Ships
- USS Nautilus (SS-168) Captain from 1 July 1930
Thomas John Doyle, Jr. (4 August 1892 – 23 November 1962) was a United States Navy officer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who graduated from the Naval Academy with the Class of 1914 and spent most of his career in submarines before commanding the fleet repair ship Medusa in the first years of the European war. He was the commissioning commanding officer of the large fleet submarine Nautilus (originally V-6), had earlier commanded the coastal boat S-39, and, from October 1939 to June 1941, ran Medusa from her San Pedro home port while the Navy prepared for a wider war. He was promoted to captain in December 1940 while still in that ship. He left her months before she shifted to Pearl Harbor and before the attack of 7 December 1941. The Navy registers still list him as a captain in mid-1945, by which time he had completed the Army and Navy Staff College course; the sources examined here do not recover his day-to-day wartime assignments after he left Medusa. He was an uncle of the Lincoln naval aviator John R. “Dugie” Doyle, who won the Navy Cross after being shot down over the South China Sea in 1944. The death date comes from a modern ship-commander compilation and has not been confirmed in an obituary among the sources examined here.
He was born on 4 August 1892. The Navy Register of 1945 gives that date of birth and records that he entered the Naval Academy on 11 July 1910. The 1914 Lucky Bag places him in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the nicknames “T,” “T.J.,” and “Tom,” and gives his address on graduation leave as 18th and D Streets in that city. His object, in the yearbook’s brief motto line, was “A square deal to every man.”
The family behind that Lincoln address can be followed in part through later Nebraska sources about his brother’s son. According to a 2014 oral-history article in Nebraska History, the father, Thomas, was a successful attorney who practiced in Greeley, Nebraska, where another son, Lewis Raymond “Lum” Doyle, was born on 21 July 1895, and who in the early 1900s moved the family to Lincoln so that his seven children could be educated. Lum became a letterman fullback on the University of Nebraska football teams of 1914–1916, took a law degree, and practiced as a trial lawyer in Lincoln. Thomas John Doyle, Jr., was the older brother who went to Annapolis instead. In 1943, when Lum’s son Dugie was a naval aviation cadet at Olathe, Kansas, the base commander, Capt. Dixie Kiefer—himself a Lincoln High School graduate who had known both men—sent word that the cadet should call on him because he knew “my dad, and he knew my uncle, T. J. Doyle, who was a career Annapolis navy man.” That family memory is the clearest contemporary identification of the captain as Lum’s brother and Dugie’s uncle. The sources examined here do not name the mother, the other siblings, or the father’s full middle name, and they do not fix the exact Nebraska town of the future captain’s birth beyond the family’s Greeley-to-Lincoln path.
He entered the Academy in the summer of 1910 and graduated into the commissioned service as an ensign on 8 July 1914. The Register of 1915 lists him among the new ensigns of that date. The Class of 1914 Lucky Bag sketch is long for its genre and unusually insistent on character under pressure. “If any one should ask you suddenly what you thought of Doyle,” it begins, “you would probably say, ‘The most happy go lucky man in the world.’ But is he happy go lucky? Isn’t he rather, the sort of man who can smile when the whole world goes wrong; when everything is black, and d’s are piling up, does he whimper and beg off? Not Thomas John Doyle, Jr. He is the sort who can lead a forlorn hope with a smile, and what’s more, he would bring the forlorn hope back with a grin.” The entry calls him “a refreshing oasis in a desert of rhinoism,” praises his good-tempered jokes, and says that after he held forth in Smoke Hall “they all feel a little kindlier than before to everyone else.”
