Ships
- USS Gatling (DD-671) Captain, 27 December 1944 – 26 November 1945
Commander Vincent James Meola, United States Navy, was captain of the destroyer Gatling (DD-671) from 27 December 1944 to 26 November 1945. He took her in the last winter of the Pacific War and left her after Japan had surrendered and the fleet had begun to thin out.
By the time Meola assumed command, Gatling was already a working ship of the Pacific Fleet. She was a Fletcher-class destroyer, built to run with the fast carriers: a long, narrow hull with high speed, five-inch guns, depth charges, and a heavy battery of anti-aircraft weapons. Her daily work was station-keeping, fueling at sea, searching for submarines, and putting up a wall of fire when aircraft came in low.
His tenure covered the carrier campaigns of 1945. In January the fast carrier force pushed into the South China Sea and struck Japanese shipping and airfields along the Asian coast, then turned toward the capture of Iwo Jima in February. Through the spring and early summer, Gatling operated with the forces gathered off Okinawa. Destroyers there spent weeks on the screen and on outlying stations while troops fought ashore and Japanese aircraft, including kamikaze attacks, pressed the fleet. Meola kept the ship in that fight through the long Okinawa campaign.
In July and August 1945 the same carrier force struck the Japanese home islands. Gatling remained a screening destroyer as those raids ran up to the surrender in mid-August and the formal end of hostilities in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. Meola was still her captain through the first months of peace, while warships shifted from combat steaming to occupation duty, patrol, and the long passage toward home. He left the ship on 26 November 1945.
Officers tied to Gatling in this wartime generation included Alvin Franklin Richardson and Frank L. Fullaway. Meola's own record on the ship is the captain's record: eleven months in command, from the South China Sea and Iwo Jima through Okinawa and the surrender, and on into the first weeks of the postwar navy.