Ships
- USS John Hood (DD-655) Captain, 7 June 1944 – 10 December 1944
Thomas James Thornhill, Jr., was born in Texas on 26 April 1905 and was a member of the United States Naval Academy class of 1930. His date of rank as lieutenant was 2 June 1938. Early in the Second World War the Navy advanced him to temporary lieutenant commander on 15 June 1942 and to temporary commander on 15 October 1942. He held the rank of commander in the destroyer commands that followed.
His first destroyer command was the Fletcher-class ship Frankford (DD-497). He was her commanding officer from her commissioning on 31 March 1943 until 25 January 1944. That tour closed in the winter, and by late spring he had orders to a new destroyer fitting out on the Gulf Coast.
John Hood (DD-655), also a Fletcher-class destroyer, was built by the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation at Chickasaw, Alabama. The keel was laid on 12 October 1942, and the ship was launched on 25 October 1943 with Miss Amelia O'Neal as sponsor. She was named for Rear Admiral John Hood, a nineteenth-century officer who had been aboard Maine when that ship was destroyed at Havana in 1898 and who later commanded the battleship Texas. Thornhill took command when John Hood was commissioned on 7 June 1944.
The new destroyer shook down in the Caribbean, then sailed for the Pacific on 21 August 1944. She reached the Mare Island Navy Yard on 6 September and arrived at Adak, in the Aleutians, on 18 September. There she joined Destroyer Squadron 57 in Rear Admiral John L. McCrea's Task Force 92. The force kept the northern Pacific, and its offensive work was directed at Japanese outposts in the Kuril Islands, more than 600 miles west of Attu, in weather that often put the ships beyond the reach of friendly air cover.
In November 1944, with Thornhill still in command, John Hood took part in the bombardment of the Japanese base on Matsuwa, and the firing did heavy damage to the installations ashore. His command ended on 10 December 1944, six months after the commissioning. The destroyer remained with the North Pacific force for the rest of the war.