Ships
- USS Fletcher (DD-445) Captain from 30 June 1942
The Navy's own books expand the initials. He is William Marchant Cole, United States Naval Academy class of 1924, the lieutenant commander who commissioned Fletcher, the commander the Navy Cross citation names for the night of 12–13 November 1942, and the captain who signed Destroyer Squadron Five's report of the Nasugbu landing in February 1945. He is not Walter Daniel Coleman, the next name on the list. He is not Cyrus Willard Cole, not William Carey Cole, and not the several other William Coles who sit near him in the registers. What follows is the life the registers, the Navy Directory, the Lucky Bag, the ship's history, the Guadalcanal combat narrative, a squadron action report, a museum catalogue, and his obituary will support. Where they stop, the blank is marked.
Origins
He was born on 10 January 1903. That date is in the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of 1 July 1945, in the date-of-birth column beside William Marchant Cole, signal number 1362, and it is repeated on the active list of 1 January 1952 and on the retired list of 1 January 1956. The Virginian-Pilot obituary of 25 July 1994 says he was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. The 1924 Lucky Bag heads his page "William Marchant Cole" and "Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," and calls him "Bill." Chester is the birthplace the obituary gives. Philadelphia is the home the yearbook gives. The two are not the same fact, and neither source explains the other.
The yearbook's sketch is classmate comedy, written to be clever, and it is not a log. It says that when he arrived he was a scrawny youth "with no habits, evil or otherwise," and that plebe summer and the cruise changed that. It gives him class track, class swimming, numerals, and class soccer. The jokes that follow, a love affair on youngster leave that an "artistic temperament" ended, a room burned by a cigarette down to a charred slide rule and the remains of a pen, a "paint jag" in the double bottoms, and a punt started down the Tagus for home, are the ordinary midshipman burlesque. They are not used here as things that happened.
Nothing in the registers names a father or a mother. The obituary names one sibling who outlived him, a sister, Elizabeth C. Smith. It does not say whether she was older or younger, or where she lived. No childhood address beyond Chester and the Academy's Philadelphia has turned up.
Formation
The Register of 1 July 1945 gives his date of entry as 9 June 1920, carried in the same column pattern as the class around him. That is the ordinary day a midshipman of the class of 1924 was admitted. The Register of 1 January 1952, in the column headed date of rank of first commission, gives 5 June 1924. The Register of 1 January 1925 lists him as an ensign, signal number 4463, with 28 June 1924 printed beside the name in a column the optical text does not label cleanly. Five June 1924 is the date used here for the commission, because the 1952 book labels it. The June 28 figure is left as an unlabeled neighbor, not as a second commissioning.
On 1 October 1925 the Navy Directory has Ensign William M. Cole on the destroyer Shirk. On 1 April 1928 he is a lieutenant (junior grade) on the destroyer Mullany. The day he left the ensign's grade sits between those two directories. No register read for this essay prints that day.
On 1 July 1930 the Directory has him a lieutenant (junior grade), "instrn, Columbia University, New York, N.Y." In these directories the same abbreviation is used for an instructor. It is also the sort of line the books used for an officer under instruction, and the word "under" is not in the line as the optical text recovered it. What the later registers do say is that he completed the postgraduate course in mechanical engineering. That is course code 22 in the key of the 1 July 1945 Register, and code 22 is the qualification printed beside his name on the lieutenant commanders' list of 1 July 1942 and again on the captains' list of 1 July 1945. Columbia in 1930 and a completed course in mechanical engineering are the two halves of one ordinary Navy education. The directory does not say which classroom, or the day he finished.
By 1 January 1932 he was back in destroyers: lieutenant (junior grade), John D. Edwards. He is still on her on 1 April 1932. On 1 July 1934 the Directory has promoted him in place. He is a lieutenant, still on John D. Edwards. The day he made lieutenant falls between April 1932 and July 1934. It is not printed in the books read here.
