Ships
- USS Ringgold (DD-500) Captain from 30 December 1942
The Navy Register and the Naval Academy Lucky Bag give the name in full: Thomas Francis Conley, Jr., born in Connecticut on 25 October 1904, appointed from that state, and a member of the Academy class of 1926. He is the officer who commissioned the second Ringgold and who, two years later, took a section of destroyers into Surigao Strait. He is not Delbert Lawrence Conley, not Edwin Gus Conley, not William Leader Conley, and not the electrician’s mate Thomas Lewis Conley who was lost in Grampus. The initial F is Francis. Nothing in the registers makes him any other man who used those three names.
Origins
The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers, in the volumes of 1 January 1933 and 1 July 1940, prints the same vital line. He was born on 25 October 1904 in Connecticut, and he entered the Naval Academy on 16 June 1922 from Connecticut. The dagger, or the later symbol that replaced it, means what the register’s own note says: he was commissioned ensign on 3 June 1926. The Lucky Bag of 1926 puts a town under the name. Classmates printed him as Thomas Francis Conley, Jr., of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and they gave him the names they used, Tom and “The Irishman.”
The “junior” is the only trace of a father. No register, yearbook, or citation read for this essay names the elder Thomas Francis Conley, or a mother, or a brother or sister. Bridgeport is the hometown the midshipmen put on the page. It is not, by itself, a birthplace more precise than the register’s Connecticut. How a boy from that city came to the Academy in the summer of 1922, and who stood behind the appointment, is not in these books.
Formation
The yearbook’s sketch of him is the usual midshipman comedy, and it has to be read as that. It says Lisbon and Paris had felt his presence. It says he seldom studied and always got by, that he had frightened first-classmen with a look, and that a right hand to the jaw in his plebe year had ended a brief ambition to box. It calls him the reddest of Red Mikes: he never dragged, never went to a hop, and had little use for the opposite sex, though the writer was sure he would fall someday. Those sentences are a roommate’s joke about a big, lucky, unsocial classmate. They are not a travel record, and they are not evidence that he remained unmarried. What the same page lists as a record, in the Academy’s shorthand, is class soccer in his second-class year, numerals, and a “Black N.” That is the whole athletic line. He was not, on that page, a varsity star.
He was commissioned ensign on 3 June 1926. The register of 1 January 1933 still has the class date of rank as lieutenant (junior grade) running, by an unbroken ditto, from 3 June 1929. On that date his duty is Arizona. The facing page dates the cruise then in progress from 3 January 1928 and the end of the cruise before it from April 1927. Sea service in the rank of lieutenant (junior grade) is three years and seven months. Total sea service is six years and two months. He had been a junior officer on a battleship for five years by the time that book was closed, and the Navy had already marked him with two course numbers, 31 and 32: completed the course in torpedo instruction, and completed the course in chemical warfare. He was not yet marked as an engineer.
The engineering came next, and the place of it is a directory rather than a ship. The Navy Directory of 1 January 1936 lists Thomas F. Conley, Jr., as a lieutenant (junior grade) under instruction at the University of California, Berkeley. By 1 July 1940 the register has added the qualification that instruction was for. Beside his name are the codes 22-e, 31, and 32. In that year’s own notes, 22-e is a completed postgraduate course in naval engineering, design. The torpedo and chemical-warfare numbers are still there. He is a lieutenant, the class date of rank dittoed from 30 June 1936, signal number 3009, and his station is the Naval Engineering Experiment Station at Annapolis. The facing page dates that shore duty from 17 August 1939. The cruise before it had ended in July 1939. Sea service in the rank of lieutenant is three years. Total sea service is nine years and seven months. The Navy Directory of 1 April 1941 still has him there, a lieutenant at the experiment station on the Academy grounds. He was thirty-six, a battleship junior officer who had gone ashore to learn how ships were designed, and then stayed ashore to work at the place where the Navy tested the machinery.
The register of 1 July 1942 is the last peacetime-shaped look at him before the books stop naming ships. He is a lieutenant commander. The date of that rank, in the class block from which his line takes its ditto, is 1 April 1941. The qualifications are still 22-e, 31, and 32. The wartime volume does not print the name of his ship. What it does print is the shape of the tour. The sea cruise then in progress had begun in May 1941. The cruise before it had ended in July 1939, the same month the 1940 book had already recorded. Sea service in the new rank is one year and one month. Total sea service is ten years and nine months. Between the April directory and the May cruise he had left Annapolis and gone back to sea. The ship is not in the register.
