Ships
- USS Missouri (BB-63) Captain, 10 December 1949 – 3 February 1950
The Navy Register prints the name in full. On 1 July 1944 William Drane Brown, signal number 1434, file number 58688, was a captain by temporary appointment, still a lieutenant commander on the permanent list, born 21 October 1902, entered 17 August 1920. The Lucky Bag of 1924 had already called him William Drane Brown of Jacksonville, Florida. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, which does not expand the initials, says the second Nicholas was commissioned at Bath on 4 June 1942 with Lieutenant Commander W. D. Brown in command. He is not Bert Franklin Brown, not Charles Randall Brown, not Chesford Brown, not James Harvey Brown, and not William Butler Brown, the Naval Academy class of 1937 who had Knapp and whose file number, in the same 1944 index, is 78842. He is also not William McClure Drane, a different officer who appears on the same register pages in aviation and medical billets. The site’s separate heading “Brown, William D.,” tied to Missouri in the winter of 1949–50, is this officer again, not a second one.
Origins
The register gives a birthday and nothing around it. 21 October 1902 is a date in a column, not a house. An alumni obituary, printed in Shipmate in November 1991 and copied onto a commanders’ website by a grandson, says he was born at Punta Gorda, on the Florida coast south of Tampa, and that he went to Duval High School in Jacksonville and then to the Marion Institute at Marion, Alabama, before Florida appointed him to the Naval Academy. The yearbook, which is closer to the boy, gives only Jacksonville. Both can be true, and neither has been checked against a birth certificate or a school roll. Punta Gorda in 1902 was a small Gulf town on a railroad. Jacksonville was the city. What his parents did, how many brothers and sisters he had, and whether the sea was a choice or an appointment that arrived because a senator had a vacancy, is not in any record used here.
He entered the Academy on 17 August 1920. The midshipman list for 1924 shows William Drane Brown appointed from Florida, in the first class. He was seventeen, going on eighteen, when he reported. The class that entered in 1920 was commissioned ensign on 5 June 1924. That date is a footnote in the 1939 register, attached to the admission year, not a sentence about him alone. It is the date the Navy used for the class.
The only portrait of him as a boy in uniform is the Lucky Bag, and it is a roast, not a biography. His classmates made a poem out of his legs. They bend, the verse says, “in two deft Grecian bows,” ladies’ delight and a problem for anyone trying to get through him on a football field or a lacrosse ground. He was on the football squad in each of his four years. The activities line under the sketch is too broken in the scan to trust for letters, numerals, or a managership, so those marks are not repeated here. The poem is enough for what they thought worth saying: a youth from the Florida coast, quick at repartee, good at the Italian course, ready for a rubber of bridge, not yet caught. They wished him a safe cruise “till some Florida deb shall catch you in her web, and make you a landsman unhappy.” The Rose Bowl is not in the yearbook entry that was read. The alumni obituary says he appeared in the 1923 Rose Bowl game. Navy played Washington on 1 January 1924, which is the game people mean. Whether he was on the field, on the bench, or only on the squad is not settled by anything opened for this essay. The yearbook’s joke about a Florida debutante is the last word it has on a private life. It does not say he had one.
Formation
On 30 June 1924 the register shows his cruise in Mississippi as begun. The column is the start of the cruise, not the commission. He had been an ensign for a little more than three weeks. The Navy Directory of 1 January 1925 still has Ensign William D. Brown in Mississippi. A battleship of that era was a school that did not call itself one: watches, gunnery drills, a wardroom full of officers who had already been to sea in the last war. Nothing in the directories says what part of her he stood, or whether he was any good at it. The next firm mark is a smaller ship and a different trade.