On 1 January 1938, 1 July 1938, and 1 January 1939 the Directory has Lieutenant William M. Cole on the cruiser Philadelphia. The Register of 1 July 1942, in the permanent-status column, carries "lieutenant commander" and "1 July 38" down a long block of officers by ditto, and William Marchant Cole is inside that block. The directories of the same day and of the following January still call him a lieutenant. The ditto is not trusted for the day. What is trusted is the next directory that changes the rank. On 1 June 1940 he is a lieutenant commander, commanding Barry.
Barry is the first ship the Directory says he commanded. It does not say when he took her, or when he left her. A compiled list of her captains runs him from 1 May 1939 to 15 February 1941. Those days were not found in a log or a directory, and they are not used as dates. The brackets that are used are the directories themselves. He is in command on 1 June 1940. On 1 April 1941 he is a lieutenant commander at the Naval Research Laboratory, Anacostia Station, Washington, D.C. Between a destroyer's bridge and a laboratory on the Anacostia, the paper is silent about the orders.
The Navy Directory stopped. From 1 April 1941 until Fletcher commissioned, no station for him was found.
War years as lived
Fletcher (DD-445) was launched on 3 May 1942 at the Federal yard in Kearny, New Jersey, sponsored by the widow of Admiral Frank Friday Fletcher, and commissioned on 30 June 1942. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships says Lieutenant Commander W. M. Cole was in command. The plank-owner roster kept by the ship's reunion association names Lieutenant Commander William M. Cole as commanding officer and Lieutenant Commander J. C. Wylie as executive officer, with the fitting-out crew photographed at Kearny. The Register of 1 July 1942, the day after the commissioning, still has William Marchant Cole on the lieutenant commanders' list. He took a new destroyer, the name ship of a new class, as a lieutenant commander.
The combat narrative of the Guadalcanal battle, written for the Office of Naval Intelligence and published in 1944, styles him Commander William M. Cole. So does the Navy Cross citation. The temporary promotion to commander therefore fell between the 1 July 1942 register and the November battle. The day was not found in a register read for this essay. A secondary commanders' list puts it on 17 July 1942. That day is inside the window and is not confirmed here.
DANFS sends the ship, not the man, across the Pacific: Fletcher arrived at Nouméa on 5 October 1942 from the east coast and went onto escort and patrol in the Guadalcanal operation, bombarding Lunga Point on 30 October. She sailed from Espiritu Santo on 9 November to cover a reinforcement landing. On 12 November she was in the fight that drove a heavy air attack off the transports. The ship's history says she splashed several aircraft. The combat narrative, which is more precise and less generous, says Fletcher alone maintained that she had positively shot down five planes and assisted in three. No sentence in either account says what Cole saw, or what order he gave, during that afternoon. He is named when the narrative lists the force. Fletcher was one of four destroyers under Captain Robert G. Tobin, Commander Destroyer Squadron Twelve, in Rear Admiral Norman Scott's Espiritu Santo group, with Aaron Ward, Lardner, and McCalla.
That night the transports went out Lengo Channel. The combatant column, under Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan in San Francisco, with Scott in Atlanta, came back in. At midnight, Friday the 13th, thirteen ships entered Lengo Channel at 18 knots: Cushing, Laffey, Sterett, O'Bannon, Atlanta, San Francisco, Portland, Helena, Juneau, Aaron Ward, Barton, Monssen, and Fletcher last. The moon had set. The sky was overcast. The sea was calm. Only Portland, Helena, Juneau, O'Bannon, and Fletcher had SG radar. The flagship did not. Helena made the first radar contact, three groups, and the report was slow getting to Callaghan. The narrative says the picture was not clear on the flagship, that the TBS became chaotic, and that the column came apart as ships sheered to avoid one another. The Japanese illuminated from both sides at 0148. Callaghan ordered odd ships to fire to starboard and even ships to port. The order was not literally followed. A free-for-all began at ranges of a few thousand yards, in a force the narrative judges outnumbered and outclassed, against an enemy that had come to bombard the island and was shooting bombardment ammunition.
