Ships
- USS Knapp (DD-653) Captain from 10 July 1944
The Navy's own books support the name, the Academy class, the birth day, the file number on the citations, and the two decorations he wore for Knapp. They do not, by themselves, print the July day he took her, or the day he gave her up. What follows is the life the registers, the Academy's annual register and yearbook, the ship's history, a hometown paper, and the award citations will support. Where they stop, the blank stays in the sentence.
Origins
The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers does not put a town on his line. It does put a birth day, and it puts the same day on him in five editions. In the registers of 1 July 1947, 1 January 1950, 1 January 1951, 1 January 1955, and 1 January 1957, the digits in the birth column read 22 January 1914. The optical text splits them across lines, one numeral at a time, but the sequence does not move, and the men beside him carry birth days in the same column. Franklin Duerr Buckley, the classmate next above him, is 23 September 1915 in that place. Brown is 22 January 1914.
The place is another matter. No register that was opened prints a birthplace. The Annual Register of the Naval Academy for 1933–34 lists him among the fourth class, the class of 1937, appointed from North Carolina, admitted 16 June 1933. In the standing table of June 1936 his age at admission is given as 19 years and 5 months. Counted to about the first of July 1933, a boy born on 22 January 1914 is 19 years and 5 months. The age and the birth day agree. They still do not name a town.
The Lucky Bag of 1937, the classmates' book, prints "Goldsboro, North Carolina" under William Butler Brown. That is the home a midshipman claimed in his last year at Annapolis, not a birth certificate. A decorations compilation, the Hall of Valor, gives a different North Carolina town as home: Columbia. Columbia is the seat of Tyrrell County. A third compilation, uboat.net, prints the birth as 22 January 1914 and then a question mark and "(Tyrrell County), North Carolina," and a death on 31 March 1959 at Goldsboro. The question mark is theirs. No birth record, death certificate, or obituary was found to test either town or the death. Columbia and Tyrrell County are not used here as a birthplace. Goldsboro is what the yearbook says, and what a later newspaper says about his parents.
That newspaper is the Goldsboro Herald of 2 May 1940. The digitized page, as the newspaper site's text presents it, says that Mr. and Mrs. William Butler Brown of California were visiting Mr. Brown's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Z. T. Brown, in Goldsboro. The line break in the optical text falls between Butler and Brown. The sense is one couple. It is the only place a wife appears, and she is not named. It is the only place the parents appear, and they appear as initials. No child is named in anything that was read. A genealogy page that seemed to attach him to a Zachary Taylor Brown and a Janet Mae Butler could not be opened, and a search summary of that page mixed the surname Brown with Taylor. It was not used.
So the family that can be spoken of is small and early. By the spring of 1940 he was a married man, living in California, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Z. T. Brown, were in Goldsboro. What he left them, and what he left the woman who went to California with him, is not in the record that was found. The marriage is a fact of 1940. The rest of the household is a blank.
Formation
He entered the Naval Academy on 16 June 1933, appointed from North Carolina, one of the fourth class that would be the class of 1937. The registers later print 3 June 1937 as the date of entry that an Academy graduate carries, the day the class was commissioned. From the 1 July 1947 register through the 1 January 1957 register, that 3 June 1937 stays on his line.
He was not a star man. The Annual Register for the academic year 1936–37 gives the relative standing of the present first class for the third year of the course, 352 members, as of June 1936. William Butler Brown stands 330. The starred names, the men the Academy marked as distinguished, are other men's. His number is near the bottom of a class that had already been thinned from the several hundred who entered in 1933. The subject columns on that page are too broken to say whether the weakness was navigation or ordnance or something else. The standing itself is plain. He got through. He did not get through near the top.
The classmates who wrote him up for the Lucky Bag were not interested in that number. The sketch is signed "G. P. O." and it is classmate prose, written to be remembered, not a fitness report. They headed it William Butler Brown, Goldsboro, North Carolina, and they gave him four names: "Trigger," "Red," "Scrapper," "Bill." They could not decide, they said, whether Trigger was first a gentleman and second an artist, or the other way around. He had, in their words, "the natural good manners of a true southern gentleman and also the erratic temperament of an artist." Red was "a rebel in more than name, being constantly at variance with the accepted order of things." He had never been known to speak or smile before breakfast. "His greatest ambition is to fly, and he should be the best there is, for his spirit is as flaming as his hair."
The activity line under the sketch is partly illegible. What can be read credits golf in the youngster, second-class, and first-class years, and captain of golf in the first-class year, boxing, and the Class Crest and King committees. One cluster of letters after the golf years does not resolve. It is not used. The hair, the golf, the refusal to talk before breakfast, and the wish to fly are the portrait they wanted kept. None of it is a Navy report. All of it is what the men who lived in the hall with him chose to print in 1937.
