Ships
- USS Hart (DD-594) Captain from 21 March 1944
The name the Navy printed, in every register opened for this essay, is Walter Dan Coleman, not Walter Daniel. No register line read here spells out Daniel.
He is not Cole, W. M. The surname is different. On 1 June 1940 the Navy Directory lists Cole, William M., as a lieutenant commander commanding USS Barry, and lists Coleman, Walter D., separately, a lieutenant under instruction at the Navy Yard, Washington. He is not John Plunkett Cole. He is not his classmate Herbert McClellan Coleman, who on 1 January 1933 was an ensign in Augusta while Walter Dan Coleman was an ensign in Tennessee. He is not William Bryan Coleman, a commander in Bushnell in June 1940 and in Portland in April 1941, later carried in the 1 January 1952 Register as a retired rear admiral. He is not David B. Coleman of Helm, not Garrett S. Coleman, not Wilson M. Coleman, not James P. Coleman, and not Walter Harold Coleman, all of whom stand as separate names in the same directories and registers. He is not the Walter Daniel Coleman Jr. of Itasca, Texas, and Bartlesville, Oklahoma, born in 1898, who appears in a public family tree and has nothing to do with this Academy class.
What the registers do fix is a line officer of the Naval Academy class of 1932, born in Illinois on 25 March 1910, appointed from Illinois, commissioned ensign on 2 June 1932, and the commander the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships names in command of Hart when that destroyer was commissioned at Puget Sound on 4 November 1944.
Origins
The birth date is the one the registers repeat, and the state comes with it. In the Register printed in 1941, whose signal numbers were effective from 1 January through 31 December 1942, the birth-and-entry columns that match his place in the lieutenants’ list read 25 March 1910, Illinois, entry 18 June 1928, appointed from Illinois. The Register of 1 July 1943 prints the same pair on his lieutenant commanders’ line, signal in that book falling just after Halford A. Knoertzer: 25 March 1910 and 18 June 1928. The Registers of 1 January 1944 and 1 January 1945 print them again. The Registers of 1 January 1956, 1957, and 1958 still print 25 March 1910 beside COLEMAN WALTER DAN, year group 32. None of those lines names a town.
The town is the Lucky Bag of 1932. Under the name Walter Dan Coleman, nicknames “Walt” and “Wally,” the class book prints “Lincoln, Illinois,” and the sketch says he arrived at the Administration Building “from the plains of Illinois.” That is a midshipman’s home as his classmates recorded it. It is not a birth certificate, and it is not what a Navy Register calls a place of birth. A compiled officer page on the web adds Logan County to Lincoln and gives a death in Palm Beach County, Florida, on 10 December 1983. The county and the death were not found in a register, a yearbook, or a newspaper that was opened. They are not used here as facts.
No father, no mother, no brothers or sisters. No wife and no children turned up in a source that was read. The blank is a blank. It is not a finding that he had no family.
He was eighteen when he entered the Naval Academy on 18 June 1928. The registers do not print the age. From 25 March 1910 to 18 June 1928 is the arithmetic. The class footnote in the 1941-imprint register, set beside the men who entered in June 1928, says they were commissioned ensign on 2 June 1932. The Register of 1 January 1933 lists him as an ensign, signal 5667, and the date-of-rank column on that page is a ditto from signal 5616, which the book prints as 2 June 1932. No officer between those signal numbers breaks the ditto with another date.
Formation
The Lucky Bag is the only portrait of him before the fleet, and it should be read as a yearbook, not as a fitness report.
Classmates remembered a boy for whom the Academy was the thing he had wanted. The sketch says that not long after he arrived he was already “doing his bit to help the Academy,” that his plebe-summer track was “nothing short of marvellous,” and that “three firsts every Saturday didn’t seem to be the least bit difficult.” It says he won his plebe numerals on the football field, that studies were “hurdled with as much ease as those in the track,” and that he became one of the most popular men in the class. The closing line calls him “athlete, scholar, Beau Brummel, popular, all in one.” Those are the adjectives a Lucky Bag spends freely. They are evidence of how the class chose to remember him, not of grades, and no class standing was retrieved.
Two later pages in the same book are more specific, and they name him. The account of the 1931 track season says Wally Coleman “was handicapped all season by the slow mending of his broken leg, but turned in some good performances in the 220.” He is on the 1931 squad list. The cheerleaders’ page names him as one of the goat-keepers, with “Red” Quirk, and wonders in the yearbook’s usual voice whether it was the goat or “Wally” Coleman and Quirk who drew the crowd. The credit line printed under his own sketch adds football “NA,” track “N” with a star, plebe basketball, goatkeeper, the Hop Committee, and “2 P. O.” Goatkeeper is confirmed by the page that uses his name. The football prose of his own sketch claims plebe numerals, not a varsity season. The “NA” and the plebe-basketball credit sit in a two-column yearbook, where a credit line can drift; they are not narrated here as a second athletic career.
What the Academy gave him, on the evidence of the later registers, was a line officer’s postgraduate trail rather than a story of early command. By the Register of 1 January 1940 his qualification numbers were 18 and 18-a: the Naval War College correspondence course in strategy and tactics, and the correspondence course in international law. By the Register of 1 July 1942 the numbers were 18, 18-a, and 26. Number 26 is the Navy’s mark for a completed postgraduate course in ordnance engineering, general. The shore stations that bracket that course are in the directories and the 1940 register, not in a memoir.
On 1 January 1933 he was an ensign in Tennessee. The duty column on that page of the register is a column of ships — Colorado, Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, Tennessee, Raleigh, Trenton, California — and his ship is Tennessee. The book does not give his billet. It does not say when he reported or when he left. It says that on the first day of 1933 Ensign Walter Dan Coleman was on board.
The next ship is missing. The register whose signal numbers covered calendar year 1942, and which still lists him as a lieutenant, gives two dates and two sea-service figures and no hull. The column headed expiration of his last cruise or tour of sea service reads June 1938. The column headed date of present shore duty, leave, or commencement of cruise reads 21 October 1940. Sea service in the rank of lieutenant, and on the promotion list for that rank, is 0 years and 0 months. Total sea service is 6 years and 0 months. Those figures are not a list of ships. They do say that when that book was compiled he had not yet been to sea as a lieutenant, and that the sea time the Navy was counting for him had closed, on the face of the column, in June 1938. Six years is also the span from his commissioning in June 1932 to June 1938. The register’s “total sea service” for an Academy graduate can include midshipman cruises, so the arithmetic is not turned here into a claim that he never left the deck between those Junes. The ships of 1933 to 1938, other than Tennessee on New Year’s Day 1933, were not found.
The shore years that follow are the ones the books name. On 1 January 1940 he was a lieutenant, date of rank 1 August 1939. That date is a ditto. On the lieutenants’ page, Sheldon Willis Brown, signal 4308, is printed “1 Aug. 39,” and every officer from Brown through Coleman, signal 4330, is “do.” His station on that page is Navy Yard, Washington, under instruction. The Navy Directory of 1 June 1940 says the same thing in the alphabetical list: Coleman, Walter D., lieutenant, under instruction, Navy Yard, Washington, D.C. On 1 April 1941 the directory has moved him: lieutenant, Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia. The 21 October 1940 date in the later register is the date that book gives for the shore duty he was then on. The register extract does not print the station name beside it. Dahlgren is the directory’s station on 1 April 1941, not a sentence that says he reported there on 21 October. What can be said is the sequence: under instruction at the Washington yard on the first day of 1940 and still on 1 June 1940; a new shore-duty date of 21 October 1940 in the register compiled after the summer of 1941; and, by 1 April 1941, the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren. The directory puts him there. It does not say what he did on the range.
He was still a lieutenant in that 1941-imprint register, courses 18, 18-a, and 26 already beside his name, so the ordnance course was complete while he was still at Dahlgren or just after the yard. The Register of 1 July 1942 lists him among lieutenant commanders. The temporary-rank date is again a ditto, and this one is secure. Sheldon Willis Brown, signal 3986, is printed 15 June 1942, permanent rank lieutenant, and the officers after him through Coleman, signal 4011, do not break the dittos. Permanent rank on that line is lieutenant. The Register of 1 July 1943 keeps him a lieutenant commander, temporary rank still dittoed to 15 June 1942, permanent rank lieutenant. In that book the permanent date, which had opened the section at 1 July 1939, is reset at Robert Lloyd Evans to 1 August 1939, and Coleman’s line dittos the reset. The two registers agree with the 1 January 1940 book: he became a lieutenant on 1 August 1939. He became a temporary lieutenant commander on 15 June 1942.
War years as lived
The war that can be documented for him is mostly a shore war, and then one day on a new destroyer’s quarterdeck. The orders between Dahlgren and that day were not found.
On 1 July 1943 he is still only a lieutenant commander in the register, with the ordnance qualification and the two War College correspondence courses, born in Illinois, entered in 1928. The book does not print a ship. On 1 January 1944 and again on 1 January 1945 he is among commanders. In the 1944 volume the commanders’ block that contains him opens with a temporary rank of 1 November 1942, permanent rank lieutenant, and his own line reads “do” for the temporary date. The optical text of that page is less tidy than the 1942 and 1943 volumes, but no different temporary date is printed between the head of the block and his name. The 1 January 1945 Register still lists him a commander, the same qualifications, the same birth and entry. Neither wartime register, in the text that was read, names his duty station. From the summer of 1942 until the autumn of 1944, the Navy’s own annual books say what rank he held and not where he stood.
The ship arrives in one sentence of the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. The second Hart (DD-594), a Fletcher-class destroyer, had been designated Mansfield. She was renamed Hart on 21 March 1944, launched at the Puget Sound Navy Yard on 25 September 1944, sponsored by Mrs. Emma Hart — the mother of the man for whom the ship was named, not a Coleman — and commissioned on 4 November 1944, Commander W. D. Coleman in command. That is the only place DANFS uses his name. The encyclopedia stub’s date, 21 March 1944, is the day the hull was renamed, six months before she was launched and more than seven months before she was commissioned. Compiled lists of commanding officers, the sort NavSource prints with thanks to Wolfgang Hechler and Ron Reeves, and the sort uboat.net repeats, start his command on that rename day and run it through her decommissioning on 31 May 1946. A prospective commanding officer can be ordered to a building yard long before commission. Those lists are not a set of orders, and 21 March is not narrated here as the day he took a ship to sea.
