Ships
- USS Miller (DD-535) Captain, 31 August 1943 – 15 August 1944
Theodore Hertzel Kobey was born in Aspen, Colorado, on 11 September 1904. His home of record was Bisbee, Arizona. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1926 and spent the years before the Pacific war in the Navy's engineering branch. He became a lieutenant on 30 June 1936 and a lieutenant commander on 1 April 1941. A temporary promotion to commander followed on 15 August 1942, and that was the rank he held when he went to sea in command of a destroyer.
Before that command he was engineering officer of the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City. On 26 March 1943, off the Komandorski Islands, the cruiser fought a long daylight action against a stronger Japanese surface force. Shell hits flooded part of the after engine room with oil and water, contaminated the after fuel tanks, and put the steering out. Kobey kept the plant running through those casualties and helped hold the ship together until the action ended. He received the Silver Star for that work. The award was later issued in the name of a captain, the rank he held when it was processed, and it recorded that he had been a commander during the battle.
His own ship was the Fletcher-class destroyer Miller, built by Bethlehem Steel at San Francisco and named for James Miller, a Civil War quartermaster who had earned the Medal of Honor in Marblehead. Miller was commissioned on 31 August 1943, and Kobey was her captain from that day. She shook down along the West Coast, sailed for Pearl Harbor on 20 November 1943, and joined Destroyer Squadron 52, the squadron she served with for the rest of the war. Hawaiian exercises lasted into January 1944 and were broken by an escort run to Makin.
On 23 January 1944 Miller headed west with Task Force 51. For the next month she screened the force and fired in support of the troops during the assaults on Kwajalein and Eniwetok. She left Eniwetok on 24 February for Majuro and there joined Task Force 58, the fast carrier force. Under Kobey she stayed with those carriers through the spring and summer: the late-March strikes on Palau, Yap, Ulithi, and Woleai; the covering of the Hollandia landings in April; the raids on Truk, Satawan, and Ponape; the May strikes on Marcus and Wake; and, in June, the screen around the carriers for the landings on Saipan and the Battle of the Philippine Sea. She was still with that force for the capture of Guam and the strikes that followed, up to the middle of August.
Kobey left Miller on 15 August 1944, when Dwight Lyman Johnson relieved him. He was advanced to temporary captain on 10 March 1945. He remained in the Navy after the war and retired as a rear admiral. He died in Carmichael, California, on 24 July 1987, at the age of eighty-two.