Fletcher, at the rear, was one of the ships that opened on the illuminating vessels to port. The narrative says her fire, with Helena and Barton, went into a cruiser that burst into flames, and that she then shifted to the next ship in line, which she reported as a Natori- or Tenryu-class light cruiser. When Callaghan ordered "cease firing, our ships," Fletcher was one of the ships that obeyed, with Helena, O'Bannon, and Portland. She reopened on a cruiser astern of her original target. Partway through the melee the narrative's tally of ships not yet hit is short: Aaron Ward, Monssen, and Fletcher. Aaron Ward and Monssen did not stay on that list. Cushing and Laffey were gone or going. Barton had broken in two. Atlanta was burning and had lost Scott. San Francisco had lost Callaghan and her captain. Portland and Juneau had been torpedoed.
At 0205 Fletcher turned south at 35 knots to work ahead of a heavy cruiser the narrative calls a Maya, steaming south at 20 knots. She drew up to about 6,000 yards on the target's starboard bow. At 0221 the cruiser had slowed and was firing at ships to the north that may have been Japanese. Fletcher came left, slowed to 15 knots, and fired five torpedoes set to run at 36 knots. Six minutes later there were two or three explosions at the target, then heavier detonations and flames. The narrative says that twenty or thirty minutes later the cruiser blew up and disintegrated, and that a footnote allows this may not have been the same ship. It was the last episode of the action. At 0226 Helena ordered ships to form on her. Fletcher joined Helena and the crippled San Francisco, and the three stood out Sealark Channel. Later they fell in with Juneau.
The Navy Cross citation, as printed from Bureau of Naval Personnel Information Bulletin No. 312 of March 1943, is the Navy's judgment of that night and not a description of it. It says the President took pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Commander William M. Cole for extraordinary heroism as commanding officer of Fletcher in an engagement with Japanese naval forces near Savo Island on the night of 12–13 November 1942; that the force to which he was attached engaged at close quarters and defeated a superior enemy force; and that by "indomitable fighting spirit, expert seamanship, and gallant devotion to duty" he contributed largely to the success of the battle. The Register of 1 July 1945 puts "(B)" after his name. In that book's key, "(B)" means awarded the Navy Cross. The obituary repeats the award for combat in the South Pacific as commanding officer of Fletcher. The citation does not mention the five torpedoes, the cease-fire, or the radar. It does not say whether anyone on Fletcher was killed.
Eleven nights later the same ship was in another night action, off Tassafaronga. DANFS says she sortied on 30 November with cruisers and destroyers, led the force through Lengo Channel, made the first radar contact off Tassafaronga Point just before midnight, and afterward rescued survivors of Northampton, using cork-floated cargo nets to take them from the water in groups. The history does not name the commanding officer in that paragraph. The reunion association's list of Fletcher's captains runs Cole from 30 June 1942 to 11 December 1942, and the same dates appear on an unsourced commanders' list. If those dates are right, Tassafaronga and the rescue were his. They were not confirmed here from a deck log or a register, and the cruise is not told as if they had been. The number of men taken from the water is not in DANFS. It is not stated here.
The same reunion list gives Lieutenant Commander Frank L. Johnson as the next commanding officer, from 11 December 1942. Everything DANFS tells of Fletcher after that December, the Solomons patrols, the claimed submarine, the Russell Islands, Munda, and the long run west to the Philippines, belongs to other captains unless a log puts Cole back aboard. No such log was found. His own name does not reappear in the sources read here until 1944, and then on a different ship.
On 6 December 1944 Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden wrote a one-page letter to Captain William M. Cole. The Imperial War Museum's catalogue describes it. Lumsden thanks him for a trip in Flusser during the Ormoc Bay landings, as an observer and as Churchill's personal representative. Lumsden calls the trip an adventure and one of his most interesting and instructive experiences. The catalogue says Cole was commander of Destroyer Squadron Five, with Flusser as flagship, and that Cole later wrote on the letter that Lumsden was killed in a kamikaze attack exactly one month after writing it. The letter itself was not read. The catalogue is the source for his being a captain, a squadron commander, and embarked in Flusser at Ormoc in the first days of December 1944. It is not a source for what the squadron did on the nights Mahan and Reid were lost.
He was still Commander Destroyer Squadron Five on 7 February 1945, when he signed the squadron's action report of the assault landing at Nasugbu, Luzon, 27 January to 2 February. The report used here is a transcription of a declassified National Archives document, file FC4-5/A16-3 serial 012, from the Commander Destroyer Squadron Five, who was also Commander Task Unit 78.2.8, to the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet. The signature at the foot is "W. M. COLE." The original image was not inspected. The transcription is detailed and internally consistent, and it is treated as his report, with that limit stated.
The unit's mission was to screen the troop and cargo ships of Task Group 78.2 from Leyte to Nasugbu and to give naval gunfire support for the landing of the 11th Airborne Division. Flusser wore the flag. With her in the screen at one time or another were Shaw, Conyngham, Claxton, Russell, Saufley, the destroyer escorts Lough, Tinsman, and Richard W. Suesens, and small craft. The passage out was quiet. No enemy contact. On the morning of 31 January the fire-support ships opened on schedule at 0715 and ceased at 0812. The first wave landed at 0818. No return fire. Cole's report says that because there were no fixed defenses and no opposition, the effect of the bombardment could not be judged, and that the targets were well covered anyway. Flusser expended 415 rounds of 5-inch antiaircraft common. It was, he wrote, a formation, screening, and fire-support job "more or less routine."
The night was not. Bright moonlight, a smooth sea, light airs. The screen was set on an arc of five miles centered on Nasugbu. Just before 2300 Lough reported many small boats. PC-1129 reported several close aboard and then went silent. Lough identified them as suicide craft and opened fire. Cole sent Tinsman, Claxton, and Flusser in. Lough reported twenty-five to thirty "Q" boats. Flusser and Claxton illuminated with star shell from the north and engaged, with automatic weapons, the few boats that got through to them. Lough and Tinsman fought the mass of them farther south. About 0030 the contacts were gone. Lough picked up PC-1129's survivors: seven officers and fifty-six enlisted men, fourteen of them wounded, one man missing. Cole judged that the patrol craft had been sunk by depth charges placed close aboard by the boats. He estimated about six of the boats destroyed. None, he wrote, got past San Diego Point.
His comments are the voice of a squadron commander who had just watched a new weapon and was writing it down for the next man. The boats were not picked up by any radar. In that moonlight they could be seen with binoculars at about a thousand yards, and the first thing seen was the bow wave, "giving the appearance of a ski-board." He put their speed at ten to fifteen knots. He thought they came in column, then split to surround a ship in groups of four to six, and that their armament was principally depth charges, so that they had to come practically alongside. At least one torpedo seemed to have been fired. Main-battery guns could not hold them while the ships maneuvered. The automatic-weapon pointers were blinded by their own tracers. Kills, he wrote, could not be expected beyond about a hundred yards, and some boats were destroyed at twenty-five. To stand off and shoot at long range would let them through. They had to be closely engaged.
The next night the same screen sank two motor torpedo boats that turned out to be American, MTB-77 and MTB-79. Cole's paragraph does not dodge it. "The sinking of two of our own MTB's on the night of 1–2 February was most unfortunate, but from the viewpoint of the OTC and the screening vessels, entirely justifiable." He lists what was missing: no visual challenge answered, no IFF, no voice radio, no pyrotechnics. Lough and the screen commander had both questioned whether the boats might be friendly. Thirty minutes passed between first contact and the first hit. He thought a plain gesture would have stopped the firing, and he recommended that the motor-torpedo-boat crews be impressed with recognition pyrotechnics as a last resort. He gave the aggressive work to Lough, called Conyngham skillful in the second fight, and said Tinsman, Claxton, and Flusser had given capable support. The morning after the "Q"-boat fight, the report records one further act of his flagship. At 0755 Flusser found a Japanese survivor and shot him after he steadfastly refused to be picked up.
That is the last operation, in the sources read here, that has his signature on it. The squadron's later landings, in the southern Philippines and at Balikpapan, are in the squadron's compiled history. They are not in a report signed by him. They are not told as his.
Cost
The Friday-the-thirteenth column paid in ships and in admirals. Cole's destroyer, last in line and one of the few with a picture from the new radar, came out of the narrative still able to steam, to fire five torpedoes at a chosen cruiser, and to stand out with the survivors. The citation turns that into heroism and seamanship. The narrative turns it into a rear-ship fight in a melee nobody fully controlled: obey the cease-fire, open again when the target was clear, then go hunting on the far side of the action when the column no longer existed. What it cost the men on the ships ahead of him is written in the losses of Atlanta, Barton, Cushing, Laffey, Juneau, and the flag bridge of San Francisco. What it cost the men on Fletcher is not in the combat narrative and not in the citation. A modern Navy historical essay gives her no dead and no wounded in that battle and adds a story that Cole, whom it calls a member of the class of 1913, took the number thirteen as a good omen. The class year is wrong. He was class of 1924. The casualty figure and the omen are not used.
Ormoc, as the museum catalogue has it, cost him a passenger. He kept Lumsden's thank-you note and wrote on it that the general was killed by a kamikaze a month later. The catalogue does not quote the sentence. It does not say what Cole thought.
Nasugbu cost a patrol craft and seventy-odd of her people wounded or missing, and it cost two American motor torpedo boats sunk by the screen he commanded. He called that sinking unfortunate and, from where he sat, justifiable, and he put the failure on recognition, not on a desire to hide it. The same morning his flagship shot a man in the water who would not come aboard. The report states it in one line, in the chronology, with no further comment. That line is his, because he signed the report. It is not explained.
The Register of 1 July 1945 gives him the Navy Cross and no other decoration symbol. A modern medal compilation says he also received the Legion of Merit as commander of a task unit in the Southwest Pacific on 4–5 December 1944 and at Leyte on 7 December, and it marks the citation "needed." The July 1945 register, which uses "(D)" for the Legion of Merit and prints it freely on the officers around him, does not print it on Cole. The award is not treated as fact.
After
The temporary captain's date in the 1 July 1945 register is 1 June 1943, dittoed down the captains' block from an officer whose date is printed in full. The Register of 1 January 1952 is plainer. On the captains' lineal list his permanent rank is captain, and the date of present rank is 1 June 1943. The wartime register had left his permanent status behind, at lieutenant commander, while he wore the temporary rank. By 1952 the permanent rank had caught up, and the date had not changed.
No directory and no register read here says what billet he held between Nasugbu and that 1952 list. The obituary's summary is the only postwar job description from his lifetime: destroyers, cruisers, and shore stations, across a thirty-year career. It does not name a ship or a desk after Fletcher and, by silence, does not name the squadron either.
He retired in July 1954. The Register of 1 January 1956 carries William Marchant Cole on the retired list, in the temporary-disability section, as a rear admiral, retired July 1954, born 10 January 1903. The date-of-rank column on that line is still 1 June 1943, the captain's date. The obituary calls him Rear Admiral and says he had lived at Virginia Beach, first on 48th Street and then on 72nd Street, since retiring in 1954. It does not say why the retirement was put on the temporary-disability list, and the reason is not guessed.
For fifteen years after the Navy he managed the Norfolk Naval Air Station branch of Seaboard Citizens National Bank, later Crestar. The obituary says he enjoyed the work. It does not say when he stopped.
He died on 21 July 1994, at ninety-one, at his residence at Westminster-Canterbury on Shore Drive in Virginia Beach. He was the widower of Emily L. Cole. His wife at his death was Harriet M. Cole. The obituary does not give a maiden name for either woman, or a wedding date, or say which marriage produced the son. The son and daughter-in-law are William M. Cole II and Jane B. Cole. The grandchildren named are William M. Cole III, Laura C. Hedrick and her husband Steven B. Hedrick, Susan S. Lawrence, and Margaret C. Frankovich. The great-grandchildren named are Steven, Robert, and Tyler Hedrick. A memorial service was set for 10:30 in the morning on Tuesday, 26 July 1994, at the Westminster-Canterbury chapel, by the Reverend David Humphreys. Burial was set for 11 in the morning on Thursday, 28 July, at Arlington National Cemetery. The family asked that memorial gifts go to the National Parkinson's Foundation. The obituary does not say that he had Parkinson's disease. The request is not turned into a diagnosis.
The Register of 1 January 1958 contains an officer named William Marchant Cole II. The columns around that name did not read cleanly enough to give him a rank or a ship. He is not folded into his father's career.