Ships
- USS Brown (DD-546) Captain, 10 July 1943 – 13 January 1945
The man who answers to the name is not Copeland, and he is not any of the other Copemans who turn up in a search: not the Royal Navy seaman Thomas Copeman of Gateshead, not the Royal Marine artilleryman Thomas Henry Copeman born in 1890, not the Michigan inventor Lloyd Copeman, and not the grandson who became a vice admiral in the next century. He is the Pittsburgh midshipman of the Naval Academy class of 1931, Navy file number 70009, the officer the registers follow from ensign on the Arizona to captain still on the active list on 1 January 1960.
What can be said about the inside of the man is thinner than the ships. Classmates wrote a portrait. A citation was written for one night in the Gilberts and then printed, years later, against the wrong hull. An obituary summary, repeated by a destroyer association, attaches him to the Greer incident of 1941 and to Korea. The registers and the ship histories do not support either attachment. The life that does stand up is a surface line officer who tried aviation and did not wear it, who was executive officer of an old four-piper in the Atlantic while the country was still officially at peace, and who then took a new destroyer through the fast-carrier war from Makin to a typhoon, and brought her home.
Origins
The Navy Register gives his birthday as 2 May 1907. It does not give a town. The Lucky Bag for 1931 prints “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania” under the name, which is the Academy’s home address, not a birth certificate. The Annual Register of the Naval Academy for 1930–31 lists “Copeman, Thomas Henry” among the midshipmen appointed from Pennsylvania, in the same column as Nathan Carroll Copeland of California, a different man. A later obituary summary also says he was born in Pittsburgh. No civil birth record was read for this essay. Pittsburgh is the place the Navy and the obituary agree to call home. It is not proved here as the place of birth.
His own parents are not named in any source used here. The classmates who wrote him up in the Lucky Bag called him “Cope” and “Tom.” They said he had spent a year at Penn State before “the urge to follow the sea” brought him to Annapolis, that he was better at practical work than at the academic departments and was not worried by them, and that crew took most of his time from early plebe year. They said his ambition was to fly, and that he had a strong liking for the Marines. The rest of the sketch is the usual yearbook weather: rugged stature, cool patience, “to know him is to feel his worth.” That is how a class wanted him remembered at twenty-three. It is not a witness to what he did later. The wish to fly is worth keeping, because the Navy’s own books show what happened to it.
Nothing else of the Pittsburgh years has turned up. No school, no father’s trade, no mother’s name.
Formation
He was commissioned ensign with date of rank 4 June 1931. The Register of 1 January 1932 still has him an ensign, and the duty column is readable: Arizona. A son, Thomas Henry Copeman Jr., was born on 21 March 1932. That date is the boy’s own later Navy Register entry, not a baptismal record. The father was twenty-four, less than a year out of the Academy, and on a battleship. The mother’s name is not in the registers, the Lucky Bag, the citation, or the obituary summary used here. She is missing from the whole of what was read. The marriage, if the birth is his son’s in the ordinary way, had to come after graduation. Midshipmen did not marry. Where, and to whom, is not known.
The Register of 1 January 1933 still calls him ensign. The duty column on that page did not survive the scanning in an order that can be trusted, so the ship for that New Year is not stated here. On 1 January 1934 the Register has him under instruction at the Naval Air Station, Pensacola. Classmates on the same page who had already qualified as naval aviators carry the numeral 2 in the qualifications column. His line does not. The Lucky Bag had said he wanted to fly. The Navy sent him to the place where that was decided. By the Navy Directory of 1 April 1934 he was an ensign in the destroyer Badger, and the Register of 1 July 1935 still has him there, by then a lieutenant (junior grade). Three months at Pensacola, or less, and then a destroyer, without the aviator’s number: that is all the record supports. It does not say he failed a physical, or asked to leave, or was dropped. It says the designation was not there afterward.
Badger was an old flush-deck destroyer. The directories do not say what billet he held in her. From the Register of 1 July 1936 through the Register of 1 July 1937 he is in Nokomis. The Directory of 1 January 1937 lists him as her engineer officer. Nokomis was not a fleet destroyer. She had been Horace E. Dodge’s steam yacht, bought in 1917, and for nearly twenty years after the first war she was a survey ship in the Caribbean and along the Central American coast. She was photographed at Coco Solo on 9 March 1937, which falls inside the span of his assignment, and she was decommissioned in February 1938. The photograph does not put him on the wharf. The engineer’s billet does put him in the ship’s books at the start of that year. Survey work, if he did it, is the ship’s trade in those years, not a cruise reconstructed from his letters. There are no letters.
On 1 July 1938 the Register marks him (V). In that year’s explanatory notes (V) means “on the promotion list,” not aviator. The duty printed beside the name is too scrambled to use. The Directory of 1 January 1939 is plain: lieutenant (junior grade), Naval Academy, Annapolis. The Register of 1 July 1939 still has him a lieutenant (junior grade). A later machine listing of officers associates 1 July 1939 with the grade of lieutenant. The printed Register of that day still says junior grade, so the day he actually put on a lieutenant’s stripe is not taken from that listing. By the Register and the Directory of 1 July 1940 he is a lieutenant, and the duty is Greer, executive officer.
Greer was another old four-piper, flagship of Destroyer Division 61. On 1 July 1940 the ship’s page of the Directory gives Commander C. W. Brewington as both division commander and commanding officer, and Lieutenant T. H. Copeman as executive officer. On 1 April 1941 the same book still has Copeman as executive officer and navigator. The captain above him is now Lieutenant Commander F. Close. Brewington has gone up to the division and off the ship’s bridge. A compiled list of Greer’s commanding officers gives Close the ship from 12 December 1940 to 8 September 1941, then Laurence Hugh Frost until 20 June 1942. Those dates are a list, not a log. They fit the two directories.
On 4 September 1941, still inside the dates that list gives to Close, Greer was carrying mail and passengers toward Argentia when a British plane put her onto a U-boat. She trailed it, watched one torpedo pass astern and another to port, and dropped nineteen depth charges. She was the first American ship in that war to attack a German submarine. Roosevelt used the morning in a fireside chat and told the fleet it need not wait to be struck first. The ship history tells that story without naming her captain or her executive officer. Copeman was her executive officer on 1 April, four months earlier. No directory, register, or deck log read here puts him aboard on 4 September, and none says he had left. The account that later circulated among Gearing veterans — that he was executive officer in 1940 when she became the first Navy ship attacked by a U-boat — has the year wrong and the presence unproved. It is not used as his morning.
He was a lieutenant commander by the Register of 1 July 1942. A compiled date of 15 June 1942 for the temporary rank was not checked against an order. The same compiled lists give him command of Greer on 20 June 1942, the day they take her from Frost. He was thirty-five.
War years as lived
The ship history of Greer is almost silent for the rest of 1942. Her spring — the Caribbean escorts, thirty-nine men taken out of the water from U-boat sinkings, the watch off Pointe-à-Pitre in case the Vichy cruiser Jeanne d’Arc came out — sits before 20 June. From his taking command until 23 January 1943, when she sailed from Guantánamo for Boston and then for convoy work, the published history does not say where he took her. A war diary for August through October 1942 exists and was not read. Those months are his, and they are blank here.
What the history does put under his command is the late winter and early spring of 1943, and it is not a victory. She left Argentia on 1 March with merchantmen for Northern Ireland. In heavy gales three U-boats, in three attacks, sank seven ships of the convoy before Londonderry on 13 March. Greer is not credited in that account with a kill, a rescue, or a particular failure. She was one escort in a convoy that lost seven ships. She brought forty merchantmen back without incident, and went on to Hampton Roads on 15 April with the tanker Chicopee. That return is inside both of the dates given for the end of his command. One list relieves him on 25 April 1943. Another keeps him until 25 May, and names Merle David Cooper Jr. as the next captain from that May date. If the April date is right, the exercises in Casco Bay and the convoy of eighty-three ships that left New York on 11 May for Casablanca are the next man’s. If the May date is right, he sailed on that convoy and left her during the crossing. Neither date was read from a log. The certain Atlantic under his hand is the convoy that lost seven ships, and the trip home.