What 4 November 1944 does mean is plain enough. He was thirty-four. He had been an ensign in Tennessee at the start of 1933, ashore from the late 1930s through the proving ground, a lieutenant commander since June 1942, a commander since the temporary date the 1944 register dittos to November 1942, and the book now names him as the first commanding officer of a new fleet destroyer on Puget Sound, with the war in the Pacific still open. DANFS then follows the ship — shakedown, Okinawa, the Borneo landings, occupation duty in Korea and on the China coast, decommissioning on 31 May 1946, two battle stars — and never says his name again. It never names a relief either. A ship’s history with one captain printed at the commissioning and none printed afterward is not the same thing as a log that keeps him on the bridge. Those months are not written here as his cruise. The lived war, on the sources that attach his name to a date, ends on the commissioning day at Puget Sound. Everything between Dahlgren and that day is a blank of orders. Everything after it is a ship’s story that may be his and may not.
There is no wartime citation in his name in the sources that were read. No action report signed by him was found. No letter, no newspaper account of the commissioning, no remark of his to a wardroom was found. The character under pressure that the yearbook was willing to invent in 1932 — the ease, the popularity, the Beau Brummel — has no wartime document to test it against. The nearest thing to a recorded strain before the war is the broken leg that slowed him through the 1931 track season and did not take him out of the 220. That is a midshipman’s injury, not a battle.
Cost
The cost that can be counted is the one the registers imply by what they do not list, and it is not a casualty figure.
He missed the sea as a lieutenant. The book compiled after the summer of 1941 gives him no sea service in that rank at all, and it closes his last sea tour in June 1938, more than three years before Pearl Harbor. Other men of the class of 1932 were already on destroyers and carriers and battleships when the war opened. He was at a proving ground. The directory does not say that he was the officer who fired the guns. It does say that he was not at sea. From June 1942 to November 1944 the registers promote him and do not place him. If he had a ship, or a staff, or a bureau desk, in those twenty-eight months, it is not in a page that was read. He received a command, when a command is finally named, of a destroyer that had not yet been in battle, late enough that her whole fighting life would fit into 1945.
No man is recorded dead under his orders, because no action in his name was found. That absence is not a claim that Hart lost nobody while he might have had her. It is a claim that this essay will not borrow the ship’s dead, if she had them, until a log or a report puts him on board. DANFS, in the text used here, does not give a casualty total for Hart at all.
The Legion of Merit comes later, and it is a staff decoration, not a battle star of his own. Hall of Valor, citing All Hands for November 1951 and marking the entry “citation needed,” summarizes an award to Captain Walter Dan Coleman as chief of staff to Commander Service Squadron Three, for support of naval vessels operating against enemy forces in the Korean area from 15 July 1950 to 28 February 1951. The magazine page was not opened. The synopsis is not a citation read in full. It is the only wartime-or-after decoration attached to his name in a source that was found, and it belongs to Korea, not to 1944.
After
The registers pick him up again as a captain, and they do not say when he left the Navy.
The Registers of 1 January 1956, 1 January 1957, and 1 January 1958 list COLEMAN WALTER DAN as a captain, line, designator 1100, date of present rank 1 January 1951, born 25 March 1910, year group 1932. He is in the active captains’ run in those books, not in a retired list that was seen. If that date of rank is right, he was a captain through the last two months of the staff tour the Legion of Merit synopsis describes, and a commander at its start, unless the synopsis’s “captain” is the rank at the time of the award rather than the rank on 15 July 1950. Hall of Valor also says he retired as a captain. It does not give the day.
The Register of 1 January 1952, in the active-list text as optically read, still styles him and his classmates commander, with 1 January 1951 in the date field. An alphabetical stretch of the same digitized volume styles him captain, designator 1100, class year 1932, and does not mark him retired. Both readings cannot be the rank he held on one day. The later registers, 1956 through 1958, are the clearer books, and they say captain from 1 January 1951. The conflict is left in the open.
Nothing after the 1958 register was found in a book that was read. No retirement date, no tombstone promotion, no second career, no obituary, no widow, no children. A web compilation gives his death as 10 December 1983 in Palm Beach County, Florida, at seventy-three. That page does not cite a certificate or a newspaper. It is recorded in the gaps, not in this paragraph, as a fact. What survived, on the evidence in hand, is the paper: an Illinois appointment, a class of 1932, an ensign’s billet in Tennessee at the start of 1933, an ordnance education, a proving-ground lieutenant’s duty in the spring of 1941, a commander’s name on a new destroyer on 4 November 1944, a captain’s date of rank on 1 January 1951, and a staff Legion of Merit for the first Korean winter, known only as a synopsis.