On 1 October 1926 he was an ensign under instruction in Chewink. By 1 July 1944 the register credited him with the submarine course, the torpedo course, the postgraduate course in general line duties, and, as a separate qualification, command of submarines. The dates of the courses are not in the register. Chewink is the first of them that can be pointed at. On 1 October 1930 Lieutenant (junior grade) William D. Brown was in S-17. The old S-boats were small, wet, and already aging. A junior officer in one of them learned the boat by living in it. No patrol report, no fitness report, and no letter of his from those years has been found.
He was still a lieutenant (junior grade) on 1 January 1933 and on 1 April 1933, under instruction at the Naval Training Station, Naval Operating Base, San Diego. The alumni obituary puts postgraduate school at the Academy and then San Diego in a smoother order than the directories do, and it is the directories that have the dates. Between the S-boat and the classroom he had become the sort of officer the Navy sent back to school.
The obituary then sends him, in July 1933, to the Asiatic Station in S-28, first as executive officer and then as commanding officer. The Navy Directory does not. On 1 April 1934 Lieutenant William D. Brown was in S-38. On 1 January 1935 he was in command of her. S-28’s own roster in the April 1934 directory names other men, including a commanding officer who is not Brown. An S-28 tour before April 1934 is possible and unproven. What the printed directory will support is S-38, and command of her by the first day of 1935. He was thirty-two. An S-boat command on the Asiatic station, if that is where she was when he had her, was a long way from a battleship wardroom: a handful of officers, a crew that could hear the captain think, and a boat whose machinery was older than some of the men. No deck-log extract and no photograph of him on her bridge were found. The fact of the command is the directory line. The content of it is a blank.
By 1 January 1937 he was a lieutenant at the Naval Academy, and he was still there on 1 January 1938 and 1 January 1939. The directories do not name the department. The obituary says Marine Engineering. That may be right. It is not what the directory printed. Three New Years at Annapolis, after a submarine command, is a shore tour that looks like a pause and was probably a profession. The Academy is where the Navy decides which lieutenants can teach as well as conn. He stayed long enough to be more than a visitor.
His permanent rank as lieutenant commander dated from 1 October 1938. That date is the register’s, traced through the ditto marks on the 1944 captains’ page back to the last date that is not a ditto. On 1 June 1940 Lieutenant Commander William D. Brown was executive officer of Selfridge. A squadron leader’s destroyer, in the last summer of the peace, was a serious ship. The executive officer runs the routine the captain does not want to touch, and he is the man the wardroom lives with. No story of that year, no gunnery score, no complaint, has turned up. The directory gives the billet and stops.
The war as he lived it
On 1 April 1941 he was in command of Gregory. She was no longer the flush-deck destroyer of 1918. The Navy had taken her out of reserve and recommissioned her on 4 November 1940 as a high-speed transport, APD-3, with three sisters, Little, Colhoun, and McKean, in Transport Division 12. The alumni obituary says he outfitted her and commanded her until January 1942. A commanders’ list, which is not a deck log, gives him 4 November 1940 to 13 December 1941 and names the next captain as Harry Frederick Bauer. The official history of the ship does not name Brown at all. It says the four transports spent about a year on the East Coast learning landing work with Marines, and that Gregory left Charleston on 27 January 1942, war already on, for the Pacific. She was sunk off Guadalcanal before dawn on 5 September 1942. The captain who died with her, and who was given the Silver Star, was Bauer.
So the ship that would make a legend was his to fit out and his to train, and not his when she was lost. If the December date is right, he had already left before she sailed from Charleston. If the obituary’s January is right, he may have had her at the start of the move west and not for the fighting. Neither date has been read in a log. What can be said is that in the spring of 1941, with the country not yet in the war, a lieutenant commander who had grown up in submarines was put in charge of an old destroyer scraped out to carry troops, and that he did not take her into Ironbottom Sound. The men who did, including Bauer, paid for the education those boats had been given on the Atlantic coast. His name is not on that bill. That is a fact about the record, not a judgment that he chose it.