He was still a lieutenant commander in the Register of 1 July 1943. On 10 July, at San Pedro, he commissioned Brown (DD-546). She was a Fletcher, built by Bethlehem at Terminal Island. The keel had been laid on 27 June 1942, the week he took Greer. She was launched on 21 February 1943, sponsored by Mrs. Claude O. Kell. The history names him in command on the commissioning day. A compiled list keeps him there until 13 January 1945, when it gives her to Robert Rutherford Craighill, a different name on this encyclopedia’s list and not this life. Brown reached the Puget Sound Navy Yard on 12 January 1945 for overhaul and was ready for sea again on 1 March. The Okinawa radar-picket fight that fills the rest of her war history belongs to the captain who had her after the yard. It is not written here as Copeman’s.
What he had, from the shakedown out of San Diego to the winter of 1944, was the fast-carrier screen.
She left San Francisco on 30 September 1943 in company with Lawrence, screening the battleship Pennsylvania, and reached Pearl Harbor on 6 October. There she joined the Northern Covering Group, Task Group 50.2, Rear Admiral Arthur W. Radford in Enterprise. They sailed on 10 November for the Gilberts. That afternoon Brown picked up Ensign S. S. Osborne, a Naval Reserve fighter pilot from Enterprise, out of the water. From 19 to 21 November the carriers she was guarding worked Yellow Beach at Makin: the harbor, troop concentrations, gun positions. On 24 November she took Seaman Second Class Robert R. Louis, who had fallen overboard from the light carrier Belleau Wood, and, that evening, Lieutenant (junior grade) I. J. Snowden, a Belleau Wood pilot who had crashed. On 27 November, just after noon, she moved Radford and his staff from Enterprise to Saratoga. The job in those weeks was not gunnery against a fleet. It was keeping men and an admiral from being lost over the side of somebody else’s ship, and staying in the screen while the carriers flew.
The nights were different. On 25 November enemy aircraft dropped flares for a torpedo run and left when Brown and the other screen ships opened fire. After dark on 26 November the history says thirty or more bombers came in, called at the time the largest night air attack yet made on the Pacific Fleet. They dropped flares and started an attack. A three-plane night-fighter team from Enterprise shot two of them down. The bombers fired on one another and withdrew. Brown’s part, in that telling, is the screen’s fire, not a claim of her own.
On the night of 28 November she was detached, escorting Monterey. Ten to twelve aircraft came in. Three torpedo planes took her from the port side and dropped three torpedoes. A hard turn cleared two wakes. The third torpedo hit her amidships and did not arm. She was not damaged. Her guns shot down two of the planes. That is the ship history. The Silver Star citation, as printed by a medals compiler from Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, serial 48 of 4 March 1944, tells the same nights and then flattens the third torpedo into an evasion: three torpedoes launched, all avoided by maneuver, two aircraft certainly destroyed, the attack running from 1833 to 1843. The citation also puts him in Greer. Greer was not in the Gilberts. In the autumn of 1943 the old destroyer was on the Atlantic side, including a collision in New York harbor on 15 October. The nights, the dates, the detached duty, and the three torpedoes are Brown’s. The word Greer in that printing of the citation is wrong. The Register of 1 July 1945, counting distinctions recorded through 1 May 1945, gives him the Silver Star without naming the ship. The Gilberts night is the only action for which a citation text was found.
She stayed with the carriers through the air and surface bombardment of Nauru on 8 December and entered Espiritu Santo on 12 December. From there the pattern was the fast-carrier war as a destroyer captain actually lived it: fuel, screen, a rescue, a short detached errand, then the next strike. On 21 December she left with five other destroyers escorting Bunker Hill and Monterey for strikes on the Kavieng–Rabaul area, and came back to Espiritu Santo on 7 January 1944 with Rear Admiral Sherman’s group. Out again on the 19th, the same carriers, the group renumbered 58.3 at Funafuti on 23 January, for the Marshalls. She anchored in Majuro on 4 February, sailed on the 11th, and was in the screen for the strikes on Truk on 16 and 17 February. On 18 February she took seventeen Japanese prisoners out of a small boat and put them aboard New Jersey, Spruance’s flagship. The history does not say who was in the boat, or what Copeman said to them, or whether any of them were wounded. It says the destroyer stopped, took them, and delivered them to the fleet commander. Then Sherman’s group struck Guam and Tinian on 22 February. She was back in Majuro on 26 February and screened Bunker Hill into Pearl Harbor on 4 March.
