Ships
- USS Dyson (DD-572) Captain from 1945
Vincent Patrick Healey, born in New York City in 1918, was a Naval Academy graduate of 1940 who went to the heavy cruiser Astoria as a young officer and was in her when she was sunk off Savo Island on 9 August 1942. He came out of that night with a Bronze Star with the combat "V." After the war he commanded the destroyer Dyson in the first year after the war, then built a career in ship systems, missiles and undersea warfare that took him to flag rank. He retired as a rear admiral in 1972. The record names one ship and one night; most of the rest is career.
The records give him as a native of New York, born on 13 March 1918 in the Bronx and the son of John William Healey and Katherine Clancy Healey, with at least three older brothers. Those family details come from a memorial listing rather than a document, and the more official sources say only that he was a New Yorker. He attended Fordham University before he entered the Naval Academy in 1936, so he went to Annapolis at eighteen.
The 1940 Lucky Bag gives the plainest picture of him at twenty-two. It describes "Vin" as a man with "his Irish smile, twinkling eyes, and love of pure bosh," seldom serious "and then only on the subjects of politics and religion." His classmates had dubbed him "Vociferous Vinny." The sketch calls him a fresh-air enthusiast, says hop nights would always find him at the hop "except when he's away at a track meet," and ends on what it calls the keynote of his personality, "his ability to win friends and influence people."
The track meets were real. The activity record under his name lists track for four years, with the varsity letter and the captaincy of the track team in his last year, three years of cross-country, and the presidency of the Newman Club, the Catholic midshipmen's society, in his first-class year.
The sketch is affectionate and short on facts, and it says nothing about his standing in his studies. It shows a cheerful, sociable man, and a team captain and club president in his last year; his obituary, sixty years later, describes him organizing reunions and fund-raising.
After graduation he was assigned to Astoria, a New Orleans-class heavy cruiser built at Puget Sound and based at Pearl Harbor since 1939. His obituary places him aboard her on 7 December 1941. The ship's history has her at sea that morning, about seven hundred miles west of Hawaii, in the screen of Rear Admiral John H. Newton's task force built around the carrier Lexington, steaming toward Midway with Marine aircraft for the island's garrison. The attack on Pearl Harbor cancelled that mission, and the force spent the next days searching southwest of Oahu before returning on 13 December. Astoria then escorted the abortive relief expedition toward Wake until that island fell on 23 December.
The obituary says he served in her through the Coral Sea and Midway. The history gives the outline of those months: the long cruise with Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher's task force around the carrier Yorktown from February 1942, the screen thrown around the carriers on 7 and 8 May in the Coral Sea, and, on 4 June at Midway, the barrage fired into the sea to throw up curtains of water against torpedo bombers, Fletcher's shifting of his flag to Astoria after Yorktown was bombed, and the boats she sent to take off the carrier's survivors. What Healey himself did on any of those days is not in the sources examined here.
Savo Island is the one episode the record attaches to him by name, and then only in a single line: he was a battery officer in Astoria when she was sunk. The sources do not say which battery. On the night of 8–9 August 1942, when he was twenty-four, Astoria was patrolling east of Savo Island in column behind Vincennes and Quincy, guarding the transports off Guadalcanal. Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa's seven cruisers and a destroyer came through the channel west of the island and opened on the American ships at about 0150. Astoria returned fire at once, stopped briefly because her commanding officer for a moment took the enemy for friendly ships, and resumed. She took no hits in the first four salvos. The fifth set the superstructure afire amidships; shells then wrecked her number one turret and started a fire in the hangar that lit her for the enemy. She fired twelve salvos in all. By about 0225 she had lost steering, and soon after, all power. By 0300 nearly four hundred men, about seventy of them wounded, were assembled on the forecastle.
The ship was hit at least sixty-five times. The crew fought the fires through the night with a bucket brigade and gasoline-driven hand pumps; the destroyer Bagley took off the wounded by 0445, and in the morning about 325 able-bodied men went back aboard to try to save her. The fires below decks grew, the list increased, and at about noon Captain William G. Greenman ordered the ship abandoned. She rolled over and went down at about 12:16 on 9 August. The official count was 219 missing or dead.
Healey received the Bronze Star with combat "V" for his part in that action. The obituary is the only source for this award, and the citation was not located, so the record does not say what he was credited with doing, whether at his battery in the fight or afterwards in the salvage.
The obituary then says only that he served "aboard other ships during the fights for Luzon, Iwo Jima and Japan itself"; a trade-press item from 1974 says he "saw more action in the Pacific aboard several destroyers." Neither names the ships or his billets.
Command lists have him as commanding officer of the destroyer Dyson (DD-572) from 24 September 1945 until 11 October 1945, and again from December 1945 to 19 August 1946, so that he was twenty-seven when he first took her. Dyson had left Okinawa for the United States on 10 September and reached Washington, D.C., on 17 October, where on 19 October Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal presented Destroyer Squadron 23 with the Presidential Unit Citation for its work in the Solomons. She then went to Charleston, South Carolina, where she supplied electric power to a group of decommissioned destroyers until she was placed in reserve on 31 March 1947. The record for the weeks between his two periods in command is silent. According to the memorial listing, he married Helen Marie Clarke in 1945.
The rest of his career can be given only in outline. After the war he attended the Naval Postgraduate School and took a master's degree in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he is also recorded as a graduate of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. From 1955 to 1958, a 1974 trade-press item says, he played a key part in introducing missile systems to the fleet. In 1963, as Commander, Destroyer Squadron Three, he is said to have seen action off the coast of Vietnam. His obituary adds a command of a cruiser-destroyer flotilla, without date or number, and work in antisubmarine and electronic warfare systems. As of 1 January 1971, he appears in the printed list of flag officers as a rear admiral, Director, Undersea and Strategic Warfare Development Division, on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, with the lineal number 151. He retired in 1972.
In March 1974 EDO Corporation, a College Point, New York, maker of sonar, aircraft structures and navigation gear, announced that he had joined it as general manager of its Washington office; he had been a consultant to EDO and other companies since leaving the Navy. In the 1980s he left full-time work but stayed on as a consultant. The obituary lists the National Security Industries Association, which he chaired, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Sigma Xi among his affiliations, and describes his retirement as spent organizing groups for fund-raising, for Naval Academy class reunions and for the preservation of historic churches and church property. He served on the parish council of St. Dominic's Catholic Church in Washington, belonged to Our Lady of Lourdes in Arlington, Virginia, and supported the Dominican House of Studies.
His first wife died in 1995. He died of pneumonia on 30 May 1998 at Georgetown University Hospital, Washington, aged eighty, with cancer; he lived in Arlington. He was survived by his second wife, Joan Casey Saenz Healey, by five children of his first marriage, Dominic Mark, Mary Helen, Peter Joseph, John Stephen and Jane Marie, and by five grandchildren. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, according to the memorial listing.