War years as lived
The eighteen months after May 1941 are a named cruise only in the unofficial commander lists. Those lists give him Barney (DD-149) from 16 May 1941 to 1 December 1942, and they attach two merchant-ship rescues to the destroyer in that period. The dates fit the register’s cruise, which began in May 1941 and was still running on 1 July 1942. Fit is not identification. The register does not say Barney. No Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships passage read for this essay says Barney under his name. The Atlantic work those lists describe is not told here as his.
What an official history does say is the next ship, and it says it at the moment she became a ship. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, in the transcription that has circulated for years from the Naval History Division text, says the second Ringgold (DD-500) was laid down on 25 June 1942 at the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, Kearny, New Jersey, launched on 11 November 1942, sponsored by Mrs. Arunah Sheperdson Abell, and commissioned on 30 December 1942 with Commander Thomas F. Conley in command. A current Naval History and Heritage Command page, as quoted in search, gives the same officer and a different day, 24 December 1942, and places the commissioning at the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn. That page could not be opened here. The older DANFS date is the one used when a single day is required, and the conflict is left standing. Either way, he took a new Fletcher-class destroyer from the builder, and the Navy’s history calls him a commander when he did it. The encyclopedia stub that started this essay has the 30 December date and the rank of commander. It has nothing else.
DANFS then follows the ship, not the man. Shakedown from the Brooklyn yard to Guantánamo and back ran through 8 February 1943. Training near Trinidad lasted until mid-July. She left New York for the Pacific on 21 July, passed the Panama Canal on the 27th, and at Pearl Harbor hoisted the pennant of the commander of Destroyer Division 50. After that the history is Marcus Island, the Gilberts, Wake, and the Tarawa lagoon, where Ringgold fired on the submarine Nautilus by mistake, took two dud hits, lost the use of a port engine, and spent 20 November 1943 inside the lagoon under shore fire. None of that later narrative names her captain. Unofficial lists end Conley’s tour on 11 August 1943, which would put him aboard through the shakedown, the Caribbean, and the passage to Pearl, and would take him off before Marcus Island on 1 September. Those lists are the uboat.net and NavSource kind. They are not used here to give him the cruise. He is on the record as the commissioning commanding officer. He is not, on a record this essay will stand on, the man who took her into Tarawa lagoon.
The next time a document puts him in a fight, he is no longer on Ringgold’s bridge. He is a captain in command of a section of other destroyers, and the fight is the night of 24–25 October 1944 in Surigao Strait. The Navy Cross citation, Commander, Seventh Fleet, serial 0647 of 9 February 1945, is the official sentence. It awards the cross to Captain Thomas Francis Conley, Jr., for service as commander of Attack Section Two, Destroyer Squadron 56, against a column of Japanese battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. It says he led the section through intense and prolonged gunfire, put it in a tactically advantageous position, delivered a well-executed torpedo attack, and retired without damage to his units. The citation is a judgment. It is not a track chart.
The track, as far as it can be taken from a later account that cites the action reports, is more particular, and less triumphant, than the citation’s adjectives. Trent Hone’s narrative in the Naval Institute’s Naval History for October 2006, drawing on the action report of Commander, Destroyer Division 112, dated 31 October 1944, and on the reports of the ships, puts Captain T. F. Conley at the head of the second section of Destroyer Squadron 56: Bryant (DD-665), Halford (DD-480), and Robinson (DD-562). Captain Roland N. Smoot had the squadron. The left-flank destroyers had been told to attack, and Smoot had been told to get the heavy ships. Three sections were to come at Vice Admiral Shoji Nishimura’s column from three directions so that a turn would not take the Japanese out of torpedo water. Conley’s three were to reach the enemy’s starboard bow.
DANFS, writing the history of Bryant and not of him, says the same three ships and the same night, without his name: in the Battle of Surigao Strait, Bryant, in company with Robinson and Halford, executed a well-coordinated torpedo attack. The ship history and the division report, as Hone uses them, are talking about one attack.
