Ships
- USS Boyd (DD-544) Captain from 8 May 1943
Ulysses Simpson Grant Sharp Jr. (2 April 1906 – 12 December 2001), known in the Navy as "Oley," was a United States Navy officer from Fort Benton, Montana, and a graduate of the Naval Academy in the class of 1927. In the Second World War he commanded the destroyer minesweeper Hogan during the Torch landings in Morocco in November 1942 and then, from her commissioning in May 1943 until the autumn of 1944, the new Fletcher-class destroyer Boyd through the Central Pacific carrier campaigns. On 8 December 1943, while trying to pick up a downed American pilot under the guns of Nauru, he brought the shattered Boyd out of a six-mile gauntlet of shellfire; he received two Silver Stars for his time in her. His younger brother, a submarine officer, was lost in the Pacific in the same war. Sharp went on to flag rank and, as an admiral, served as Commander in Chief, Pacific Command, from 1964 to 1968, through the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He died at his home in San Diego at the age of ninety-five.
He was born on 2 April 1906 in Chinook, Montana, a town in Blaine County in the north of the state, and was named for Ulysses S. Grant, to whom the family was related by marriage. The family settled in Fort Benton, on the Missouri River in Chouteau County, and he grew up there. Time magazine, writing about him in 1964, described the town as a tiny landlocked place of 1,887 people that had produced four admirals. His father, also named Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, kept a general store; the magazine's account is that the boy, "bored with the prospect of a merchant's life," wanted an appointment to the Naval Academy and won one. His mother was named Cora, and he had a sister, Margaret, who married a man named William Angus; those names come from a memorial record prepared for his younger brother. A cousin, Louis A. Sharp Jr., also became a rear admiral, according to the same Time article.
Time gave him his nickname: "Oley" came, it said, from his towheaded, Swede-like looks.
The 1927 Lucky Bag prints his name as Ulysses S. Grant Sharp Jr., of Fort Benton, with the nicknames "Ole" and "Olaf." The sketch opens by saying that through his boyhood Ole had "a strong tendency toward the Service, probably because most of his paternal relatives are members of the Army or Navy." Playing soldier had been his great pastime in early years, and camping out and "roughing it" became "life itself" as he went through grade and high school. The writers added a joke at the family's expense: a cousin in the first class had afflicted him during plebe year, and "the sins of his kin were transmitted to him threefold." He came through all the same, as "a good Plebe," and reached the status of an upperclassman. Socially, they said, "the Swede is 'there.'" His athletics were confined to "the glorification of his class on the cinder path and in the squared ring"; the activities line under his name records class track. Time later added that he boxed and ran the 880-yard race in intramural track.
The sketch gives the sort of praise the book gave the men it liked. Whenever a favor was wanted, "be it the standing of a watch or to appease the desire for a smoke, Olaf is always ready with the goods." There was "a streak of the philosopher in his attitude toward life." His "undaunted cheerfulness" had won him "a host" of friends, and the closing sentence looked forward to the day when the class would scatter: whenever they met him again, "be it on the Yangtze or in Boston, in ten years or twenty, it will be with a rush of gladness." His academic record, in Time's phrase, was "so-so." He graduated in 1927 ranked 286th in a class of 579. At graduation he was twenty-one.
The sources examined here give little detail for the next fifteen years. Time says that "during the dead calm of the pre-World War II years he dutifully trod water in a routine variety of posts," and adds that he married, had a daughter, Patricia, and a son, Grant, and developed a golf game good enough for a ten handicap. The prewar ships and stations in which he served were not found in the sources consulted. The rank dates published by the uboat.net site place his promotion to lieutenant on 30 June 1936 and to lieutenant commander on 1 November 1941, five weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack.
His younger brother Thomas Frederick Sharp followed him to Annapolis, graduating in 1935, according to a memorial record that reproduces the 1935 Lucky Bag. The yearbook sketch of Thomas says he had spent a year at the University of Montana before the Academy, and that aviation would "claim him in the future." The brothers' father was still listed as the Fort Benton merchant.
The record places Sharp in command of the Hogan, a World War I flush-deck destroyer converted to a high-speed minesweeper (DMS-6), from 24 May 1942 to 16 January 1943. That date range comes from uboat.net, a weak source on its own, and agrees with the Naval Institute summary, which says that in this command he served on convoy duty in the western Atlantic and the Caribbean and took part in the invasion of North Africa. He was thirty-six when he took her over. The ship's official history places her with the Center Attack Group off Fedhala, Morocco, on 7–8 November 1942, where she forced the surrender of the French escort Victoria after the Frenchman fired on her and tried to ram. Time says that Sharp "picked up a commendation for combat action off Casablanca." No citation text for that commendation has been found.
He left the Hogan in January 1943. The Fletcher-class destroyer Boyd (DD-544) was commissioned at San Pedro, California, on 8 May 1943, with Lieutenant Commander Sharp in command. He was thirty-seven years old and had been commissioned for nearly sixteen years. Naval Institute records of his own recollections, in the index to his oral history, summarize what followed in that ship: escort duty out of Noumea; the Baker Island landings; the Wake Island raids; the Gilbert Islands landings; the damage from the Nauru shore batteries; the installation of a combat information center; the Battle of the Philippine Sea; the invasion of Guam; and, in the autumn of 1944, the rescue of men from the cruiser Houston. The ship's official history, in the form reproduced in Wikipedia, dates the Baker Island occupation to 1 September 1943, the Wake raid to 5–6 October, and the Gilberts landings to 19 November–8 December 1943.