He went to a new ship. Nicholas was laid down at Bath Iron Works on 3 March 1941, launched on 19 February 1942, and commissioned on 4 June 1942. The sponsor was Mrs. Edward B. Tryon, a descendant of the Marine officer the ship was named for. The officer who took command, in the official history’s one sentence about him, was Lieutenant Commander W. D. Brown. A history of the ship written from her people’s memory says the Browns were known as gracious hosts while she and her sisters were fitting out at Bath. It does not give his wife’s name. It is the first source that speaks of a household at all. “The Browns” is a phrase, not a marriage record.
The official history then follows the ship and drops the captain. Assigned to Destroyer Squadron 21, Nicholas left New York on 23 August 1942 in the screen of the battleship Washington, passed the Canal, and reached Espiritu Santo on 27 September. Three days later she began escorting the Guadalcanal convoys. Through the end of 1942 that was the work: out with the ships assembled at Espiritu Santo and Nouméa, down to Cactus, the name for Guadalcanal and Tulagi, wait while they unloaded, and bring them back. Between convoys the squadron’s destroyers hunted submarines off the harbors, swept the Slot, and fired at shore targets as the troops pushed inland. The history does not say which of those days were his. If he remained in command through January, they were.
The Destroyer History Foundation dates his command from 4 June 1942 to 26 January 1943, and names Andrew J. Hill, who had been executive officer, as the next captain. The same dates appear on lists that do not cite a log. They are used here as a boundary, not as a deck entry. Inside that boundary, in January 1943, Nicholas was one of the Tulagi-based destroyers of Task Force 67, the Cactus Striking Force. The history gives three bombardments: the new Japanese airfield at Munda on 4–5 January, the Kokumbona–Cape Esperance escape route on 19 January, and the resupply point at Vila on Kolombangara on 23–24 January. No action report in his hand was found. The ship’s guns did the talking the history records. On 1 February, as the Japanese began to evacuate Guadalcanal, Nicholas and De Haven were attacked by dive bombers. De Haven was sunk. Near misses killed two of Nicholas’s crew and damaged her steering. That morning falls after the 26 January relief the foundation gives. It is not written here as his fight. If the relief date is late by a week, it was. The log would settle it. The log was not opened.
What the Navy itself later said about those months is in a citation, and the citation does not name Nicholas. It says that as operations officer and senior aide to the commander of Task Force 68, during operations in the Solomons, Commander William Drane Brown already had “intimate knowledge of the geography of the locality gained while commanding a destroyer operating against the enemy in this area,” and “previous experience in bombardment operations.” That is the Navy connecting the destroyer captain to the staff officer without writing the ship’s name. The action the citation is for came next.
On the night of 5–6 March 1943, Task Force 68 bombarded military and air installations on Kolombangara and, in Kula Gulf before the bombardment, sank two enemy vessels. The citation says contact in the gulf came at a very tense moment, just before the ships were to open on the shore, and that Brown was calm, and that “his usual efficiency seemed enhanced by the excitement of the occasion.” The President’s words, as the Military Times transcription has them, are the only picture of him under fire that is not a yearbook joke or a court-martial. Clear thinking, local knowledge, a man whose work got better when the night got worse. The task-force commander is not named in the citation. Histories of the action give the force to Rear Admiral Aaron S. Merrill. The alumni obituary says that in February 1943 Brown reported as chief of staff and aide to the commander of Cruiser Division 12. Merrill commanded that division. The titles do not match word for word, operations officer and senior aide against chief of staff and aide, and they are close enough that they are probably the same desk in the same month. They have not been laid against an order.
He was a temporary captain from 1 June 1943. The whole block of captains on his page of the July 1944 register carries that date, by ditto, and his line does not break it. His permanent rank was still lieutenant commander, dating from October 1938. The Navy was using him two grades above the permanent rank, which is what it did with destroyer officers who had learned the Solomons.
The second citation is for thirty-six hours, from midnight on 30 October 1943 to noon on 2 November, when he was chief of staff and operations officer on the staff of the commander of Task Force 39. The citation itemizes the hours. The force made the first daylight bombardment of the Shortland–Faisi–Ballale area under shore-battery fire. In a night action it met a heavier Japanese force, cruisers and destroyers, and the citation says at least one cruiser and four destroyers were sunk, others damaged, and the rest driven off, so that the beachhead at Empress Augusta Bay was not bombarded and the transports were not destroyed. The ships then fought off an air attack by at least sixty-seven dive bombers and medium bombers and shot down at least seventeen. Captain Brown, the citation says, set an example by “fearlessness, calmness, and gallant determination,” at great personal risk. Again the admiral is not named in the text. Again the force is Merrill’s in the histories of Empress Augusta Bay. Brown was not on a destroyer’s bridge. He was the officer who had the plan and the night action in his head while the cruisers fired. The July 1944 register prints (D) (D) after his name. In that register’s own key, (D) means the Legion of Merit from the Navy Department. Two of them. The register is the official confirmation that both awards existed by the middle of 1944. The wording above is a later transcription of the citations, not the signed paper.
The obituary adds a Bronze Star, with a gold star in lieu of a second, for the same March-to-November stretch, and says Secretary Knox awarded the set. Knox could have signed papers into the spring of 1944. The July 1944 register, which is careful about this and has a separate symbol for the Bronze Star, does not put that symbol after Brown’s name. The Bronze Star is not narrated here as a fact. It may have come later. It may be the obituary remembering the second Legion under the wrong medal. The quotation the obituary gives, about planning that helped hold the beachhead at Empress Augusta Bay, tracks the second Legion citation and does not need a third medal to be true.
In January 1944, the obituary says, he was detached to the headquarters of the Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, in Washington. A year later he reported as commander of Destroyer Squadron 62, with Task Forces 38 and 58. Those are the fast-carrier task forces, Halsey’s and Mitscher’s numbering of what was often the same ships. A squadron commander in that screen is a sea command of a different kind from Nicholas: not one ship, a group of them, and the carriers’ survival as the job. No squadron war diary was opened. No ship is named as his flagship. The obituary is the only source for the squadron, and it is a late one. It is not turned here into a cruise narrative. If he had that command, it was the last fighting job the obituary gives him, and it is the one about which the least has been found.
What it cost
The citations praise a particular kind of nerve. Under fire he was the man who got clearer. The cost of that reputation arrived in daylight, five years after the war, on a ship so large he had never commanded anything like her.
Malcolm Muir, writing in Naval History in September 1991 from the court of inquiry and the press, describes Captain William D. Brown, Naval Academy 1924, as an officer with a combat record in destroyers and submarines who had distinguished himself after the war in oceanographic research, and who was given Missouri in December 1949 because a big-ship command was what a man needed if he was going to make flag rank. Some officers, Muir writes, already thought him a bit of a martinet. The alumni obituary’s list of later tours includes command of the Naval Mine Countermeasures Station at Panama City, Florida, command of Missouri, command of Submarine Group 5, and command of the Florida Group of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet. The mine station and the research Muir mentions may be the same years told twice. They have not been matched order by order. What both accounts agree on is that the battleship was the prize, and that he had not had a command at sea since the war.
He formally assumed command on 10 December 1949, relieving Harold Page Smith, with the ship in the Norfolk yard. On 23 and 24 December he took her out for a short run past the Virginia Capes and back. That was the crew’s first measure of him. Muir reports that after the executive officer, Commander George Peckham, offered a view on a navigational question, Brown had him into the cabin and set the rule: Brown was the skipper, Peckham was the executive and the administrator, and navigational advice was to come from the operations officer and the navigator. “Do we understand each other?” The sentence is from the court record as Muir quotes it. It traveled through the ship, as such sentences do. The first link, Muir says, in what Brown would later call an unusual and unfortunate chain of circumstances.
