. The register does not say why he was turned back. Academics, conduct, illness, and a request for a second chance are all possible. None of them is written down in the entry.
The 1934 Lucky Bag is classmate prose, written to be clever, and it should be read that way. It calls him "Russ" and "Russelby," "Great Barrington's contribution to the nation's welfare," and "one of the Academy land-marks, approaching Tecumseh in antiquity, and the corridor boys in indolence." The antiquity joke sits next to a record that shows five years in Bancroft Hall instead of four. The yearbook does not say that this is what the joke means. It does say that his spurts of activity were athletic and unspecialized: boxing, wrestling, and the gym squad on alternate nights, "more balanced than specialized." The line under the sketch that the optical text renders as class football is the usual yearbook credit, and it is not clean enough to quote as a letter or a championship. On weekends, the sketch says, no hop was complete without him, and his mail covered the Atlantic seaboard. It jokes that he claimed constancy and that his classmates suspected "a trace of Mormon in his ancestry." That is a joke about girls. It is not evidence of a courtship, a marriage, or a religion.
The same sketch is harder on the classroom than on the profession. "Scholastically — Well there's little romance in a turbine," it says, and it calls him a "fighting poet" who should not have to bother with a reciprocating engine. "Fighting poet" is their phrase, not a record of poems. Aptitude for the service, the sketch says, was another matter. There "Russ has consistently been among the leaders," and "the Executive Department recognizes his worth despite the blindness of the academics." The summary they wanted kept is the one that sounds least like a roast: "one of the boys, good hearted and easy going, but with a will and a personality of his own, amiable yet decisive; a man on his way to a definite goal." The yearbook lists him a second petty officer, the midshipman rate, not a Navy rating. It does not give his class standing. The turnback is the only academic judgment the government's book records, and it records the fact without the reason.
He graduated with the class of 1934. The Register of 1 January 1953, in the column headed date of rank of first commission, prints 31 May 1934 on his line, the digits reading as the fifth month, the thirty-first day, and the year 34. The Register of 1 July 1935 carries the same day as the date of rank of the ensign block his name sits in, dittoed from 31 May 1934 at signal 6022 down to him. On 1 July 1934 the Navy Directory already has him an ensign on the battleship New Mexico. He is still on New Mexico on 1 January 1935 and 1 April 1935. The directories do not say whether he was on deck, in a turret, or in the engine rooms. A first cruise on a battleship was the ordinary making of an ensign in that decade. The record gives the ship, the rank, and about ten months, and stops.
By 1 October 1935 the Directory has moved him. The optical text of that volume reads "u s s Talt^," which is the wreck of a name the Directory of 1 January 1936 prints cleanly: ensign, USS Talbot. He is an ensign on Talbot again on 1 January 1937. The Directory of 1 April 1936 lists him an ensign and then loses the ship; the next officer's line runs into his. Talbot on either side of that date is the likely duty, and it is not what that one line says. On 1 January 1938 and 1 July 1938 he is a lieutenant (junior grade) on Talbot. On 1 January 1939 he is still a lieutenant (junior grade) on Talbot. The Register of 1 July 1938 confirms the ship: signal 5386, Russell Bowes Allen, lieutenant (junior grade), Talbot. The date-of-rank heading on the page above his year-group is 31 May 1937, and the lines read between that heading and his name are dittos. Thirty-one May 1937 is three years after his ensign's commission, the ordinary day, and it is the day the register's column is using. It is not reprinted on his own line.
Talbot (DD-114), a Wickes-class destroyer recommissioned in 1930, spent those years with the Battle Force out of San Diego, went to Hawaii in 1937 to support the Submarine Force for a year, and in 1939 served with the Battle Force and the Submarine Force. That is the ship's history, not a log of his billets. The directories put him on her from the autumn of 1935 through the start of 1939, long enough that the Hawaii year was the ship's year while he was one of her officers. They do not say what he did there. Four years on one old destroyer, from ensign to lieutenant (junior grade), is the apprenticeship the later command rests on. McKee was not his first destroyer. The history does not record a collision, a grounding, or a fight with his name on it from these years. The work, as the paper has it, was the ordinary work.
