Ships
- USS McKee (DD-575) Captain from 4 September 1945
Victor Bernard Graff (born about 1914; died 11 January 2007) was a United States Navy officer, born in Connecticut and raised in Los Angeles, who came to the Naval Academy by way of the enlisted ranks and graduated in the class of 1938. He commanded the old destroyer Shaw, a survivor of Pearl Harbor, in the Philippines campaign, and on the night of 7–8 January 1945, off Luzon, took her in to point-blank range of a Japanese destroyer that was trying to slip out of Manila Bay; for it he received the Silver Star. After the war he commanded the destroyer McKee, retired as a captain in 1958, earned a master's degree, and finished a second career in the administration of a California community college. He died at ninety-two at Millbrae, California.
His obituary, published in the San Francisco Bay Area in January 2007, calls him "a native of Connecticut," and says that he attended the University of California at Los Angeles before the Naval Academy. The 1938 Lucky Bag gives his home as Los Angeles. The date and place of his birth were not found; the obituary gives his age at death as ninety-two, which puts his birth in 1914 or very early in 1915. His parents are not named in the sources examined here. A sister, Marion Graff, was living in Los Angeles when he died.
The Lucky Bag sketch begins with his enlistment. "VIC started his naval career at the Naval Training Station, San Diego," it says, "and after a long fought battle of over two years gained his admission to the Academy." The sketch does not say how long he served or how the appointment was finally won. The writers described him as a man who "hails from California" and was "known to possess both perseverance and humor." His hobbies were log circulation, wrestling and swimming; his weaknesses, in the yearbook's list, were "brunettes, foreign mail, aviation, and Packards." He was "equally proficient with the pen and the squilgee — to say nothing of his ability to play a violin," and took "just pride in a neat appearance." The activities line under his name records battalion soccer in his first two years, wrestling in all four, the sub squad, the Lucky Bag staff, the boat club, a Christmas committee, and a post as circulation manager of the Log. The sketch ends in a sailor's blessing: "Keep the wind aft, Vic, continue your successful voyage. You can't lose."
Graff's early ships, his duties between 1938 and 1944, and the date and circumstances of his marriage were not found in the sources examined here. His obituary says only that he was the husband for fifty-seven years of Helen Graff, who died before him.
The record of his wartime command begins in the fall of 1944. According to the destroyer's lists compiled at NavSource and reproduced at uboat.net, Lieutenant Commander Graff commanded the destroyer Shaw (DD-373) from September 1944 to May 1945, and again from June to 21 July 1945. The Shaw was a Mahan-class destroyer built at Philadelphia and commissioned in 1936. She had been in the floating dock at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 when a bomb struck her magazines and blew off her bow, and she had been rebuilt; she had since served in New Guinea, where she was damaged by dive bombers at Cape Gloucester on 26 December 1943. In late 1944 she rejoined the Seventh Amphibious Force at Leyte and escorted convoys between the Philippines and New Guinea.
The invasion of Luzon came in January 1945. The Shaw was in the escort and screening force for the assault on Lingayen Gulf, and Graff's Silver Star citation, which is the official record of what he did, is for the night of 7 January. "When an enemy destroyer attempted to attack the disposition of which his ship was a member," it reads, "Commander Graff boldly closed the hostile vessel and directed his gun batteries in delivering accurate fire which contributed to its destruction." The enemy ship was the destroyer Hinoki, which had been damaged by a torpedo on 5 January, returned to Manila, and sailed again. According to the Japanese destroyer records compiled at combinedfleet.com, she was sunk by shellfire from the American destroyers Charles Ausburne, Braine, Russell and Shaw in the outer approaches to Manila Bay, and was lost with all hands, including the commander of her destroyer division, Commander Iwagami.
That is the whole of the narrative the sources support. They do not say what Graff said on the bridge, whether he or his squadron commander gave the orders to close, how long the action lasted, or what the Shaw's men saw of the enemy ship. They do not say what he thought afterward about a fight in which, by the combined fleet's account, every man in the target died. His obituary says that the decorations of his career included the Silver Star and the Bronze Star; the Bronze Star citation was not found.
After the Luzon operations, the Shaw took part in the recapture of Manila Bay, the occupation of Palawan, and operations in the Visayas, and in early April struck an uncharted pinnacle. She left for the West Coast on 25 April and reached San Francisco on 19 May. Graff's command ended, according to the compiled lists, on 21 July 1945; she was decommissioned on 2 October 1945 and scrapped the following summer.
His next ship was the McKee (DD-575), a Fletcher-class destroyer that had spent the war with the fast carriers and ended it off the Japanese coast. He took her on 4 September 1945, two days after the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay, as a lieutenant commander, and kept her until 25 February 1946. In those months she steamed home from the Pacific, reaching Charleston, South Carolina, on 16 October, and was decommissioned there at the end of his command and placed in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet.
He stayed in the Navy for another twelve years after the war. His obituary says he retired in 1958 with the rank of captain. His postwar assignments were not found. After the Navy he took a master's degree at the University of California at Berkeley while working as an instructor at City College of San Francisco, and then, according to the same obituary, retired from the San Francisco Community College District as its Director of Facilities and Planning.
He died on 11 January 2007, at Millbrae, California, at the age of ninety-two. He was survived by a daughter, Kathleen Hutchinson, of San Bruno, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and by his sister. The obituary records a memorial service on 20 January at a chapel in Millbrae and a private inurnment at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno.