Ships
- USS Abner Read (DD-526) Captain, 5 February 1943 – 14 October 1943
Origins
The officer who commissioned the destroyer Abner Read was Thomas Burrowes of the United States Navy, Naval Academy class of 1925, service number 59381. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 17 October 1904. When he entered the Academy and when President Coolidge signed his ensign's commission, the Navy still wrote his name as Thomas Burrowes, Jr. Later registers, his wartime reports, and the awards made in his name drop the junior. His own son, a different officer, appears in the 1 January 1958 Navy Register as Ensign Thomas Burrowes, Jr., file number 621934.
Almost nothing else of the household has been found. No parent's name, no school before Annapolis, and no appointment letter beyond the fact of the Academy itself. The 1925 Lucky Bag heads his sketch "New York City" and then puts a classmate's joke in his mouth: that he hailed from "just sout' o' de city—Staten Island." That is yearbook dialect, not a birth record. A modern awards index gives his home of record as Keyport, New Jersey. The two places are not far apart on a map and they are not the same fact. Brooklyn is the birthplace the East Carolina University finding aid and that awards index agree on. New York City is how the class book listed him. Keyport is how a later index filed him. Staten Island is a joke.
What the yearbook does fix is the boy the Navy had by 1925. Classmates called him Tom and Middy. They put him on the class basketball team in all four years, in the orchestra as a fourth classman, and down as an expert rifleman. They remembered an electrical-engineering mark that swung from 3.83 to 2.45 in a month, and they were more interested in saying that he was not the old-fashioned boy he looked, and that he vanished when there was a hop, than in saying anything about why he had come to Annapolis. The sketch's only quoted lines—"Gee, but she was keen!" and the Staten Island bit—are the editors' comedy, not a diary. He was also carried on the Fourth Battalion staff as Burrowes, T., Jr. The class of 1925 later made him associate editor of its 1950 book The Silver Quiver, under Roland W. Charles. That is a middle-aged job of class memory, not a clue to 1904.
Formation
His commission is on paper. A letter of appointment, preserved in his papers and dated at Washington in June 1925, appoints Thomas Burrowes, Jr., an ensign in the Navy from 4 June 1925. The East Carolina finding aid, written from those papers, says that on graduation he was sent first to the battleship West Virginia. A diary he kept from 1925 through 1941 records day-to-day life, and the money, on a run of ships that maps a junior officer's ordinary education between the wars: West Virginia, Marcus, Noa, Eagle 35, Eagle 58, Kane, Whippoorwill, Texas, Moffett, Conner, and McKean. The finding aid describes that diary as notes of activities aboard those ships. It does not say he commanded them. Short "commands" of Conner, Robinson, and McKean in 1940–41 appear on a wartime-commander compilation and are not used here as cruises.
The Navy Registers that survive in clear enough type fix the ladder, not the decks. On 1 January 1933 he was a lieutenant (junior grade). On 1 July 1936 the register still has him in the lieutenant block, as "Thomas Burro wes," precedence number 3259, the columns too broken by the scan to trust a date of rank. On 1 July 1940 and again on 1 July 1942 he was a lieutenant commander. On 1 July 1944 he was a commander, file 59381. On 1 July 1945 he was a captain. He was still a captain in the register of 1 January 1952, the month he was on the Korean gunline. By the register of 1 January 1956 the same file number, 059381, is a rear admiral, and he is a rear admiral still on 1 January 1957 and 1 January 1958. The finding aid says he made rear admiral in 1953. A commander list says 1 September 1955. Both dates sit in the gap between the 1952 and 1956 registers. Neither is adopted here as a day.
He married Jean Archer Randal. They had two children, Jean Ann and Thomas Burrowes, Jr. The finding aid says that, and says that when the papers were given in December 1978 the widow was living in Silver Spring, Maryland—the guide spells it Silver Springs. It does not say when they married, or where the children were born, or what she did through the years he was at sea. There is no letter in the sources used here in which he explains himself to her. The man has to be read from what he was required to sign.
War years as lived
The list that sent this essay after him remembers one day: 5 February 1943, when he took Abner Read. That day is real, and it is not the start of his war.
Secondary lists—uboat.net and NavSource, the latter crediting Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves—name Lieutenant Commander Thomas Burrowes as commanding officer of the Sims-class destroyer O'Brien (DD-415) from about 13 December 1941 until she sank on 19 October 1942. His papers hold an officer roster, a personnel list, the war-damage report, newspaper stories of the sinking, and photographs of the ship going down. The official ship history and the Bureau of Ships war-damage report tell the story without printing his name. They speak only of "the Commanding Officer." On that evidence he is the likely captain, not a captain whose every order can be quoted. What follows is the ship's documented ordeal, attached to him only so far as those lists and his own files attach it, and then left.
O'Brien had commissioned under Carl F. Espe in March 1940. Through 1940 and 1941 she worked the eastern seaboard. If the lists are right, Burrowes relieved Espe in the second week of December 1941, days after Pearl Harbor, and took her out of Norfolk on 15 January 1942 with Idaho and Mustin for the Pacific. She was back almost at once: a collision with the destroyer Case damaged her port side, and she repaired at Mare Island before going on to Pearl Harbor in late February. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships then has her escorting, patrolling French Frigate Shoals, lifting civilians off Midway with the seaplane tender Curtiss, and working the Samoa run. On 15 September 1942 she was in the anti-submarine screen of the carrier Hornet, southeast of the Solomons, with Wasp's task force nearby. At 1452 she saw smoke from Wasp. The Hornet force turned sharply right. A torpedo missed close astern. A second hit the port bow.
The local wound was almost modest. The bow below the main deck was blown away back toward frame 10, and the ship could still steam. The detonation whipped the hull. Bottom plating, the vertical keel, and the deep longitudinals failed around frame 104, far from the hit, and the forward engine room leaked through sprung seams and sheared rivets. The Bureau of Ships report, built on the commanding officer's letters of 23 September and 26 October 1942, is a record of a man trying to keep a cracked girder alive across 2,800 miles of moderate weather at never more than twelve and a half knots. Temporary patches at Espiritu Santo by Curtiss and the Seventh Construction Battalion, then more work by Argonne at Nouméa, replaced too little steel, in the wrong line, over too short a length. Two days out of Suva, on the morning of 19 October, the bottom opened. At 0600 the bow and stern began to work independently. At 0625 the commanding officer, with the task-group commander's approval, ordered her abandoned. By 0701 she was empty, left rigged for a tow that never mattered. Just before 0800 she folded and went under, about fifty miles from Tutuila after the navigation in the Bureau's account, with no one lost. The Bureau's judgment was technical and hard: this was the first American case of a ship breaking amidships from an explosion far from the break, and the repairs had not put back the strength the whip had taken. A later sketch on the battleship Wisconsin's association site says Burrowes was commended by the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, for bringing a destroyer into port in August 1942 after her torpedoed bow was blown off, with no one killed. The month is wrong for this torpedoing, and O'Brien did not reach a United States yard. She reached Suva and then the bottom. That commendation is not narrated here as a fact.
Between the sinking and the next command the registers show only that on 1 July 1942 he was still a lieutenant commander, and that by the time he next appears in a ship's history he is a commander. There is no diary for 1942. The 1925–41 diary had already stopped.
Abner Read (DD-526), a Fletcher, was laid down at Bethlehem Steel in San Francisco on 30 October 1941, launched on 18 August 1942, and commissioned at the yard on 5 February 1943. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships puts Commander Thomas Burrowes in command that day. The sponsor was Mrs. John W. Gates. He got a new ship, a new crew, and almost no time. Shakedown ran down the California coast into April. She sailed with Task Group 51.2 for the Aleutians, took up patrol on 4 May, and on 11 May shelled Attu in support of the Army's 7th Division. She bombarded the island again on the 16th and was back in San Diego on the last day of May.
The Bronze Star citation, published as Commander Destroyers Pacific serial 671 of 25 January 1946, and worded there as a gold star in lieu of a second Bronze Star, is the Navy's later description of those days, not a log. It says the ship was newly commissioned and still, technically, in shakedown, and that she was put in at short notice as a primary fire-support ship. It says Burrowes handled her in uncharted water with an inexperienced crew and bad weather, and that the ship helped neutralize at least two enemy batteries that had pinned the troops. The citation's praise is the Navy's. The circumstances it bothers to name—the green ship, the green people, the chart, the weather—are the part that belongs to a life rather than to a medal list. A first Bronze Star, which the "second award" wording and a later Wisconsin sketch both imply, has not been found as a text. It is not assigned here to Attu, to Kiska, or to O'Brien.
Two weeks in a San Francisco drydock, then north again. On 14 June 1943 she sailed for Adak, joined Task Force 16, and patrolled off Kiska. On 22 July, in Task Group 16.22, she took part in a heavy bombardment. Between 12 and 15 August she shelled the island again for the landings. On 17 August the troops found that the Japanese had already gone. The garrison had been lifted off in the fog, and the Americans were shooting at an empty island.