Hone’s account of how it went is the one that can be checked against that pairing. As the destroyers worked up to twenty-five knots, the American battleships and cruisers astern of them opened fire, and the tracers passed overhead. Samuel Eliot Morison, whom Hone quotes, gives Conley’s signal as “This has to be quick. Stand by your fish.” That sentence is Morison’s, relayed by Hone. It was not read here in Morison’s volume or in the division’s report, and it is not offered as a deck-log extract. What Hone takes from the reports themselves is the geometry. The Japanese found the three destroyers at 0351 and opened an erratic fire. Their star shells fell short. Conley did not answer with his guns, so as not to give the enemy his flashes to range on, and he kept his ships against the western end of Hibuson Island to make them harder to see. He meant to fire at about 8,000 yards. By 0354 the ships were in position. Each fired five torpedoes. All of them missed. Nishimura’s column had turned to port to parallel the American battle line, and the torpedoes ran to empty water. Conley took the section out. Other destroyers, Smoot’s among them, hit Yamashiro. The battleships finished her. His own fish did not.
The citation and the narrative are not in conflict about the result to his ships. He retired without damage to his units. They are in a different register about the attack. “Well-executed” is the Seventh Fleet’s word for a section that reached its firing point under fire, held its own guns, launched, and got clear. The torpedoes missed. Both of those things are in the record. The miss does not make the night a failure of nerve. The award does not make the torpedoes hit.
He was still a division commander the next spring, and the Navy’s second citation for him is about a ship that had already been hit. The Silver Star, Commander, Amphibious Forces, Pacific, serial 3937 of 24 November 1945, names Captain Thomas Francis Conley, Jr., as commander of a division of destroyers on 16 April 1945, during the assault and capture of Okinawa. It says his flagship was struck by a bomb-laden suicide plane, that the damage was severe and the fires raging, and that he took control of the ship. The bridge was in flames and smoke and in immediate danger of collapsing. He got communications through to the engine rooms. Then, the citation says, with the help of only a small-boat compass, he navigated the ship to a safe anchorage in a rear area. The citation says he contributed materially to saving the ship. It does not say which ship. It does not say who was killed. It does not say that the division was still Destroyer Division 112, though that is a fair question and it is not answered here.
Bryant, one of the three ships he had led at Surigao, was crashed by a suicide plane at Okinawa, and DANFS dates that crash to 13 April 1945, not the 16th. The plane hit the port side of her bridge, the bomb exploded, twenty-eight men were killed, eight were missing, and thirty-three were wounded. DANFS does not put Conley aboard. The three-day gap and the silence are enough. Her dead are not written into his citation, and his citation is not written onto her bridge. The flagship of 16 April remains unnamed.
By 1 July 1945 the register has caught up with part of this, and not with all of it. He is in the captains’ section, signal number 2033. The temporary-rank date carried down the page by ditto from the class block is 1 August 1943. The letters after his name are (B) and (G-1). In that year’s notes, (B) is the Navy Cross and (G-1) is the Bronze Star. The Silver Star, coded (E), is not there. The Silver Star serial is dated 24 November 1945, after the register closed, so its absence is what one would expect. The Bronze Star is on the name and nowhere else. No citation for it turned up in the decoration lists read here. The Navy Cross is the one whose words were found.
The rank is less tidy than the medals. On 1 July 1944 the register’s index still calls him a commander, signal 2357, file number 60338, and it prints no decoration letters at all, which is right for a date before Surigao. On 1 July 1945 the same file number sits beside a captain. The 1 January 1952 register, and the 1 January 1956 register, both carry him as a captain with 1 August 1943 as the date of rank that the column pattern yields. A captaincy dated 1 August 1943 and a commander’s listing on 1 July 1944 cannot both be a description of the rank he was wearing in the summer of 1943. The later date-of-rank is in the books. The 1944 book is also in the books. DANFS, at the commissioning in December 1942, calls him a commander, and that agrees with the 1944 listing better than it agrees with a captaincy already a year old. When the Seventh Fleet wrote the Navy Cross citation in February 1945, it called him a captain for the October action. That is the rank in the citation. It is not a finding that he had been a captain since August 1943.
So the war, as the paper leaves it, is this. A Connecticut engineer-lieutenant went back to sea in May 1941, on a ship the register does not name. In the last days of 1942 he commissioned Ringgold. By the autumn of 1944 he was no longer her captain. He was the officer who took Bryant, Halford, and Robinson up the western side of Surigao Strait, fired fifteen torpedoes into a turn, and brought the three ships out untouched. In April 1945, on a flagship the citation does not name, he conned a burning destroyer out of the transport area with a boat compass. The Navy gave him a cross for the first night and a star for the second, and by the summer of 1945 it had also given him a Bronze Star whose reason is not in the file.
