Ships
- USS Nevada (BB-36) Captain from 14 October 1918 · Relieved on 7 May 1919
Captain William Carey Cole assumed command of the battleship Nevada (BB-36) on 14 October 1918, while she lay at Bantry Bay on the southwest coast of Ireland. She was one of the newest American battleships afloat, in commission since 1916, oil-fired, and armed and protected on the pattern the Navy had adopted for its heavy ships. Cole joined a vessel that had already crossed the Atlantic and settled into a wartime anchorage.
In August 1918 Nevada had come over with Oklahoma and Utah. Together they formed Battleship Division Six, commanded by Rear Admiral Thomas S. Rodgers, and worked with the British Grand Fleet from that Irish base. Their station covered the Atlantic approaches, where a German breakout toward the convoys was the danger they had been sent to meet. American naval forces in European waters as a whole served under William Sowden Sims. Through the weeks Cole had the ship, the German High Seas Fleet remained in its harbors.
The armistice of 11 November 1918 arrived before his first month in command was out. The watch at Bantry Bay ended with the fighting. Nevada stayed only while the Allies settled the next moves at sea. In December 1918 she sailed for the United States with Cole still in command, and the deployment that had carried her to Ireland closed in American waters.
From the turn of the year into the spring, Cole's duty was the work of a battleship captain in a fleet standing down from war. Nevada needed upkeep after the months abroad. The crew drilled, the ship moved with the Atlantic Fleet, and the Navy around them reduced from a wartime footing. His remaining time in command passed in that peacetime routine.
On 7 May 1919 Cole was relieved. He had held Nevada for just under seven months, from the last weeks of the war through the voyage home and the first spring of peace. The ship had begun her commissioned life in 1916 under Joseph Strauss. Cole's months were the ones that took her off a war station and back into the peacetime fleet.