Ships
- USS Dennis (DE-405) Captain from 20 March 1944
Lieutenant Commander Sigurd Hansen, United States Naval Reserve, of San Francisco, took command of the new destroyer escort Dennis at her commissioning in Houston, Texas, on 20 March 1944. Brown Shipbuilding had launched the John C. Butler-class ship the previous December. She was named for Radioman Third Class Otis Lee Dennis, and Hansen was her first commanding officer.
He was already an experienced reservist. He had held the rank of lieutenant commander since 28 August 1941. From late 1941 until 13 February 1943 he commanded the patrol craft PE-32, and from 26 August to 31 December 1943 he commanded the destroyer escort Stadtfeld. The Navy then gave him a new escort of the same kind for the move across the Pacific.
Dennis reached Pearl Harbor on 19 June 1944. Hansen took her on convoy duty to Eniwetok and Kwajalein, and on 29 July she returned to Eniwetok after screening the light carrier Belleau Wood. With the Fifth Fleet he escorted Carrier Division 22 to Manus for exercises. On 10 September he sortied with Task Force 77, and from 15 to 27 September the carriers under his screen supported the landings on Morotai. At the beginning of October Dennis lay in Seeadler Harbor under orders to get underway on an hour's notice.
From 12 October the escort screened the escort carriers covering the invasion of Leyte. On the morning of 25 October 1944, off Samar, a Japanese force of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers came upon the small carrier group known as Taffy 3, Task Unit 77.4.3. Hansen saw the first enemy salvo fall inside the formation at 0705. Dennis made smoke, and at 0735 she was ordered into the space between the carriers and the attacking ships. He closed the Japanese column, handled the escort under continuous gunfire, and launched a torpedo attack at short range, pulling hostile fire onto his own ship.
That morning became the Battle off Samar, a phase of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Dennis shared the Presidential Unit Citation awarded to the task unit. After the escort carrier St. Lo went down under air attack, Hansen's crew took 434 survivors from the water. For his conduct as commanding officer in the surface action he received the Navy Cross. The award recognized the way he took a small escort in against major ships of the Japanese fleet and helped turn a badly mismatched fight.
He brought Dennis to Kossol Roads in the Palaus on 28 October, sailed for the West Coast three days later, and arrived at San Francisco on 26 November 1944 for overhaul. His command of the ship, which had begun on the day she was commissioned, continued into June 1945. A Navy photograph made at Guam on 20 June 1945 shows him after the Samar action, recorded then as a commander and wearing the Navy Cross.