The day that made his name in the Navy was 8 December 1943. Time told the story twenty-one years later, and it tells it in the voice of the man who lived it. The Boyd was part of the screen for a carrier bombardment of Nauru, the small phosphate island in the central Pacific then held by the Japanese. A fighter pilot had been shot down within point-blank range of the island's shore batteries, and the Boyd went in to pick him up. The ship's history gives the sequence: ordered to the rescue at 10:33 in the morning, she found a raft with the pilots about fifty-seven minutes later and at 11:40 pulled alongside to shield it from the guns. About two minutes after that she was hit. The first shell passed through the main deck into the forward engine room, severing a high-pressure steam line and destroying a power distribution board. The second struck inside the number one stack. Twelve men were killed and eight wounded; the ship's history says that every man in the forward engine room died.
Time says that half the ship's power was gone and that, unable to find the pilot, Sharp turned the crippled destroyer around and began what the magazine called "a nightmarish slow-motion escape through waters alive with explosions." His own explanation, in the magazine's quotation, was a piece of practical reasoning: "Knowing that the gunners would attempt to correct their fire after each miss, I decided to chase the fall of the shot." Whenever a shell burst, he turned toward the geyser. For six miles, Time says, he ran that gauntlet, and brought ship and crew into open sea. The Silver Star citation, which is the contemporary official text, is plainer. It says that "when his ship was hit and severely damaged while carrying out the hazardous task of searching for a friendly pilot during a bombardment of hostile shore positions, Captain Sharp skillfully extricated his vessel from its dangerous situation without further damage and, by efficient ship handling and the effective damage control measures taken enabled the ship to continue in the action and return to port under her own power." The Boyd went to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides for repair.
He was then thirty-seven years and eight months old. The repaired Boyd reached Pearl Harbor on 23 March 1944 and joined Task Force 58. In the ship's history the next months are a list of the great carrier operations of 1944: Hollandia, the raid on Truk, Satawan and Ponape, Saipan, the Bonins, the Battle of the Philippine Sea on 19–20 June, Guam, the Palaus and Morotai. The destroyers' work was the unglamorous part of the carrier war: screening the carriers, rescuing aircrew, going where the aviators went down. No account in Sharp's words of any of those operations was found in the sources examined here beyond what the oral-history index summarizes.
The second Silver Star, a Gold Star in lieu of a second award, covers the Boyd's part on 13 and 17 October 1944 off Formosa. The citation describes her as a screening vessel "protecting the withdrawal of two battle-damaged ships from enemy-infested waters." By his "outstanding seamanship," it says, Sharp "enabled the BOYD to perform dangerous rescues, including the transfer of personnel under unusually adverse conditions of wind and sea and hostile aerial attacks." The ships it does not name; the index to his oral history identifies the rescue of personnel from the Houston and a part in her tow. He was thirty-eight when the rescue work was done.
His command ended soon afterward. Uboat.net gives the end of his tenure in the Boyd as 10 November 1944; the index to his oral history says he was relieved of command at Guam. The Guardian's obituary credits him with two Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars for the war and says he finished it in command of destroyers in the Pacific. The Bronze Star citations and details of that last assignment were not found. Uboat.net lists his temporary rank of captain from 20 March 1945.
Time says that during the Korean War he briefly commanded a destroyer squadron and then began "a series of staff jobs"; his biography in the Military Hall of Honor records that he assisted in the planning of the Inchon landing. The Naval Institute lists his later assignments as commanding officer of the heavy cruiser Macon; Commander, Cruiser Division Three; Director of the Strategic Plans Division; Commander, Cruiser-Destroyer Force, Pacific Fleet; Commander, First Fleet; and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans and Policy during the Cuban missile crisis. He was a graduate of the Naval War College in 1950. In 1960, Time says, he was appointed a vice admiral and went to the Pentagon, where he was "a sharp-tongued perfectionist" who drove twelve-hour days and mastered the art of absorbing a mass of information and delivering it in a concise, organized briefing. On 27 September 1963 he was promoted to admiral and took command of the Pacific Fleet. On 30 June 1964, according to the index of his oral history, he relieved Admiral Harry Felt aboard the carrier Ranger as Commander in Chief, Pacific.
Time in August 1964, when he was fifty-eight, described him as five feet seven inches and 147 pounds, "as slender and hard as a torpedo," and quoted him on the Tonkin crisis: "These things are all thought out ahead of time. It is the culmination of a lot of planning, and the actual execution is fairly simple." The command he held then covered, in the magazine's phrase, more than forty percent of the earth's surface, with some 440,000 men and 400 ships.
The Guardian obituary records his private misgivings in August 1964, when the Maddox incident led President Johnson to order retaliatory air strikes: Sharp urged Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to wait for firm evidence of damage to American ships before the order was given, and held McNamara's refusal against him for the rest of his life. According to the same obituary, his stand was not revealed until 1982, when records of his exchanges with McNamara were released. He retired in July 1968, at sixty-two. In May 1969 he wrote in Reader's Digest that McNamara had "arbitrarily and consistently" disregarded his military advisers, and that the insistence on a gradual campaign "gave the enemy plenty of time to cope with our every move." In 1978 he published a book on the war, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect.
He settled in San Diego. His first wife, Patricia, died, and he married again, in 1987, to Nina Blake. The Guardian says she brought him two stepsons and survived him, and that he had a son and a daughter by his first marriage. After a fall in October 2001 his health declined, and he died at his home in San Diego on 12 December 2001, aged ninety-five. He was buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego.
His brother Thomas, the other Fort Benton boy who went into the Navy, had not come home. The memorial record for Thomas Sharp says he died as executive officer of the submarine Pickerel (SS-177), which was lost in the spring of 1943 north of Honshu; the Navy's own submarine-loss record puts the date of her loss in April 1943, and Thomas was awarded the Silver Star posthumously for the boat's first five war patrols. The boat was lost in April 1943, a month before the Boyd was commissioned.