That night the empty island still had a mine. A transcription of Abner Read's action report, serial 006, the commanding officer's letter dated 26 August 1943 and signed T. Burrowes, sets the explosion at 0150 on 18 August. The ship was on anti-submarine patrol on line K-7, a track about 6,400 yards long on courses 320 and 140 degrees, its inshore end roughly 2,000 yards from Blue Jay Rock, Sparrow Rocks, and a charted "possible mine field" off Bluff Cove. Sunset on the 17th had been at 2132. After dark the navigation was radar. The night order book had been written to keep her off the rocks. Speed was down to about five knots so the fixes would be honest. The sea was calm, the wind light from the south, the moon in and out of a broken sky, fog in patches. Readiness Two, material condition Baker, split plant. At 0143 a fix. At 0144 right full rudder, thirty-two degrees. At 0150, still swinging, gyro stopped on 270, an explosion aft. Circuits aft were pulled. Degaussing was pulled. At 0151 the general alarm, the word "Do Not Abandon Ship," men in the water, and a talk-between-ships report that an underwater explosion had blown the stern off.
Burrowes's own reconstruction, in the section the transcriber marks as reproduced from the 1943 report, is worth staying with because it is the one place this captain writes at length about what the sea did to the people in his ship. Some men sleeping aft were not waked by the blast. They were waked by FS smoke in the compartment. The smoke, from ruptured generator tanks—one tank blown forward on the port deck to about frame 170—covered the stern from about frame 168 aft. He wrote that it was the most depressing single effect of the disaster. It blinded them and, worse, it strangled them. It seemed to lock the muscles so that a man could neither breathe in nor out. After a few breaths, he wrote, their mental outlook became one of forlorn abandon. They lay down and waited for the ship to sink. Some hung on the lifelines gasping. About four climbed onto number 5 gun and got a breath or two before the stern went. The sinking of the stern was, for the men on it, a relief: cold water and fuel oil were nothing next to the smoke. The deck under bare feet was almost too hot to stand on. Bunks had come down in the dark. A few men, groping, fell through holes into the oil tanks below. The stern did not plunge. It broke away slowly, after end first, at about frame 170, and took men down with it. One floater net floated clear. Twenty men were brought back by the ship's motor whaleboat, volunteers, working the oil slick out to about two hundred yards while the moon lit the water. Other boats found no one else.
He spent the rest of the report ruling things out, in the tone of a man who expected to be asked whether he had blown up his own ship. The remaining depth charges were on safe. There was no explosion when the stern sank. A depth charge rolled off the rack in that turn would have gone off on the starboard quarter, not where the wreckage was, and would not have heated the decks. A submarine torpedo was, in his opinion, impossible: the geometry left no room for a boat, the sound gear had heard no propellers, no wake had been seen, and a stopped ship would have taken a second shot that never came. He added, from "the personal experience of the Commanding Officer," that a torpedo's destruction would have been greater. The experience he meant is not named. If he had been on O'Brien's bridge a year earlier, the sentence has a private meaning the report does not spell out. An area marked as a possible minefield lay about 3,000 yards inshore. His opinion was that the stern, swinging to port, touched and exploded a drifting mine; that the underwater body abaft frame 170 was destroyed; that the stern broke off by its own weight in about four minutes; that the ship remained tight forward of bulkhead 157; and that the deaths came from the smoke and from men trapped in the stern. He called the absence of fire in the broken fuel tanks and magazines providential. He wrote that the conduct of the officers and men was exemplary, and that recommendations for awards would go in a separate letter. He gave particular credit to the commanding officers of Bancroft and the fleet tug Ute: their speed in taking the tow was what kept Abner Read off the beach she was drifting toward, and what let her reach the nearest base.
The deck-log transcription for the midwatch is strangely thin—"No remarks"—except that at 0300 Deane Layton Warren, radioman second class, was declared dead of drowning by the medical officer, time of death set at 0152. Bancroft had the tow by 0256 and at 0300 was hauling her off the beach, the depth then thirty-one fathoms. At 0355 Ute took the tow. By 0440 she was on the way to Adak with Sicard as escort, Ute on a two-inch wire and Abner Read on seventy-five fathoms of her own chain. General quarters was secured at 0644. Sunrise was at 0657. At 0800 they mustered. The ship history's published total is seventy men killed or missing and forty-seven wounded. The transcription of the muster enclosure separates that into seventy missing, one confirmed dead, and forty-seven wounded. The medical section of the same transcription counts forty-eight casualties in the first wave, one of them dead, thirty-four transferred to the dispensary at Adak, eight kept on board, and five more slight cases found the next day. The numbers do not lock. The fact does. A new destroyer lost her stern and a large part of the crew who lived aft, on a calm night, off an island the enemy had already left. She was the only warship casualty of the Kiska occupation. On 20 August she was in the floating drydock YFD-22.
