Ships
- USS Pensacola (CA-24) Captain, 19 May 1944 – February 1946
Willard John Suits commanded the heavy cruiser Pensacola in the last year and a half of the Pacific war. He took her on 19 May 1944, already a veteran ship with a long record in the early carrier raids, the Coral Sea and Midway, the Guadalcanal campaign, and the night action off Tassafaronga, where she had been badly damaged and then rebuilt. From the spring of 1944 until February 1946 he was her captain.
Through the summer of 1944 Pensacola worked with the amphibious fire-support forces in the Marianas. She bombarded beaches and inland positions at Saipan in June, then shifted her guns to Tinian and Guam as those islands were taken in July and August. The cruiser’s role was close support for troops ashore: counter-battery fire, illumination, and deliberate shoots against defenses the landing force marked for destruction. Between bombardments she screened the transports and kept station with the other heavy ships of the gunfire group.
In September 1944 she moved on to the Palau operation and fired in support of the landings at Peleliu and Angaur. That autumn the Central Pacific drive carried the same fire-support ships westward. Pensacola spent the last months of 1944 in training, upkeep, and further bombardment duty as the fleet prepared for the volcanic islands that still barred the way to Japan.
On 17 February 1945, two days before the landing on Iwo Jima, Pensacola was inshore on the pre-invasion bombardment when Japanese coast-defense guns found her. Several shells hit the cruiser, wrecked gun positions, and killed and wounded a large part of the crews manning her exposed batteries. Suits kept her in the fire-support line. Damaged mounts that could still train were put back to work, fires were fought, and the ship continued to shoot at the batteries that had hit her and at targets called by the landing force. She pulled out only long enough for emergency repairs, then returned to the island and stayed on the gun line through the opening phase of the battle.
After Iwo Jima she went south for repair and then joined the bombardment force for Okinawa. From late March 1945 into the early summer she fired on shore targets, covered minesweepers and underwater demolition teams, and stood anti-aircraft watch as Japanese aircraft attacked the ships crowded around the island. The Okinawa campaign kept Pensacola at sea for weeks at a time, rotating between the firing line, screening stations, and short stops for ammunition and fuel.
When Japan surrendered in August 1945, Suits still had the ship. Pensacola took part in the early occupation of Japanese home waters, then turned to bringing men home across the Pacific. He left her in February 1946. Later that year the cruiser was expended as a target ship at Bikini; that last duty fell to other hands. Suits’s command covered the Marianas, Palau, the costly day off Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the passage from war to occupation.
Officers who served in Pensacola at other points in her career included Norman Scott, Allen Prather Mullinix, and Randall Euesta Dees. Suits’s own tour was the long final wartime command, from 19 May 1944 to February 1946, and it is the period in which the ship finished her fighting service.