Ships
- USS Langley (CVL-27) Captain from 31 August 1943 · Relieved on 27 September 1944
Wallace Myron Dillon was born on 18 July 1895 and graduated from the Naval Academy with the Class of 1918. His yearbook photograph shows the cauliflower ear of a wrestler. He was designated Naval Aviator No. 2946 in 1921.
He set firsts for naval aviation between the wars. On 2 May 1924 he piloted a DT torpedo plane, carrying a dummy torpedo, that was catapulted from the first carrier Langley at anchor in Pensacola Bay. In 1926 he was a lead officer of the Alaskan Aerial Survey Expedition, which photographed some 40,000 square miles of the southeast Alaska coast, and he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. In 1927 he was executive officer of Fighting Squadron Five at Norfolk, and in 1929 he was flying Boeing F3B-1 fighters out of San Diego.
In World War II, as a captain, he commanded the new light carrier Langley (CVL-27), the second ship of the name. He won the Legion of Merit for her operations in the western Pacific in 1944. A second Legion of Merit followed in July 1945 for keeping the Okinawa airfields operating as Commander, Naval Air Bases, Okinawa.
He retired as a rear admiral in 1946. In the late 1940s he married Dorothy Smith (1908–2010). He died on 4 April 1965 and is buried at Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida.