Ships
- USS Cushing (DD-797) Captain, 18 May 1945 – 15 September 1945
He was the third of his name in a Lynchburg family that had put down roots in the hills above the James long before he was born, and the Navy called him, in the spare style of the Registers, William D. Adams.
William Duval Adams, 3rd, was born on 20 September 1917 in Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of William D. Adams (William Duval Adams, Jr.) and Martha Rivers Monee Adams. His mother later wrote a newspaper column on local history for Lynchburg readers. After her death a family collection of Rivers and Paine papers passed to him, and after his death to a nephew, Douglas C. MacLeod. He had an older brother, James Rivers Adams, born 12 July 1910, a Virginia Military Institute graduate of 1931 who went into business and then into the Marine Corps.
Bill arrived at Annapolis late. The Class of 1939 Lucky Bag remembered that he was almost three months late in arriving from the hills of Virginia, and that he made up the lost time. Undaunted by the long transmission interval, the yearbook said, he treated academics as merely a supplementary course, worked most of his problems in his head without a slide rule, and became the man to ask when a classmate did not savvy a problem. He was not a varsity athlete. He found time for battalion basketball and baseball when he was not sailing a starboard around the bay, and now and then broke down and invited up a flower of the South to brighten a weekend. The portrait the class left of him is specific: happy, even-tempered, irresponsible, Bill had a multitude of friends in the Regiment. They called him Bill and Willy. He was a midshipman petty officer, football manager as a plebe, and wore one stripe. He had entered as a midshipman on 6 September 1935. He graduated and was commissioned ensign on 1 June 1939. The Navy Register also records a date of rank of 24 June 1939 in the lineal list. The Academy’s annual register for 1938–39 lists him among the first class as Adams, William Duval, 3rd.
The first ship that can be fixed with confidence is not a Pacific destroyer. The Navy Directory for 1940 and again for 1941 places Ens. William D. Adams, 3d, in USS MacLeish (DD-220), a Clemson-class four-piper recommissioned on 25 September 1939 as the war in Europe opened and the United States still called itself neutral. MacLeish worked the eastern sea frontier: Caribbean patrol by early 1940, rearming and coastwise convoy work into 1941, then North Atlantic patrol and convoy operations that continued after Pearl Harbor. By February 1943 she had safely escorted twelve convoys between Norfolk and Key West and nine between New York and Guantanamo. That work was ordinary, cold, and necessary. How long Adams remained in her after the 1941 Directory, and what billet he held, the published sources do not say. The Directory itself ceased with the April 1941 issue, and wartime Registers dropped station listings. Between MacLeish and the bridge of Cushing there is a gap of several years.
What the Registers do show is the climb in rank that the war forced on his class. He was lieutenant (junior grade) from 1 June 1942 and lieutenant from 15 June 1942, and temporary lieutenant commander from 15 March 1944. By the 1944 Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers he stood as a lieutenant commander with file number 82367. By the 1945 Register he carried the parenthetical mark “(G-l).” In that volume’s key to symbols, “(G-l)” means awarded the Bronze Star Medal. The citation itself, the action, the date, and the ship, has not been found. The decoration is a fact of the lineal list. The story behind it is missing.
On 18 May 1945, Temporary Lieutenant Commander William Duval Adams relieved Commander Louis Frank Volk in command of USS Cushing (DD-797), a Fletcher-class destroyer already deep into her Pacific war. Cushing had been in commission since 17 January 1944. By the spring of 1945 she had screened the fast carriers through the Palaus and the Philippines, fought in the air attacks of Leyte Gulf, ridden out the December 1944 typhoon and picked up survivors, stood radar picket and fighter-direction duty on the approaches to the Japanese home islands, and fired in the softening of Okinawa. She had earned, by war’s end, six battle stars. Adams took her when the last phase was still unfinished.
After replenishment at Leyte in June 1945, Cushing went back with the carriers for strikes on the Tokyo area until the end of the war. Under Adams she is repeatedly named in the wartime logs of USS Iowa as one of the destroyers topped off from the battleship’s tanks, on 3 June, 9 July, 11 July, 13 July, and again through early and mid-August 1945 as the task group stayed at sea. Those fueling entries put him on the bridge of a destroyer still working the carrier screen in the last weeks of the Pacific war: keeping station, taking oil, and covering the launches while Japan was struck from the air. On 27 August 1945 Cushing anchored in Sagami Wan and served as harbor entrance control vessel for the occupation forces. Adams’s command ended on 15 September 1945, when Lieutenant Commander John Wyatt, USNR, took over as acting commanding officer. The ship reached Bremerton on 20 November and went into reserve at Long Beach on 3 February 1947. Adams was no longer in her.
He left the Navy soon after. His rank history records retirement as lieutenant commander in June 1946. He was twenty-eight. Why he retired, whether health, the reduction of the wartime officer corps, or his own preference, has not been established. A search of the 1947 Register did not turn up a clear retired-list entry under his name.
The war had already reached his family before he took Cushing. On 21 July 1944 his older brother, Captain James Rivers Adams, U.S. Marine Corps, of Headquarters Company, 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, was killed in action on Guam. Born in Lynchburg, VMI class of 1931, James had built a career with Westvaco and been commissioned only about a year before the landing. Memorial accounts say he volunteered for the first assault wave though he was not required to, and that he was struck by enemy fire while assisting a wounded officer on the beach at Agat. He is buried in Spring Hill Cemetery, Lynchburg. Bill Adams took command of a Pacific destroyer less than a year later. Whether and how that loss shaped the months on Cushing is not something the deck logs or the Registers record. It is a fact of the household he came from.
After the war the trail thins again. Compiled records identify W. Duval Adams, also known as William Duval Adams III, born 20 September 1917 in Lynchburg, son of William D. Adams and Martha Rivers, died 11 September 1991 while residing in ZIP code 24014, south Roanoke, Virginia. He was seventy-three, nine days short of seventy-four. No published obituary has been located. No wife or children have been confirmed. No civilian career, church, or civic affiliation has been documented. Martha Rivers Adams’s family papers passed to her son William Duvall Adams and, upon his death, to nephew Douglas C. MacLeod. That small administrative sentence is one of the few traces of what he did with the years after June 1946.
He was a Lynchburg boy of a named local line, late to Annapolis and quick once he arrived, liked by his classmates for temper and mind rather than for varsity glory. He went to sea as an ensign in an old destroyer on the Atlantic edge of a war the country had not yet joined. He rose with his class through the temporary ranks the war required. He was awarded a Bronze Star whose citation has not been recovered. In the last summer of the Pacific war he commanded Cushing on the carrier screen and into Sagami Wan, then left the Navy within a year of the surrender. His brother had already been killed on a Pacific beach. He lived nearly half a century longer in Virginia and died in 1991.