She left Pearl on 16 March with four carriers, two cruisers, and eight other destroyers, and on 22 March left Majuro screening Lexington to join Rear Admiral J. J. Clark’s Hornet group for Palau, Yap, and Woleai at the end of March. After Majuro again she went to the Hollandia operation: strikes on the airfields, a night bombardment of Satawan on 30 April in which the history counts barges, buildings, a pier explosion, a machine-gun battery, and an airstrip put out of use, and the bombardment of Ponape on 1 May with the battleships. Through May and June she moved with the Essex and Hornet groups to Marcus, Wake, and then the Marianas. Airfields ashore were hit from 15 June as the troops went onto Saipan.
On 19 June the Japanese fleet’s air arm came at Mitscher’s Task Force 58, and mostly died before it reached the ships. Those that got through met the screen’s gunfire. Brown’s history does not give her a score for that day. It puts her in the force, under the raids, and then on the evening of 20 June in the work that followed the strike against the retiring Japanese carriers: destroyers dropped astern to pick up airmen who came back in the dark, low on fuel, into ships burning searchlights. She took Lieutenant (junior grade) W. H. Nelson and his radioman W. F. White from Yorktown, and Lieutenant (junior grade) M. F. Pilcher and radioman R. B. Boisley from Bunker Hill. The radioman’s name is the history’s spelling. Four men, named, out of the water, on the night the carriers turned their lights on. That is a fact of his command. What he thought about the men who were not found is not.
The summer and early autumn are the same life at a higher tempo, and the history does not pause to distinguish his decisions from the task group’s. Strikes on Pagan and Iwo Jima in late June, the Bonins, Guam, Rota, Yap, Ulithi, the air-sea bombardment of Iwo Jima on 4 and 5 August, then the covers for Peleliu and Morotai, Mindanao and the Visayas from 10 to 14 September, air raids fought off from 21 to 24 September while the carriers hit Luzon. In October, with an Essex group out of Ulithi, the targets were Okinawa on the 10th, Luzon on the 11th, Formosa from the 12th to the 15th. Off Formosa she was in repeated air attacks and, on the afternoon of the 15th, picked up Ensign W. H. Boring of Hornet after a water crash. On 18 October the carriers turned to the Philippines. Troops landed at Leyte on the 20th. On 25 October Brown went north with the heavy ships for the action off Cape Engaño. The history gives the sinkings to the carrier aircraft and to submarines, including Zuikaku. It does not give Brown a gunnery claim of her own. She was there, in the screen of a battle fought mostly by aircraft, and then she went back to Ulithi and out again to the airfields of northern Luzon.
On 25 November suicide planes hit Intrepid. Brown took aboard three of the carrier’s men who had been blown overboard. On 17 December a fueling rendezvous was abandoned in rising weather. She steamed into the typhoon that capsized Hull, Spence, and Monaghan. On 21 December she took thirteen men of Hull off a life raft, and six survivors of Monaghan. The history gives no names for those nineteen. She reached Ulithi on 24 December, sailed on the 26th, and arrived at Puget Sound on 12 January 1945. If the compiled relief date of 13 January is right, he turned her over in the yard, after the typhoon and after the passage home. Craighill’s war in her, including Okinawa, is another captain’s.
Between the yard and the next ship there is a gap of about four months in which no duty has been found. On 3 May 1945, at the New York Navy Yard, he commissioned Gearing (DD-710), the name ship of the long-hull class, Commander T. H. Copeman in command. She had been launched at Federal, Port Newark, on 18 February, sponsored by Mrs. Thomas M. Foley. The European war ended five days after he commissioned her. The ship history for his months is shakedown off Cuba, Norfolk on 22 July, training crews for other destroyers, Casco Bay on 5 October, Navy Day at New London from 26 to 29 October with five thousand visitors walking her decks, and Pensacola on 4 November to screen Ranger during carrier qualifications. Japan had surrendered in August, while he was still shaking her down and drilling other ships’ crews. A ship-association list relieves him on 16 November 1945, in favor of George E. T. Parsons. The history’s next firm movement, back at Norfolk on 21 March 1946, falls after that date and is not his. He had commissioned the first of a new destroyer type and spent the last summer of the war, and the first autumn of the peace, in the Atlantic, training. The men of Brown who were still in the Pacific that spring were off Okinawa under somebody else.