The wish to fly is the one sentence that can be checked against a later book, and the later book does not fulfill it. Nothing found here puts him in flight training. The register of 1 January 1957 prints him as a commander with the designator 1100, unrestricted line, not an aviator's designator. The ambition is in the yearbook. The wings are not in the register. Why the one did not become the other is not said.
What the Navy gave him first, on the page that can be dated, was a carrier, and a junior officer's billet on her, not a cockpit. The Register of 1 July 1938 lists William Butler Brown as an ensign. The duty printed on his line is Enterprise. The word "do" between his name and the ship is the ditto the register uses when a run of classmates share a date of rank. The ship is his own. USS Enterprise, the carrier, was in commission that summer. The register does not say whether he was on deck, in a turret, or in engineering. It does not say he flew. It says an ensign of that name was borne on her books on 1 July 1938.
The ranks after that are snapshots, not a promotion letter.
The 1941 Register, printed by the Government Printing Office at Washington in 1941, indexes him as Brown, William B., lieutenant (junior grade). The as-of day is not on the title page that the optical text preserved. The 1 July 1947 register, in the date columns on his line, carries 3 June 1940 beside the permanent rank it still prints as lieutenant (junior grade). That is the ordinary three-year step for a 1937 ensign. It is used as the date the later register prints, not as a story about how he spent the year.
The Register of 1 July 1942 indexes him as a lieutenant. The Register of 1 July 1944 indexes him as a lieutenant commander, and the number at the end of that index line is 78842. On the same page the index gives William D. Brown, captain, the number 58688, and William G. Brown, lieutenant commander, the number 81204. Those are the other William Browns. The 78842 is the service number the Hall of Valor prints on the citations for William Butler Brown. Nine days after that register's date, the command lists say he took Knapp. The register itself does not mention the ship.
Two temporary dates that a ship-commander compilation prints for him, temporary lieutenant on 2 January 1942 and temporary lieutenant commander on 1 July 1943, were not found as clean dates on his own line. The registers that were read are enough without them. He was a lieutenant (junior grade) in the 1941 book, a lieutenant on 1 July 1942, and a lieutenant commander on 1 July 1944.
Between Enterprise in the summer of 1938 and Knapp in the summer of 1944, the registers that were opened do not name another ship. The California address in the Goldsboro paper of May 1940 sits in that silence. It may be a West Coast duty. It is not identified. Those six years are the largest blank in the career. He went into them an ensign on a carrier, married or about to be, the yearbook's redhead who wanted to fly. He came out of them a lieutenant commander with a destroyer.
War years
Knapp was already a fought ship when he got her, if he got her on the day the lists say. She was a Fletcher-class destroyer, built at Bath, commissioned on 16 September 1943 with Commander Frank Virden in command. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships gives her the Marshalls, Truk, the Marianas, Emirau, Hollandia, Saipan, and the Philippine Sea, all of it before the summer of 1944. None of that is his. Virden's cruise is not told here as Brown's.
The day itself is a list date, not a deck log. The project's stub, uboat.net, and NavSource all say Lieutenant Commander William Butler Brown took command on 10 July 1944 and remained until 5 July 1946. Those three agree, and they often copy one another. No log entry reading "assumed command" was found. What does not depend on them is the citations. By 30 August 1944 he was, in the Navy's own language, commanding officer of a destroyer in a carrier task force. By 13 October he was, by name, commanding officer of USS Knapp.
The ship's history used here is the DANFS narrative as carried in the Wikipedia article that says it incorporates that public-domain entry, and as repeated on the ship's veterans' page. The Naval History and Heritage Command page itself returned an error when it was asked for. Dates below that are not in a citation are that ship's history, not a reconstruction from a weak list of ports.
If the 10 July date is right, his first weeks were the weeks DANFS gives Knapp from 25 July to 5 August: still screening the carriers in the raids on Palau, Ulithi, Yap, Iwo Jima, and Chichi Jima, and joining the surface gunfire against ships of a Japanese convoy that carrier aircraft had already worked over. The Legion of Merit citation, which starts on 30 August, does not cover those weeks. They are not narrated here as a battle he was decorated for. They are what the ship was doing in the month the lists say he had just come aboard. Then, DANFS says, she refitted at Eniwetok from 11 August to 30 August.
On 30 August she went out again, and the citation clock starts.
