Ships
- USS Stack (DD-406) Captain from 25 March 1945
Origins
He was born on 21 June 1916. That date is the one the Register repeats for him from the wartime volumes through the lineal lists of the late 1950s and 1960s. Where he was born is not in those registers. What the Naval Academy did record, when his class published The Lucky Bag in 1939, was a home: Union Springs, Alabama. The sketch that sits under his name on page 211 calls him a man from the deep South, and it says the Academy had not broken him of an easy-going manner or of a southern accent. Classmates printed two names beside the portrait. One is clearly "Turret Top." The other is set in quotation marks in a line the scan reads as "San," which is the sort of misreading "Sam" produces, and it is not safe to treat "San" as a separate nickname.
The "Jr." is doing real work. From the midshipman list of 1 July 1936 onward, the Navy's own books style him Sam Johnston Caldwell, Jr., so there was a father of that name. Nothing in the registers, the yearbook, or the ship's history consulted here says who that father was, what he did, or whether he was alive when his son went to Annapolis. No wife and no child appear in any of these sources. The man who can be written about begins as a name, a birth date, a junior, and an Alabama town claimed by his classmates.
He is not the other Caldwells who crowd the same registers. Turner Foster Caldwell, and Turner Foster Caldwell, Jr., are different officers, the younger of them a naval aviator. Henry Howard Caldwell, Kenneth Carlton Caldwell, Rex Smith Caldwell, and Harry Handly Caldwell are other men. The destroyer Caldwell (DD-605) was named for James R. Caldwell, not for him. A Samuel Caldwell Haynes appears among midshipmen in the 1933 Register; that is another name. A modern admiral, James F. Caldwell, Jr., is not this officer.
Formation
He entered the Naval Academy on 25 June 1935. The Register carries that as his date of entry for the rest of his traced career, and the 1 July 1936 Register already lists Sam Johnston Caldwell, Jr., among the midshipmen. He graduated with the class of 1939. The 1 July 1943 Register footnotes his part of the list with the class fact that these officers were commissioned ensign on 1 June 1939, and his own date of rank as ensign, printed in the 1 July 1941 Register, is that same day.
The yearbook page is the only picture of him as a midshipman that these sources give, and it is a classmates' sketch, not a service record. They said French was his only worry, because French spoken in a southern accent was a hard combination, and that his two ambitions were to speak Italian fluently — they used the midshipman word "Dago" — and to be a flyer. They said the academic departments did not frighten him, that he knew when the play should stop, and that conscientious work had given him a good standing in the class. Under the laugh, they wrote, there was will and determination joined to ability. The activities printed in his column of that page are specific. Football in his fourth-class and third-class years. Boxing as a plebe. The King Committee in his second-class and first-class years, the Hop Committee in his first-class year, and one stripe. A second list in the same column gives battalion cross country in all four years, battalion tennis in three, the Reception Committee for two years, a fourth-class star, and two stripes. A star in that book is an academic mark for the year indicated. Stripes are midshipman rank. None of this says he was first in the class, or last. It says his classmates remembered an athlete of the company and battalion sort, a committeeman, a starred plebe, and a first classman who had held petty-officer stripes.
The Navy's later marks only partly follow that sketch. By 1 July 1941 the Register's column for special courses and qualifications carried "5-a" against his name, and the explanatory notes of that volume define 5 as interpreter or translator and "a" as French. The worry the yearbook had made his signature had, within two years of graduation, become an official qualification. Italian, which would have been "5-d," is not on his line. Naval aviator is not on it either, in 1941 or in the wartime registers that follow. When designators appear after the war, his is 1100. The 1 January 1960 Register defines the first three digits 110 as an unrestricted line officer, not as a pilot. The flyer his classmates said he wanted to be is not the officer the later Register describes.
The 1 July 1941 Register, still listing him as an ensign with date of rank 1 June 1939, is also the last of these volumes that tries to say where he was. Its columns are awkward. One is headed, in the ensign pages, as the date of present shore duty, leave, or commencement of a cruise, and for him that date is 24 June 1939, three weeks after he became an ensign. The next column, expiration of his last cruise or tour of sea service, reads August 1938. August 1938 falls while he was still a midshipman; the Register does not name the cruise. The June 1939 date had not been replaced by 1 July 1941, so whatever duty, leave, or cruise began then was, in the Register's reckoning, still his present one two years later. The column does not say which of the three it was, and it does not name a ship. That is the whole of his first commissioned billet as the official list recorded it.
War years as lived
The war, in the sources that can be checked, is a ladder of temporary rank inside an unchanged class order, not a log of ships.
On 1 July 1942 the Register places him in the lieutenants' section. The date of temporary rank at the head of that run of the class, and then carried down the page by ditto marks through his own line, is 15 June 1942. His permanent status on the same line is lieutenant (junior grade), date of rank 1 June 1942, and the permanent date is marked "(Y)." The notes of that volume say "(Y)" means subject to examination and/or confirmation. So at the start of the first full summer of the war he was a temporary lieutenant, and a permanent junior lieutenant whose permanent date the Navy had not yet finished confirming. He sits at signal number 6226, still among the same classmates who bracket him for years: Egil Thornton Steen, Frederic Clayton Fallon, James Frederick Bennett Johnston.
