Ships
- USS Colorado (BB-45) Captain from 23 August 1944 · Relieved on 2 September 1945
Walter Scott MacAulay was a captain in the United States Navy and commanding officer of the battleship USS Colorado (BB-45) from 23 August 1944 until 2 September 1945. He took the ship after she had already fought through the Central Pacific landings. In July 1944, off Tinian, Japanese shore batteries had hit her heavily, and she had gone in for repair. The year ahead of him was the work of an older battleship on the gunfire line: eight 16-inch guns, a large secondary battery, and long days answering calls from troops ashore.
In the autumn of 1944 Colorado joined the campaign to retake the Philippines. MacAulay's gunners fired on shore targets for the landings on Leyte in October. On 27 November 1944, while the ship lay in Leyte Gulf, two Japanese aircraft struck her in suicide dives. Those crashes killed 19 men and wounded 72, started fires, and tore up spaces above the armor deck. The hull and the main battery remained fit for service, and the battleship stayed with the force.
December carried her to the landings on Mindoro, where she again covered troops going ashore on a hostile coast. In January 1945 she moved north to Lingayen Gulf for the invasion of Luzon. On 9 January, with that landing under way, shellfire struck Colorado and killed and wounded more of the crew. The damage took her off the line for repair. She was back in the western Pacific in time for the next great assault.
At Okinawa in the spring of 1945, Colorado spent weeks on call for naval gunfire. Her heavy guns and secondary battery were laid on pillboxes, artillery, and defended ground as the fighting ashore dragged on. Ships on the gun line and in the anchorages lived under a steady threat from kamikaze aircraft. Under MacAulay the battleship came through that campaign and remained in the western Pacific into the summer, as the island war moved toward Japan itself.
He was relieved of command on 2 September 1945, the day Japan signed the instrument of surrender in Tokyo Bay. His tour had lasted a little more than a year. It covered the bombardments that supported the landings on Leyte, Mindoro, Luzon, and Okinawa, and it included the aircraft crashes and the shellfire that cost his crew heavy casualties. Officers who served with him on Colorado included William Alexander Ancrum. MacAulay left the ship at the formal end of the war, after bringing her through the last amphibious battles of the Pacific.