On 1 October 1939 the Directory has moved him again: lieutenant (junior grade), USS Memphis. Memphis (CL-13) had come through the presidential review off San Francisco on 12 July 1939, and in August she sailed for Alaska, where the ship's history keeps her until early 1941. The October directory places him on her. It does not say he had joined before she left for Alaska, or what his duty was, or when he left. By 1 November 1940 he is on another ship.
That ship is Crane. The Directory of 1 November 1940 and the Directory of 1 April 1941 both list him a lieutenant (junior grade) on USS Crane. Crane (DD-109) had been recommissioned on 18 December 1939 and put on the Neutrality Patrol in the Pacific. Through 1940 and 1941 she stayed on the west coast, on antisubmarine patrol, local escort, training, and the screening of amphibious exercises. He is on her at two directory dates inside that duty. The April 1941 directory is the last of the series. It does not say he was still aboard when the war started, and it does not give his billet. A lieutenant (junior grade) on a recommissioned four-piper in the last year of peace was learning the work he would later be decorated for: station-keeping, patrol, and other people's exercises. The books do not say he had yet commanded anything.
He was a lieutenant by 1 July 1942, when the Register lists him in the lieutenants, signal 4841, Russell Bowes Allen, the dates on his line dittoed. The date that belongs to him is recovered from a later book, not from that line. On the Register of 1 July 1945 he stands in the commanders. The page heading gives the columns: date of temporary rank, permanent status, date of birth, date of entry, and then rank and date of rank. Two lines above the dittos that reach him, Gordon Paiea Chung-Hoon's line prints an explicit 1 August 1941 in the permanent-rank date, and the next lines, including Allen's, ditto it. The permanent status those dittos carry is lieutenant. One August 1941 falls in the open window between the April 1941 directory, which still has him a lieutenant (junior grade), and the July 1942 register, which has him a lieutenant. It is the best date the registers give. It is a ditto, not a date printed on his own line in 1942.
From 1 April 1941 until 19 May 1944 there is no directory and, in the registers examined, no station. Wartime registers dropped the ship. No letter, no fitness report, and no deck-log signature from those three years was found. He may have stayed on Crane, gone to a school, or gone to another ship. Crane herself kept the west-coast work until April 1944. That is her history, not a proof that he was still in her wardroom. The sources used here do not say where he was when the war began, or where he was for Guadalcanal, or for the first year of the Central Pacific drive.
The war, as the paper has it
The rank he took to sea is dated, and then argued over by the books.
The Register of 1 January 1953 lists him in the commanders. The column headed date of present rank prints, on his line and on the lines of the classmates beside him, 1 February 1944. The column headed permanent rank still says commander, which in that list is the grade he holds, not a lower grade hiding under a temporary title. The Register of 1 July 1945 puts him in the commanders' section, signal 4232, and the date of temporary rank dittoed down that page from the men at the head of the block is the same day, 1 February 1944. His permanent status on that page is still lieutenant, with the lieutenant's date dittoed as 1 August 1941. Temporary commander, permanent lieutenant, is the ordinary wartime shape of a rank. The Register of 1 July 1944 does not agree. Its alphabetical index styles "Allen, Russell B." a lieutenant commander, and it styles his classmate Denis H. Biwerse the same way. The index is damaged by the optical reading, and the file number on that line is not trustworthy, but the rank abbreviation is legible. A register dated 1 July 1944 should already have shown a promotion dated 1 February 1944. It shows lieutenant commander instead. The later registers, which print 1 February 1944 as a date and not as a ditto, are the ones followed here for the day the commander's rank began. The July 1944 index is the conflict, and it is not explained.
McKee (DD-575), a Fletcher-class destroyer, had been commissioned at Orange, Texas, on 31 March 1943, with Commander J. J. Greytak in command. The commanding-officer list kept by Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and printed by NavSource, gives the ship to Commander Russell Bowes Allen on 19 May 1944 and keeps him until 4 September 1945, and then gives her to Lieutenant Commander Victor Bernard Graff. The same dates are on the uboat.net commanders' list. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships names Greytak at the commissioning and never names Allen. The list is a compilation, not a deck log. It is the bridge between the man and the cruise, and the end date especially should be held as secondary until a log or a set of orders turns up.
If those dates are right, the war he lived in command begins in the middle of the ship's preparation for the Marianas and runs through the day she turned for home. It does not include her first year: the passage out with Yorktown, Bougainville, Rabaul, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Kavieng, or Hollandia. Those were Greytak's. What follows is the ship's history for the months the list assigns to Allen, told as the ship's, except where a citation or a witness puts him in the decision.
In May and June 1944 she prepared in the Solomons and the Marshalls. How much of that month of May was still Greytak's, the history does not say. On 17 July she sortied from Eniwetok with Task Group 53.18. Scheduled fire opened on 21 July in Agana Bay, Guam, as the 3rd Marine Division went ashore. The history says she lay close enough offshore to see pillboxes and trenches, and that she delivered close support fire through 4 August, when she retired with a group of carriers to the New Hebrides. None of this is a story of an order he is recorded as giving. It is a destroyer, a captain in his first months of command, and the ordinary brutal work of a fire-support ship: shoot at what the spotters name, stay in the boat lane, come off the beach when the carriers go.
The seizure of Morotai, beginning 15 September, met what the history calls light opposition. McKee and her force went back to Humboldt Bay, the staging port for Leyte. By the middle of October more than seven hundred vessels were on the way to put the Sixth Army ashore. On 20 October, as McKee approached her area in Leyte Gulf, two natives paddled out from Samar. The history says their information let the ship destroy two camouflaged landing barges, a tug, and an ammunition dump. It does not say who talked to the two men, or who gave the order to shoot. That night she left with a convoy of dock landing ships for Humboldt Bay. A series of convoy trips brought her to San Francisco on 15 November 1944. He had had her six months. The ship's history gives him, if the list is right, a landing, a bombardment, a pair of strangers in a canoe, and then the navy yard. It does not give him a citation for any of it.
She sailed again on 10 January 1945 for Ulithi, and on 7 February joined Task Force 58 for strikes on the Japanese home islands. The force's planes hit Tokyo on 16, 17, and 25 February, and Iwo Jima in between. The history says the raids were destructive enough that the enemy did not hit back at the carriers or their screen. They came back a month later. Strikes against Kyushu began on 18 March, to thin the aircraft before the Okinawa landings set for 1 April. This time suicide planes got through the combat air patrol and the antiaircraft fire to the formation. The history says McKee found pilots to rescue, targets for her guns, and submarine contacts for two depth-charge runs. It does not say whether the depth charges hit anything, or how many pilots came aboard, or whether he conned the ship alongside the rafts himself. From 6 April the air attacks grew heavier as the Fifth Fleet covered the Okinawa landing.
Then the books stop agreeing about a single afternoon.
The Navy Cross citation, as printed by Hall of Valor from Commander, First Carrier Task Force, Pacific, serial 0554 of 30 May 1945, says that on 14 April 1945, near Okinawa, an advanced picket group of which McKee was a unit was under heavy air attack by about twenty enemy planes. It says Commander Allen's ship shot down and destroyed two of them and damaged at least two others that were ultimately destroyed. It says the two that were shot down crashed near enough to shower the ship with debris, without damage or casualties. It praises his courage, skill, and leadership, and it stops. It does not name the other ships of the picket, or the type of aircraft, or a maneuver.
The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the text long carried by GlobalSecurity, tells the fight on the 13th, not the 14th, and tells it as four planes, not twenty. She splashed one and badly damaged another. The third crashed fifty feet off her starboard bow. The fourth missed her and crashed into Hunt. Three days later, that text says, she shot down a Zeke that was trying to crash her. The Wikipedia transcription of the same history moves the picket fight to the 14th and the Zeke to three days after that, which would be the 17th. Hunt's history, as printed in the article that follows her DANFS narrative, puts her on a radar picket off Okinawa from 8 April and says that on 14 April a kamikaze, already hit by her guns, struck her at deck level, sheared the mainmast, cut into the forward stack, and left a wing there, while the fuselage fell about twenty-five yards off. A second plane that day was shot down before it reached her. A photograph in the National Archives, reproduced on NavSource, shows McKee in Task Group 58.1 on 16 April 1945, with the caption that she had splashed a kamikaze minutes earlier. Sixteen April is three days after the 13th, and it is not three days after the 14th.