The same sketch is frank about costs. He was “savvy and a wonderful mathematician” and “the wooden man’s friend, open at all hours,” but tobacco—“Bull Durham”—cost him stripes. He lost his First Class Leave and “nearly left our midst” for a final demerit, then spent September on the station ship Reina Mercedes “Just for wearing cits.” His own theory of discipline, as the yearbook quotes it, was that once he had been ragged and punished he was free to do the same thing again; “However no one else could see it.” He was listed with the Fourth Company, played basketball and football for class numerals all four years, had been a cheer leader, was Keeper of the Goat—the Academy mascot—and was listed as Champion Boat Officer for four years. The yearbook closes by calling him “Happy, square, efficient—that’s how we present one of the best of them all—T. J. Doyle, Jr.”
What he did with that commission in the First World War is not recovered in the sources examined here. The next firm shore-and-ship trail begins nearly a decade later. By 1921, ship-commander compilations list him as the first commanding officer of the new destroyer Hull (DD-330), from her commissioning on 26 April 1921 until 11 May 1921—a brief fitting-out command of about two weeks. Those compilations are secondary; the Navy Directory and Register evidence that follows places him securely in the submarine force soon afterward.
In 1923 the Navy Directory lists Lieutenant T. J. Doyle, Jr., under instruction in the submarine tender Chewink. In 1924 he was aboard the coastal submarine S-40. The Register of 1925 lists him as a lieutenant with date of rank 1 November 1923 and gives his duty as “Commanding S-39,” with a present-duty date of September 1921 that may mark the start of his submarine assignment rather than the precise start of that particular command. The Navy Directory of 1926 still has him commanding S-39 as a lieutenant commander. The directories of 1927 send him “to U.S.”; those of 1928 and 1929 place him at the Submarine Base, New London, Connecticut—the school and industrial heart of the peacetime submarine force.
The big assignment came next. The Register of 1930 shows Lieutenant Commander Thomas John Doyle, Jr., with the submarine-command and submarine-instruction qualifications, date of rank 23 February 1925, and duty “Conn. V-6”—fitting out the new boat. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships records that V-6, later renamed Nautilus and redesignated SS-168, was commissioned on 1 July 1930 with Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Doyle, Jr., in command. She was one of the large “V-boats,” a long-range fleet submarine with heavy deck guns, built to operate with the battle force rather than only in coastal waters. The Navy Directories of 1930 through 1932 list him in command while she ran special submergence tests from New London and then, under the name Nautilus, went out to Pearl Harbor as flagship of Submarine Division 12. A 1931 newspaper photograph reproduced in later ship-history compilations shows him with his officers at the Washington Navy Yard when the new boat visited the capital. He thus commissioned and first brought into service a submarine that, under other captains, would later earn a Presidential Unit Citation and fourteen battle stars in the Pacific war. He was not in her for that war.
After leaving Nautilus he took the junior course at the Naval War College at Newport. The Navy Directory of early 1933 lists him there under instruction. On 22 May 1933 the Washington Evening Star printed Navy orders detaching Lieutenant Commander Thomas John Doyle, Jr., from the War College about 27 May and sending him as inspector-instructor of Naval Reserve units at Detroit, Benton Harbor, Saginaw, Grand Rapids, and Toledo. How long that Midwestern reserve tour lasted is unclear. By the directories of 1934 and early 1935 he was navigator of the battleship Oklahoma; by late 1935 he was a commander and the battleship’s first lieutenant. The Register later credited him with completion of the Naval War College junior course and with qualification for command of submarines and completion of the submarine-instruction course—the marks of a finished peacetime submariner who had also taken the staff schooling the Navy then offered its mid-career officers.
From 1936 through 1939 the directories list him as naval attaché, and naval attaché for air, at the American embassies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay. It was diplomatic and reporting duty on the South Atlantic littoral while Europe slid toward war and while the United States still clung to neutrality. The sources examined here do not preserve his attaché reports or say what he made of German and Italian influence in the region. They only show that a Nebraska submarine officer who had commissioned Nautilus spent the late 1930s watching the southern ocean from embassy desks.