The Legion of Merit, with the combat "V," is the Navy's summary of the next two and a half months, and it is worth quoting for what it claims and what it refuses to name. Commander, Second Carrier Task Force, Pacific, serial 0948 of 15 January 1945, as transcribed by the Hall of Valor, recommends the award to Lieutenant Commander William Butler Brown, service number 0-78842, "as Commanding Officer of a United States Destroyer assigned to a carrier Task Force operating against the enemy during the Palau and Philippine landing operations 30 August 1944 to 11 November 1944." He "capably and effectively handled and fought his ship in more than thirty Japanese air attacks, a bombardment of enemy territory and a surface engagement, delivering certain damage to the enemy and stoutly defending our own forces." The citation does not name the destroyer. The Silver Star citation, a month older, does. The Register of 1 July 1945 prints "(D)" and "(E)" after his name. In that volume's key, (D) is the Legion of Merit and (E) is the Silver Star, both from the Navy Department. The register confirms the two medals. The sentences are the compilation's transcription of the citations. No original citation form was in hand.
DANFS puts flesh on the window without using his name. From 30 August, Knapp screened five battleships out of Eniwetok for the Palau invasion, then met Langley, Lexington, Essex, and Princeton for the strikes during the fight for Peleliu. Through September she screened heavy ships striking the Philippines. On 6 October she left Ulithi for the strikes on Okinawa and Formosa that were meant to clear the way to Leyte, and she fired antiaircraft cover for her group in the Formosa air battle of 12–14 October. That battle is the obvious place for a large share of the "more than thirty Japanese air attacks." The citation's count is the citation's. It was not retallied from an action report.
Inside those same October days sits the other medal, and it is the one that shows the man under a particular kind of pressure. Not a charge. A salvage.
The Silver Star, Commander, Third Fleet, serial 0124 of 2 December 1944, again as the Hall of Valor transcribes it, is for Lieutenant Commander William Butler Brown as commanding officer of USS Knapp, "assigned as a screening vessel to a Task Group protecting the withdrawal of two severely damaged ships, under tow, from enemy waters during the period 13–17 October 1944." "By outstanding seamanship, his ship performed missions of rescue, transferred personnel under adverse conditions of wind and sea and under enemy air attack." The screen work, the citation says, "contributed greatly to the successful accomplishment of the salvage mission."
The citation does not name the two ships. DANFS names one. It says that after the Formosa battle, Knapp guarded the retirement of Canberra, which an aerial torpedo had hit on 13 October, and that she then rejoined her group for strikes on Luzon and for screening in the Battle of Surigao Strait, the southern action of Leyte Gulf. Canberra's retirement is the ship's history. The second hull in the citation is not identified in the DANFS text that was used. It is left unnamed here on purpose. Surigao is the only surface action that text places Knapp in during the Legion's dates. It is a fair reading that the citation's "surface engagement" is that night, or part of it. It is a reading, not a sentence in the citation. The "bombardment of enemy territory" is likewise not pinned to a beach.
What the Silver Star does say, without needing that guess, is the work. Wind. Sea. Men to be taken off or put across. Aircraft still coming. A screen to be kept around ships that could not keep it themselves. He was thirty years old that autumn, if the birth day in the register is his, a lieutenant commander who had wanted, at twenty-three, to fly, and who was instead the captain of a destroyer in the practical sense of the word, responsible for the handling of one hull while two others were dying slowly under tow. The citations praise leadership, tactical ability, courage, skill. They do not quote him. No letter, no oral history, no deck-log remark in his voice was found. The character under that pressure is the conduct the Navy recorded, not a temperament invented to match the yearbook.
The Legion's window runs on to 11 November. DANFS, still without his name, sends Knapp back to Ulithi on 30 October, out again two days later, and then to Reno. On 3 November the light cruiser was hit by torpedoes from the submarine I-41. Knapp guarded the withdrawal. From late November into the middle of January 1945 the same narrative has her screening strikes on Luzon, the coast of French Indochina, and the China coast, the attacks meant to isolate Lingayen Gulf. On 21 January a kamikaze and air attack left Ticonderoga hurt. Knapp escorted the carrier into Ulithi on 24 January. On 30 January the destroyer sailed for the West Coast and arrived on 20 February for overhaul. She did not sail west again until 23 April.
If he was still in command, and the lists say he was, the winter of 1945 was a yard period on the West Coast, then the long run back. Nothing says whether the wife who had been "of California" in 1940 was still there, or whether he saw her. That is not filled in.
DANFS has Knapp off Okinawa on 27 May 1945, a radar picket until 26 June, then with the carriers for the last raids on the home islands. Radar picket off Okinawa in those weeks was one of the worst billets the destroyer force had. The ship's history puts her there. It does not put his name there. The command lists do not break. No relief was found between July 1944 and the decommissioning. The picket duty is told as the ship's, in the period those lists give him the ship, and not as a scene from a log with his signature.