David Harvey, a seaman on McKee from sometime in 1944, told an interviewer for the National WWII Museum that on 13 April a kamikaze dropped bombs at the ship, missed, turned toward a carrier, and was shot down. The museum's summary of that interview, not a verbatim transcript, is the source. Harvey also said the attacks came often, that general quarters could last six hours, and that what went through his mind was whether he would see the next morning. He is one man remembering one day. He is not the action report.
Read together, the sources will support this much. McKee was on picket duty off Okinawa in the middle of April 1945, under a captain the citation names. Planes attacked her. At least one crashed close enough that the citation can speak of debris on deck, and the ship's history can speak of a crash fifty feet off the bow. Hunt was hit by a kamikaze on the 14th, in the account of Hunt. The citation says McKee took no damage and no casualties from the planes that crashed near her. The ship's history does not contradict that sentence. The number of planes, the date, and whose guns killed the plane that hit Hunt are not settled by these texts. The citation's "about twenty" and the history's "four" cannot both be a careful count of the same attack. One of them is a round number, or they are different attacks pressed into one story. The serial of 30 May 1945 is the Navy's official sentence on Allen. It is also a citation, which is a kind of sentence that counts enemies generously. The conflict should stay visible.
On 21 April the ship's history has her bombard Manimi Daito Shima, which is the history's spelling. At the end of the month Task Group 58.1 went to Ulithi for nine days. Under way again, her carriers struck Kyushu on 13 May and then alternated between the home islands and Okinawa. On 28 May she joined Admiral William Halsey's Third Fleet. Eight days later a typhoon, with winds the history gives as 110 knots, "threatened to be more damaging than the Japanese." The same sentence says skillful seamanship brought McKee through with only minor damage. The history does not say the seamanship was his, and it does not say what the minor damage was. He was the captain the list still has aboard. That is as far as the paper goes.
She was repaired and overhauled at Leyte. The GlobalSecurity copy garbles the day she rejoined Task Group 38.1; the transcription that Wikipedia draws from the same history says 9 July, off the Japanese coast. On the 30th, with six other destroyers, she went into Suruga Wan and shelled an aluminum plant and the railroad yards at Shimizu, on Honshu. The history calls it the closest penetration of Japanese home waters up to that time. It is a ship's claim, made about seven destroyers, not a sentence about one man's daring. The strikes against the Tokyo area went on until 0900 on 15 August, when Japan capitulated.
The day before the surrender ceremony on Missouri, the history says, McKee turned for home. She escorted Wasp to Eniwetok, then went to Pearl Harbor and joined a task group for the east coast. She arrived at Charleston on 16 October 1945 and was decommissioned there on 25 February 1946. The commanding-officer list ends Allen's command on 4 September 1945, three days after the turn for home if "the day before" the 2 September ceremony means 1 September, and six weeks before Charleston. If both the history and the list are right, he had her when she left the war, and he did not have her when she reached South Carolina. The list does not say where Graff relieved him, or why. Harvey's interview, in the museum summary, remembers the ship in Tokyo Bay on 25 August, a trip on 1 September that took Admirals Mitscher and McCain to Missouri, and then the escort of Wasp to Enewetak, without staying for the ceremony. The summary says the skipper had told the crew they would do everything together and go home together, "which they did." The annotator identifies that skipper as Allen. The commanding-officer list says Allen left on 4 September and that another officer took the ship to the decommissioning. Harvey's "home" may mean the end of the fighting, not the dock at Charleston. The list and the memory do not say the same thing about who brought the crew back, and neither is a log.
Harvey also said they lost one man. No casualty roll was found to test that number. The citation's "without damage or casualties" is about one action, not about the whole command. The ship's eleven battle stars are the ship's. They are not a count of decorations given to him. Hall of Valor, which prints the Navy Cross in full, lists no other award.
The cost
The cost that can be documented is uneven, and some of it is what the record refuses to show.
He lost a year at the start. The Academy turned him back, and the register will not say for what. He stayed, graduated at twenty-four, and spent the rest of his twenties on a battleship and then on one old destroyer. That is a choice only in the sense that he did not leave. The books do not record anyone asking him to leave, or anyone waiting at home while he decided.