The Register of 1 July 1945, with distinctions current through 1 May, records four awards beside his name and no others: the Silver Star, one Bronze Star, and two special letters of commendation with authority to wear the Commendation Ribbon. It does not say which operation produced the Bronze Star or the letters. The Gilberts citation is the only text. A Navy release quoted in 2008 said the Silver Star was for the Gilberts in Brown — that part agrees with the ship history — and added two Bronze Stars, for the Marianas and the Philippines. The 1945 Register has one Bronze Star, not two. Both of those campaigns were over before the register’s cutoff of 1 May 1945, so a second Bronze Star, if it was awarded at all, was awarded late or was remembered in the place of a commendation. The obituary summary’s phrase, a Silver Star “with combat V” and a commendation “with V and Star,” mixes the devices. The register’s pair of commendation ribbons can look, in a hurried memory, like a ribbon with a star. The register is the count used here.
After
From November 1945 to the summer of 1948 no duty station was found in the registers that were read. The later registers of this period are machine lists of rank, date, and file number. They do not print a ship.
A NavSource list of Oglethorpe’s commanding officers gives him the attack cargo ship from 1 July 1948 to 31 July 1949 and styles him captain. The ship’s own chronology on that page puts her Korean campaigns in July–November 1950, under later captains, Paul F. Heerbrandt among them. The Gearing association’s reprint of his obituary says he commanded Oglethorpe in the Korean theater. Those two statements cannot both be true. If the list’s dates are right, he had left a year before the war. The list also calls him captain in 1948. The registers give his date of rank as captain as 1 December 1950. If that date is right, he was a commander when he had her, and the list used the rank he later held. Neither the dates nor the Korean sentence were checked against a deck log or a Navy Directory. The Korean claim is rejected. The command itself is only as good as the list.
The Register of 1950 still has him a commander, with a date-of-rank field that reads 1 November 1942 for him and for classmates beside him. That November date does not survive the Register of 1 July 1943, which still calls him lieutenant commander, or the commissioning report of 10 July 1943, which uses the same rank. He is a commander in the Register of 1 July 1944. The day in November 1942 is not used here as the day he became one. He is a captain, date of rank 1 December 1950, in the registers of 1954, 1956, and 1960, designator 1100, unrestricted line, not aviation. The Register of 1 January 1960 still carries him on the active list. It does not say where.
The obituary summary gives him two shore commands and a home. From 1955 to 1956, it says, he was chief staff officer of the Service Force, Sixth Fleet. His last active duty was deputy chief of staff of the Eleventh Naval District. He retired in July 1960 as a captain and lived in Del Mar. A compiled retirement date of 1 July 1960 matches the month and the fact that the January 1960 register still has him. The day was not read in a register. The Sixth Fleet staff job and the Eleventh District job were not read anywhere except that summary. They are not invented here, and they are not confirmed beyond it. The same summary is the one that misplaces him on Greer in September 1941 and on Oglethorpe in Korea, so the staff billets are possible and unchecked.
The son, Thomas Henry Jr., appears in the registers as an ensign, designator 1100, date of rank 3 June 1955, born 21 March 1932. The 1955 register does not say he was a Naval Academy graduate, and this essay does not say it. A Honolulu newspaper, reporting the grandson’s promotion to rear admiral on 30 May 2008, said the father — Thomas H. Copeman Jr., a retired commander — was at the ceremony, and that he had served in destroyers and cruisers for twenty-two years, commanded Fidelity, spent a year in Vietnam, and taught at the Naval Academy. The same story gives the grandson’s mother as Eileen. She is the son’s wife, not the captain’s. The captain’s wife is still unnamed. Rear Admiral John Bird, speaking at that ceremony, said the family had eighty years of Navy service from the grandfather through the father to the son. The grandfather, he said, had commanded five ships. Four are named in the sources used here: Greer, Brown, Gearing, Oglethorpe. The fifth was not found.
He died, the obituary summary says, on 21 December 1982, in a hospital in San Diego. The San Diego Union (the summary says the Union-Tribune) printed it on Sunday, 23 December 1982. The paper itself was not opened. He was seventy-five. The grandson who spoke of him in 2008 had been born in 1959, so the captain lived to see that child, and not much of the child’s Navy. No grave, no will, and no word of his own about the typhoon or the unarmed torpedo was found.