On 20 July 1945, while that last carrier phase was underway if the DANFS calendar and the command lists are both right, the registers give him the date of rank of commander. The 1 July 1945 register, nineteen days earlier, already carries the Legion and the Silver Star on his name, and it is dated before the promotion. The 1 July 1947 register still prints the permanent-rank abbreviation as lieutenant (junior grade), with 3 June 1940 and 20 July 1945 both present as dates on the line. From 1 January 1950 on, the rank word is commander, and 20 July 1945 is the date of rank. He finished the war a lieutenant commander in the citations and became a commander, on the Navy's date, in the last month of it. Whether the stripe reached him at sea or in a mailbag is not known.
DANFS brings the ship into Sagami Wan on 27 August 1945, into Tokyo Bay on 1 September, and present for the surrender ceremonies on Missouri on 2 September. In the first days of the occupation she helped demilitarize bases for midget submarines and suicide boats. She sailed for the United States on 5 December and reached San Diego on 21 December. She went on through the canal to Boston, arriving 17 January 1946, then to Charleston on 2 April, and she was decommissioned on 5 July 1946. The same command lists that start him on 10 July 1944 end him on that decommissioning day. If they are right, he brought her home and stood on her while she went out of commission. No decommissioning report with his name was found. The ship's later life, the recommissioning in 1951 and the Korean cruises, belongs to other captains. It is not used.
Knapp is credited, in that same DANFS-derived article, with eight battle stars for the war. The stars are the ship's. They are not entered here as personal decorations of his. His personal decorations, in the 1945 register and in the two citations, are the Legion of Merit with the combat "V" and the Silver Star.
Cost
The record does not show a wound, a sunken ship, a court, or a letter of reprimand. It does not show a son or a daughter, and it does not show the wife's name. The cost that can be pointed at is the work the citations describe, and the years around it that the books leave empty.
He fought the ship, in the Legion's words, through more than thirty air attacks, a bombardment, and a surface engagement, across the Palau landings and the Philippine landings, from the end of August to the middle of November 1944. For four days in the middle of that, 13 to 17 October, the work was seamanship of a meaner kind: rescue, transfer of people, a screen around ships under tow, wind and sea against the boats, and aircraft still in the sky. DANFS adds, for the ship, the guard on Canberra, the night screen at Surigao if he was there for it, the guard on Reno after the submarine, the long screening of the winter strikes, the escort of a burned carrier, and then, if the command really ran on, the Okinawa picket and the last raids and the occupation. That is a year and a half of other people's danger sitting on one man's watch bill. The Navy paid it with two medals and, on 20 July 1945, a commander's date of rank. It did not, in anything found here, pay it with a sentence about what it cost him.
The yearbook's rebel, who would not smile before breakfast and who wanted the air, is not a motive for any of this. It is only the last clear look at him before the gap. The citations are the next clear look, and they are official prose. Between them he married, or was already married, and took his wife to California, and left his parents in Goldsboro. That is the whole private record.
He survived the war. He was thirty-one when the fighting stopped, if the birth day holds. Survival is not the same as a documented afterward.
After
From 1 January 1950 through 1 January 1957 the registers keep him on the active list as a commander, date of rank 20 July 1945, and in the 1957 book as an unrestricted line officer, designator 1100. Signal numbers change with the books, as they do for everyone. No ship, no shore station, no school, and no retirement date appears on the lines that were read. A photo-index of destroyers, NavSource, lists a Commander William Butler Brown in command of USS Strong (DD-758) from 1950 into August 1951. That is a weak list of the kind this project does not treat as a cruise. It was not confirmed in a register, a directory, or a deck log. It is not narrated.
A line on the Hall of Valor page says he retired as a captain. The registers through 1 January 1957 still call him a commander. No later register was found that promotes him, and no retirement order was found. The captaincy is not used.
Uboat.net says he died on 31 March 1959 at Goldsboro, North Carolina, aged forty-five. That day and that place were not found in an obituary, a cemetery record, or a North Carolina death index that could be opened. If the compilation is right, he died in the town where his parents had lived in 1940, and where the yearbook had placed him, less than two years after the last register that still carried him as an active commander. The cause is not stated anywhere that was read. Who was with him is not stated. The wife of 1940 is not found again. No child is found. What survived of him, in the papers that could be opened, is the Academy sketch, the two citations, the ship's history that never prints his name, and a service number that keeps him distinct from the other William Browns.