Cost
The record is almost silent on the private cost. No letter, no wife, no child, and no obituary that can be tied to him turned up in the registers, the Lucky Bag, DANFS, or the citations. The yearbook had been sure he would fall hard for someone. If he did, the marriage is not in the sources used here. The service numbers are what stand in for a choice. From ensign in 1926 to a sea cruise that by July 1942 had already run more than a year, with a long shore interval only for the engineering course and the experiment station, the life on the page is the Navy’s.
What the war put in front of him, on the evidence that can be used, was not a single heroic cruise with a clean score. At Surigao the cost to his own section was, by the citation’s words, no damage. The cost of the miss was tactical rather than bodily: fifteen torpedoes that did not hit, in a battle other people finished. That is a real outcome. It is not a small one for a destroyer officer whose whole attack was the torpedo run. He had held his gunfire so the enemy could not spot him, and he had stayed on the firing course until the range was the one he wanted. The Japanese turned, and the geometry beat the spread. He took the ships home. The cross says the Navy thought the leadership was the thing that mattered. The reports, as Hone renders them, say the torpedoes did not.
The Okinawa citation is the other kind of night. A bomb-laden plane had already hit the flagship. The bridge was on fire and might come down. The man who was supposed to direct the division from that bridge took the ship herself, got a voice to the engine rooms through the smoke, and steered by a compass meant for a boat. The citation says the ship reached an anchorage and that he had a part in saving her. It does not say what it cost the crew, and this essay will not borrow another ship’s casualty list to fill the blank. The hazard he is credited with facing is the one in the citation: fire, a failing bridge, and a ship that still had to be taken somewhere safe.
The Bronze Star sits between those two stories with no story of its own. It was on his name by 1 July 1945. That is all the register knows.
After
He remained a captain for a long time after the war, and the registers are almost empty of what he did with the rank. On 1 January 1952 he is Thomas Francis Conley, Jr., captain, with the 1 August 1943 date of rank in the column beside the birth date 25 October 1904 and the commissioning date 3 June 1926. On 1 January 1956 he is still a captain, in the active-list portion of the book. No ship, no bureau, and no shore station is recoverable from the broken columns of those two volumes. The six-page sketch Rear Admiral Thomas F. Conley, Jr., U.S. Navy, Retired, issued by the Naval History Division in 1956, is the document that would ordinarily fill the gap. It was not found in a form that could be read. Its title is evidence that the Navy, in 1956, was already styling him a retired rear admiral. It is not evidence of the billets.
The register of 1 January 1957 carries him on the retired list. The rank printed with the name is rear admiral. The digits in the date-of-rank, date-retired, and date-of-birth columns, read against the pattern of the flag officers around him, are 1 August 1943, July 1956, and 25 October 1904. The July 1956 retirement is a reading of a badly broken page, not a clean line, and it is used here only as that reading. What is firm is the change of list. At the start of 1956 he was still borne as a captain. At the start of 1957 he was a retired rear admiral. The star, if it was the tombstone promotion the title of the 1956 pamphlet implies, came with the retirement or on the retired list. The day of it was not read off a clean page.
His death is in worse shape than his retirement. Hall of Valor gives 9 November 1962. The uboat.net commander page gives the same day and adds Alameda County, California. Neither is a vital record opened for this essay, and no obituary was found. A Los Angeles National Cemetery transcription lists a Thomas Francis Conley who was born on 25 March 1891 and died on 17 October 1956. That man is thirteen years older, and he died while this officer was, on the register evidence, either just retiring or just retired. He is not this Conley. Where Thomas Francis Conley, Jr., died, and whether anyone of his household survived him, is not established by a source this essay can stand on.
What the paper leaves is a Bridgeport midshipman of the class of 1926 who spent his early career on Arizona, learned naval engineering at Berkeley, and served at the experiment station at Annapolis until the spring of 1941. He commissioned Ringgold. He took three destroyers into Surigao Strait, fired, missed, and came out. Six months later he steered a burning flagship with a boat compass. The Navy made him a captain, gave him a cross, a star, and a Bronze Star it did not explain in the register, and eventually carried him on the retired list as a rear admiral. The rest of the life, including how it ended, is not yet in a source that can be quoted without a warning.