He came home to a ship that existed to keep other ships fighting. On 6 October 1939—five weeks after Germany invaded Poland—Commander Thomas John Doyle, Jr., took command of Medusa (AR-1), the Navy’s first vessel designed from the keel up as a repair ship. She had been built at Puget Sound, commissioned in 1924, and for years had worked out of San Pedro with the Base Force, carrying machine shops, foundries, optical and electrical repair gear, and even a detail to service battleship floatplanes. A later official history quotes her commanding officer in 1939 saying that “Service to other vessels is the only justification for [this ship’s] existence.” The quotation is dated only to that year; Doyle’s predecessor still held the ship until early October, so the sources examined here do not settle which captain spoke the line. What is firm is that Doyle held the command through the first year and a half of the European war, while Medusa remained on the West Coast doing the unglamorous work of keeping the fleet’s machinery alive.
The Navy Directories of 1940 and 1941 list him as commanding Medusa. The Register of 1941 shows him a captain from 1 December 1940, with a present-duty date of 6 October 1939 that matches his assumption of the ship. He was still a repair-ship captain when he put on the four stripes. On 12 June 1941 he was relieved. Three months later, in mid-August 1941, Medusa stood into Pearl Harbor. On 7 December, with her then commanding officer ashore, the repair officer took her to general quarters; her gunners fired on a midget submarine and claimed dive bombers, and after the attack she pumped, fed, armed, and helped dig men out of the capsized Utah. None of that was Doyle’s battle. He had left the ship in June. The gap between his relief and the attack is one of the sharper facts of his war: the repair ship he had commanded for twenty months was at Pearl Harbor without him.
What he did for the rest of the war is only partly visible. The Registers of 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945 continue to list Captain Thomas John Doyle, Jr., among the line captains. By the 1945 Register his special qualifications include, in addition to submarine command, submarine instruction, and the War College junior course, completion of the Army and Navy Staff College course—a wartime combined staff school that did not exist when he left Medusa. That single added code is evidence that he took senior staff training during the war, but the sources examined here do not recover the station, the billet, or any ship command after June 1941. No action report, war diary, or award citation in his name has been found among them. He does not appear as a wartime commanding officer of a combatant in the stronger ship histories examined here.
The war did reach his family by another route. In November 1944 his nephew Dugie, flying a dive bomber from Ticonderoga, was hit while attacking a Japanese heavy cruiser in the South China Sea, ditched, and spent weeks with Filipino guerrillas before rescue. He later received the Navy Cross at the University of Nebraska. The Nebraska oral history that preserves that story also preserves the uncle as “a career Annapolis navy man,” known to the Lincoln naval circle that included Capt. Dixie Kiefer. Whether the captain and the nephew saw each other during the war, and what the older man said about a repair ship left behind at San Pedro or about a staff college course in Washington, the sources examined here do not say.
The trail thins sharply after 1945. He is still a captain in the Register issued for that year. Searches of later Registers among the sources examined here have not produced a clear retired-list entry, in part because the optical-character-recognition copies are badly broken for those years. A modern compilation of Allied warship commanders gives his date of death as 23 November 1962, at the age of seventy. No contemporary obituary, cemetery record, or Navy biography file confirming the place or circumstances of death was found among the sources examined here, so that date remains only as well supported as the compilation that carries it.
What can be said with more confidence is the shape of the life the records do show. He was a Midwestern lawyer’s son who went to Annapolis, took demerits with a grin according to his classmates, and then disappeared into the closed world of the submarine force. He commanded a small S-boat, helped bring the big Nautilus into commission, sat in South American embassies as Europe went to war, and then spent the first months of that war running a floating navy yard out of San Pedro. He made captain in a repair ship. He left her before Pearl Harbor. The Navy still carried him as a captain when Japan surrendered. His brother’s boy came home with a Navy Cross. The smile the Lucky Bag remembered—“the sort who can lead a forlorn hope with a smile”—is almost the only personal testimony that survives in his own generation’s words. The rest is duty stations, dates of rank, and the ships that outlived his time in them.