Ships
- USS Perkins (DD-377) Captain, 18 September 1936 – 27 May 1938
- USS Atlanta (CL-51) Captain from 24 December 1941
Samuel P. Jenkins was born in Evansville, Indiana, on 3 June 1893. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1915 and spent the years that followed in the seagoing Navy, as the fleet replaced its older ships with the faster destroyers and cruisers of the 1930s. From 18 September 1936 to 27 May 1938 he was captain of the destroyer Perkins. The tour put him in command of a modern fleet destroyer at the moment the Navy was expanding for a possible war in the Pacific, and it gave him day-to-day responsibility for a ship whose work was screening, torpedo attack, and high-speed maneuver.
The command that defined his wartime service was the light cruiser Atlanta. She was the lead ship of a new class built around sixteen five-inch dual-purpose guns in twin mounts, with torpedo tubes as well, and she was intended to throw a heavy anti-aircraft barrage around the carriers. Built at Kearny, New Jersey, and launched on 6 September 1941, she was commissioned at the New York Navy Yard on 24 December 1941 with Captain Jenkins in command. The writer Margaret Mitchell, sponsor of the ship, stood with him at the ceremony. Jenkins then worked the new crew through shakedown in the Chesapeake and at Casco Bay, Maine, until 13 March 1942. A yard period for repairs and alterations followed before Atlanta was sent west.
Atlanta reached Pearl Harbor on 23 April 1942 and joined the carrier forces gathering for the central Pacific. In June she went through the Midway campaign in the screen, while the decisive fighting was done by aircraft far from her guns. Her own first hard action against enemy planes came in August, in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, when Japanese aircraft struck at the American carriers and the ships around them. Jenkins later reported that Atlanta may have shot down five of the attackers. The cruiser came through that fight undamaged. For a ship commissioned only eight months earlier, the barrage she threw up was the work she had been designed to do.
By autumn the campaign had moved to Guadalcanal, where Japanese warships were trying to reinforce the island and to shell the American positions ashore. Atlanta operated with the cruiser-destroyer groups committed to that fight. On the night of 12 November 1942 she was in the American column that escorted transports clear of the island and then turned back into the sound. Rear Admiral Norman Scott was embarked in Atlanta for the operation. Shortly after midnight the column met a Japanese force near Savo Island. The range closed so fast that ships on both sides were suddenly inside gun and torpedo range of one another.
The blow fell on Atlanta at the opening of the melee. A torpedo hit left her dead in the water, and shellfire swept her forward decks and superstructure. In the confusion of the dark, heavy shells from the cruiser San Francisco struck her as well. Norman Scott was killed. Jenkins was wounded in the foot, made his way aft to the after control station, and kept command of a ship that could no longer steam or fight. Within minutes of the start of the action Atlanta was out of the battle, burning in places and taking water, while the American column broke up the Japanese attempt to bombard the beachhead.
Daylight on 13 November showed that the cruiser could not be kept afloat by the means at hand. The badly wounded were taken off toward Guadalcanal, and the tug Bobolink came alongside to tow. The water continued to gain. Jenkins judged further salvage hopeless. With approval from his seniors he cleared the remaining men and ordered Atlanta scuttled. She sank a few miles west of Lunga Point, in the stretch of water later known as Ironbottom Sound. After he had been taken off, he stopped gunners on the rescue ship from firing on Japanese sailors who were still in the water. For his conduct as commanding officer in the close night action of 12–13 November 1942 near Savo Island, he received the Navy Cross.
Jenkins survived the loss of his ship and remained in the Navy through the rest of the war. On 30 April 1945 he was appointed a temporary commodore, and after the war he retired as a rear admiral. He died on 10 June 1975, at the age of eighty-two, and was buried in San Diego. The public record of his sea service runs from the destroyer Perkins, which he commanded in the late 1930s, to the cruiser he took from a winter commissioning in New York to the night battle off Guadalcanal, where he stayed aboard, wounded, until the ship had to be given up.