DANFS carries the hull on from there without saying when Burrowes left her. After about a month of temporary repairs in Alaskan ports, the tug Oriole towed her to Puget Sound Navy Yard. She went onto keel blocks at Bremerton on 7 October 1943. The revised commanding-officer list in the Naval History and Heritage Command's Abner Read history, as captured by a search of that page, dates his relief on 14 October 1943, when Commander Thomas B. Hutchins III assumed command. The yard finished the new stern on 21 December. Everything Abner Read did after that—New Guinea, Biak, the kamikaze that sank her in Leyte Gulf on 1 November 1944—belongs to other captains. It is not continued here.
He was already, or was about to be, a division commander. The Legion of Merit, worded for Captain (then Commander) Thomas Burrowes as commander of Destroyer Division 106, covers 10 December 1943 to 7 August 1944 in the Pacific. The citation says he directed a newly formed division in the Marianas operation and gave fire support for the landings, and that later, with a fast carrier task group, the division's defense against a Japanese air attack accounted for fourteen planes with no damage to his own ships. A Silver Star for 19 and 20 June 1944, the First Battle of the Philippine Sea, places the same division on the screen of the fast battleships in Task Force 58. The citation says he fought the formation while Japanese bombers came in to attack, deployed the ships for the gun action, and that the four-ship escort broke up the formations before they reached the heavy units. It styles him captain. The Navy Register of 1 July 1944, eleven days after the battle, still lists him as a commander. The captaincy in the citation fits an award written up after the promotion that the 1 July 1945 register records. No flagship is named in either citation. A ship's-association sketch says the flagship was Yarnall. That name is not used here as a fact. The division's other hulls are likewise unnamed in the citations, and they are not guessed.
The register of 1 July 1945 has him a captain. The war, for him, had already moved from a single deck to a short column of decks, and the paper that survives is the citation, not the night order book.
Cost
The cost that can be counted is other men's. On O'Brien, if he was the commanding officer the lists say he was, the crew lived and the ship did not. The Bureau's report is an argument about inches of steel and the neutral axis of a ship girder, and it ends by saying the loss was a lesson. It does not say what the captain thought when the main deck started to tear at frame 105 and he sent the crew over the side into a moderate sea. On Abner Read the arithmetic is the muster: on the order of seventy dead or missing, and on the order of forty-seven wounded, including one man declared dead at 0152 while the ship was still being hauled off the rocks. Their names are in the enclosure the ship's memorial file kept; this essay does not have that list, except Warren's name in the deck-log transcription. Burrowes's report does not decorate them. It says the smoke made trained men lie down and wait to drown, and that cold oil was a mercy by comparison. That is as close as the record comes to a captain looking straight at the price of a watch he had set.
He was not among the casualties. He signed the report eight days later, still in command, and he was still in command, on the compilations, when the hull reached the keel blocks. The Navy's medals came afterward, on paper dated as late as January 1946 for the Attu Bronze Star, and they praise leadership in the language citations always use. They do not say whether he asked for the Kiska patrol line, or protested it. The transcribed report says the line had been patrolled by other destroyers since 15 August and by Abner Read since about 1300 on the 17th, and that extreme caution was required at night to stay in safe water. A later revision of the ship's history, quoted in search extracts from the Naval History and Heritage Command page and not reopened in full here, has him calling the geometry of K-7 unusual: a short line aimed at the beach, the inshore end equidistant from rocks and a possible minefield, a current setting across the track. If that revision is quoting his report, he had already written down, before the explosion, the reasons the station was a bad one. He patrolled it anyway. The record does not say he had a choice.
What it cost at home is not written down. Jean Archer Randal and the two children are names in a finding aid, not figures in the wartime file. There is no cable, no returned letter, no description of how he slept after Adak. Inventing one would be a worse breach than leaving the silence.
After
The second of his diaries, January to November 1947, is described as his time as Commander, Destroyer Squadron Seven, in the Pacific. The papers include a history, photographs, and operating notes for that squadron. In 1950 he was associate editor of the class of 1925's Silver Quiver. A third diary, July 1948 to April 1956, is summarized by the archive as his command of Wisconsin, then duty as Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for the Naval Reserve, then command of Destroyer Flotilla Three in the Pacific.