The war, once he had a ship of his own, was long and, on the paper, strangely unbloodied for him. From 19 May 1944 to the first days of September 1945 the list has him in command through Guam, Morotai, Leyte, the carrier strikes, the Okinawa picket, a typhoon, and the run into Suruga Wan. The only fight the Navy wrote up in his name is the one in which his ship was showered with debris and nobody was hurt. Hunt, in the other ship's history, was hit on the 14th. The men who died on other pickets in those weeks are not in his citation. If the citation is right about his own crew that day, the thing he was decorated for is a ship that was not lost.
Harvey, who was on the deck force and then with the gunner's mates, remembered a different cost, and he remembered the captain inside it. He said the skipper would be told that something was on the way, and would order battle stations, and the men would wait and hope the combat air patrol got there first. He remembered torpedoes passing under the ship, three times, and he remembered a burning tank on a beach, men trying to get out, and the skipper putting the destroyer alongside and taking them aboard. The summary gives no date, no beach, and no names for that rescue. It is not in the ship's history. It is one sailor's account, set down years later, of what the captain was for. Harvey also said there was no part of the war he wanted to go back to. That sentence is about Harvey. It is the nearest thing these sources have to the temperature of the cruise.
There is no letter in which Allen says what he thought of the turnback, or of the three missing years, or of the planes that missed, or of turning the ship over in the first week of the peace. The Lucky Bag had promised a man with a will of his own and a weak classroom record. The registers show the will, in the only way registers can: he stayed, he was promoted, he was given a new destroyer, he brought her through a picket station without losing her. They do not show what it cost him, because nobody wrote that down in a place these sources reach.
After
The next time the record has a rank for him, the war has been over for years and the ship is gone.
On 1 January 1953 he is still a commander, date of present rank 1 February 1944, in the company of the classmates who moved with him. On 1 January 1955 the Register lists him in the captains. The column headed permanent rank still says commander. The column headed date of present rank says 1 July 1953, the same day printed for the men around him, which is how a Naval Academy year-group usually moved. The alphabetical index of that volume calls him captain and gives the designator 1100, unrestricted line, file 073573. Captain from 1 July 1953, permanent rank still commander as of the opening of 1955, is what those columns say. They do not say what job the captain's rank was for. No ship, no staff, no bureau, and no squadron appears after McKee in any source read here.
On 1 January 1958 he is still on the active list, in the captains, with the same date of present rank. On 1 January 1960 the alphabetical index lists "ALLEN RUSSELL B," file 073573, as a rear admiral, retired. The volumes read do not show a rear admiral's rank on the active list. They do not give the day he retired, and they do not say whether the retired rank was an advance of one grade on leaving active duty or a flag rank he had held in a job. Hall of Valor says he retired as a rear admiral. That matches the 1960 listing and adds no assignment. A secondary list gives the retirement as 1 November 1959, which falls in the open window between the 1958 and 1960 registers. The day was not found in a register entry read for this essay, so it is not used here as fact. No flag biography, no command-at-sea after McKee, and no postwar fitness report was found. The modern rear admiral named Russell Allen, a naval aviator who enlisted in 1978, is a different man.
The same secondary list, and Hall of Valor, give his death as 29 August 1999. The secondary list adds Fairfax County, Virginia, and an age of eighty-nine, which fits a birth in January 1910. No newspaper obituary, no funeral notice, and no grave record were found to test the place or the day. They are reported, not established. Harvey's interview, summarizing a memory rather than quoting a guest book, says the skipper came to several of the ship's reunions. It does not say when, or what he said when he got there.
He was a Massachusetts midshipman who was turned back and stayed, a battleship ensign, a lieutenant (junior grade) who spent four years on the destroyer Talbot and then a short tour on Memphis and Crane while the country was still formally at peace. The registers lose him from the spring of 1941 until the spring of 1944. They find him again as the second captain of McKee, from the Marianas through Leyte, the fast carriers, the Okinawa picket, and the last sweep into Suruga Wan. The Navy gave him the Navy Cross for an afternoon in which, by the citation's own words, his ship was not hurt and his men were not killed, and the ship's history and the citation do not agree about how many planes came, or on which day. A sailor who served under him remembered a captain who promised they would go home together, and remembered the beach. The list has him leaving the ship in the first week of September 1945. He was a captain from the summer of 1953, and by the first day of 1960 a retired rear admiral. The rest — parents, wife, children, the three missing years, the reason for the turnback, the reason he left McKee, the work of the postwar Navy, and the manner of his old age — is not in the record used here.