On 1 July 1943 he is still in the lieutenants, temporary rank still dated 15 June 1942, permanent rank still lieutenant (junior grade) from 1 June 1942. The "(Y)" is gone. Birth remains 21 June 1916, entry 25 June 1935, qualification still 5-a. The Register of that year, like the others issued in wartime, does not print a ship.
On 1 July 1944 the section changes. He is a lieutenant commander. The date of temporary rank, again a class date dittoed down an unbroken chain to his line, is 15 March 1944. Permanent status is unchanged: lieutenant (junior grade), 1 June 1942. The 1 July 1945 Register says the same thing, in the lieutenant commanders' section, temporary rank 15 March 1944, permanent lieutenant (junior grade) from 1 June 1942, French still the only special qualification on the line, signal number 5684. The index of the 1944 volume spells him, once, "Samuel J., Jr." The body of that volume, like every other body consulted, says Sam Johnston Caldwell.
That is the war as the Register lets it be lived. A 1939 ensign became a permanent junior lieutenant on the peacetime three-year point, 1 June 1942, and a temporary lieutenant two weeks later. Twenty-one months after that, on 15 March 1944, the temporary grade jumped to lieutenant commander, and the permanent grade did not jump with it. He was still, on paper, a junior lieutenant wearing a lieutenant commander's temporary rank when the Register of 1 July 1945 was closed, two months before the war ended. The Navy had qualified him in French. It had not, in these volumes, qualified him as a pilot, decorated him, or said what water he was in.
The encyclopedia stub, and the command compilations that agree with it, say that on 25 March 1945 Lieutenant Commander Sam Johnston Caldwell took the destroyer Stack (DD-406). The rank in that sentence matches the temporary rank the Register gives him on either side of the date. The ship does not appear in any Register consulted here. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships account of Stack, reprinted from the Naval Historical Center text, follows the ship from Lingayen Gulf in January 1945 through Ulithi, the sortie of 27 March with Task Force 53, Okinawa on 1 April, screening Louisville toward Pearl Harbor in June, the surrender conference at Truk on 30 August, occupation duty, and decommissioning in the Marshalls on 29 August 1946. It names Isaiah Olch as her commissioning commanding officer and does not name Caldwell. Those months are the ship's history. They are not yet his.
Cost
No citation, no wound, and no lost ship can be charged to him from these records, and it would be a fiction to invent one. The cost that is actually written down is the gap between the rank he wore and the rank he held.
From 15 March 1944 through at least 1 July 1945 he was a temporary lieutenant commander and a permanent lieutenant (junior grade). The 1 July 1947 Register still prints him, with the rest of that class block, as lieutenant (junior grade), and it still prints both dates, 1 June 1942 and 15 March 1944. The Officer Personnel Act that would rebuild the permanent list was not yet law on 1 July 1947. For three years after the temporary promotion, and for nearly two years after the shooting stopped, the official permanent grade of a man who had been a lieutenant commander in the late war was the grade he had earned, on schedule, in June 1942.
The medal letters the Register used in 1944 and 1945 — Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, Air Medal, commendation ribbon, and the rest of that table — are not on his name. That is not a finding that he was never decorated later. It is a finding that, as of the last wartime Register, the Department had nothing of that list to print beside him. The yearbook's "will and determination" is not cashed, in these books, as a decoration.
There is a smaller, sharper miss. The class book said he wanted to fly. The qualification column never says he did. By 1 January 1956, and still on 1 January 1968, the designator beside the commander and then the captain is 1100, the unrestricted line, the surface and general line rather than the pilot's 1310. If he ever sat in a cockpit it is not in this trail of paper. What is in the paper is a line officer who kept the French mark through the war and then, in the volumes that drop special-course codes, simply went on as line.
After
On 1 January 1952 the Register lists him as a lieutenant commander, date of rank 1 April 1949, born 21 June 1916, with 1 June 1939 still the commissioning date. The same 1 April 1949 is the date of rank printed for classmates in that block, Steen among them. It reads as a class date, the point at which the permanent list finally caught the wartime temporary grade, not as a story of one man's separate promotion.
On 1 January 1956 he is a commander, designator 1100. The date printed in the rank-date position of that scrambled page is again 1 April 1949, and it is the same date printed for Steen, who is also now a commander. Because the 1952 book had already used 1 April 1949 for lieutenant commander, that date is not treated here as the day he became a commander. The 1956 book establishes the grade. It does not, cleanly, establish the day.
On 1 January 1958 he is a captain. The date of rank, repeated in the lineal lists of 1 January 1959, 1960, 1962, and 1965, is 1 December 1957. The 1960 notes make two other columns readable. Source code 01 is the Naval Academy. The two-digit service date 39 means, by that volume's own note, 30 June of the year given, the date from which commissioned service was counted for staying on or leaving the active list. His number in the lineal list is in the 2556 series; the subnumber moves, as those notes say subnumbers may, from 90 to 95 between the 1959 and 1960 books. None of these volumes says what ship, staff, or bureau he served in as a commander or a captain. The postwar Register, like the wartime one, kept the man and dropped the billet.
He is still a captain, designator 1100, on the active-duty list of 1 January 1968. He is not on the active-duty register dated 31 December 1970. Between those two rolls he left active duty. The day, the place, and the reason are not in the registers. No obituary, no retired-list entry, and no family notice was found to say when he died or whom he left. The public record used here ends as it began after Annapolis: a name, a date of rank, and a silence about the room he was standing in.