Wisconsin (BB-64) had gone into reserve at Norfolk on 1 July 1948. The Korean War brought her out. DANFS says she was recommissioned on 3 March 1951, Captain Thomas Burrowes in command. The finding aid dates the command from January 1951, which would be the prospective-command months, through February 1952. A Wisconsin association page dates it 3 March 1951 to 22 February 1952, which matches the end of his Korean award. After shakedown she made two midshipmen cruises—Edinburgh, Lisbon, Halifax, New York, Guantánamo—and on 25 October 1951 left Norfolk for the Pacific. She passed the canal on the 29th, reached Yokosuka on 21 November, and relieved New Jersey as Seventh Fleet flagship for Vice Admiral H. M. Martin.
The Legion of Merit for 28 November 1951 to 22 February 1952, a gold star in lieu of a second award, with the combat V, calls him captain and commanding officer, and also task-element commander of gun strikes. One catalog line above that citation absurdly brackets him as "then Commander." The 1945 register and the 1951 ship's history both have him a captain. The bracket is a filing error. The citation itself says he took task elements through mined and restricted water and used the ship's gunfire against fortified positions on the bombline and in the Kojo and Wonsan areas, in support of troops ashore and against supply moving to the front, and that he planned sea-air rescues that saved three pilots. DANFS, for the weeks that fall inside those dates, has the battleship off the Korean east coast from late November: gunfire for the Republic of Korea corps in the Kasong-Kosong area, then for the 1st Marine Division; a short relief; more firing into mid-December screened at one point by Twining; a shift to Kojo; Senator Homer Ferguson aboard on 18 December; a coordinated shoot at Wonsan; Cardinal Spellman's Christmas visit by helicopter; Yokosuka at the end of the year; Pusan on 9 January 1952, with President Syngman Rhee and his wife received aboard on the 10th; the bombline again; Kojo; Wonsan at the end of January; more firing in February. How much of that day-to-day was his personal direction, and how much was the flag officer's, the ship's history does not divide. The award's claim is the firing and the three rescues. On 15 March 1952 Wisconsin took her first direct hit of the commission, a 155-millimeter shell on a 40-millimeter mount that wounded three men. That date is after 22 February. It is not told here as his.
His papers include official papers on a grounding of Wisconsin in the Hudson River in August 1951, which would fall between the midshipmen cruises and the deployment, while he was captain. No contemporary narrative of that grounding was recovered for this essay. It is not described beyond the archive's statement that the reports exist.
The same diary, after the battleship, is summarized as the reserve-personnel job and Destroyer Flotilla Three. A fourth diary, May 1956 to January 1974, records him as Commander, Military Sea Transportation Service, from May to August 1956; Director of the Logistic Plans Division from September 1956 to September 1958; and Commander, Service Force, Atlantic, from September 1958 to June 1960. A Richmond naval-reserve chronology lists him as the speaker at a luncheon on 9 September 1960, still styled Commander, Service Forces, Atlantic Fleet. That is a few months after the finding aid ends the billet and starts his retirement in July 1960. The title at the luncheon may have lagged the orders, or one of the two dates may be soft. The finding aid is followed here for the retirement: July 1960, after thirty-five years from the 1925 commission, which is the span the archive itself gives. The last diary runs on through retirement to January 1974. The collection includes a book, Your Future in the Navy, which the finding aid says he wrote in retirement. A Navy recruiting pamphlet of that title exists from the 1940s; whether his book is that pamphlet, a later edition, or another work with the same name was not settled from the copies in hand. The papers also hold speeches, orders, biographical sheets from 1945 to 1960, and his Academy transcript. They were given by Mrs. Thomas Burrowes on 4 December 1978.
An awards index gives his death as 29 June 1974. The library authority record on the class book uses the years 1904–1974. uboat.net adds Silver Spring, Maryland, which fits the widow's address four years later and does not, by itself, prove the place of death. No newspaper obituary for this rear admiral was retrieved. A Washington Post notice of 25 March 2003 for Thomas Henry Burrowes, a Harvard man who died in Chevy Chase, is a different person and has nothing to do with file 59381.
He left a broken destroyer's report in which he refused to blame his own depth charges, a set of citations that track him from a green ship off Attu to a battleship off Korea, four diaries, and two children. The Navy Register stopped listing him among the active rear admirals. The sea had already written the sentence he seems to have trusted most: on a calm night, the thing that killed was not the mine alone, but the smoke the mine set loose, and the men who lay down in it.