On 13 January 1950 the Naval Ordnance Laboratory asked, it did not order, that Missouri run an acoustic range near Thimble Shoal on her way out, so the Navy could record the signature of her propellers. Brown, busy with a training cruise to Guantánamo, passed the paper to his operations officer, Commander John R. Millett, who passed it unread to the navigator, Lieutenant Commander Frank G. Morris. Brown already distrusted Morris. Muir says the distrust was earned: over the next days Morris and a quartermaster could see that the buoys were unclear, in number as well as in place, and did not clear it up. The range had been marked by five buoys and then by two. It lay close to the shoal. On the morning of 17 January almost nobody else on board even knew the run was intended.
Brown stood on the auxiliary bridge used for sea detail and later said he felt “extremely rusty.” His orders did not sound rusty. He took the conn himself, increased speed toward fifteen knots, and pointed the ship at what he thought was the range. When the officer of the deck and his relief looked blank, he told them to go inform themselves. They went to the charthouse and crowded out the assistant navigator, a new ensign, who stopped plotting. Millett identified a pair of spar buoys as the acoustic buoys. They were the Back River channel, a fourteen-foot cut for fishing boats. Missouri drew more than thirty-six. Down in the combat information center, Lieutenant John Carr watched the radar, decided the set must be wrong, and did not report. He would say later that the ship’s practice was not to send radar advice unless it was asked for. The helmsman knew and kept quiet. It was not his place, he said, to give the captain orders.
Morris did speak. He recommended coming right. Brown refused, because a turn would spoil the acoustic run. Morris recommended it again, and then came back waving his arms. Brown turned to Millett and, in the words Muir takes from the testimony, said he did not believe the navigator knew where they were, and sent Millett to find out. Peckham, four decks below, had been passing warnings through a telephone talker who mumbled. His last warning dropped the form. “Come right immediately. Twist ship.” At that moment the lifebuoy watch aft reported that the propellers were kicking up mud. Brown ordered the rudder over and the engines back. The engineers had already shut the plant down, to keep sand out of the condensers, and that decision saved the machinery. The ship ran on for something like half a mile and stopped, bow up, in full view of the Army at Fort Monroe and of Rear Admiral Allan E. Smith, who told his staff that Missouri had just gone half a mile inland. She had grounded at high tide. She sat there for two weeks. The jokes were as bad as the photograph. The Navy spent about $130,000 getting her off, on 1 February, and less than $50,000 on the damage, which Muir, against a later legend, found to be three ruptured fuel tanks and not a broken back. An old anchor from some earlier wreck had been driven into the bottom. The band played “Missouri Waltz,” “Anchors Aweigh,” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
The trouble that lasted was not the hull. Brown first told the court he had been abandoned. The silence of his officers, he said, left him utterly alone on the bridge. He especially wanted Peckham’s counsel, the same Peckham he had told, a month before, not to offer it. Peckham’s answer was that at no time had Brown indicated he wanted advice. The judge advocate walked him through the chart. Brown read the depths along his own course down into the twenties of feet, and then said he had seen nothing to make him think his team would fall down when he needed it. “Who was the captain of the team?” “I was the captain of the ship.” He then changed. As captain, he told the court, it was his duty to keep her safe, and he had not done it. At the court-martial he pleaded guilty to stranding the vessel and neglecting his duty. “My orders put the ship aground. Therefore any culpability involved in the grounding is mine.” The court dropped him 250 places on the captains’ list. Muir’s reading of that sentence is that it ended any chance of flag rank on the active list. Carr was reprimanded. Morris and Millett were reduced in numbers. The engineers were commended. Admiral William M. Fechteler, commanding the Atlantic Fleet, wrote that he doubted a major ship had ever gone aground under circumstances less excusable, in daylight, off the Navy’s own base, with no equipment failure to blame. “The grounding could be attributed to only one thing — personnel failure.”
The man of the Solomons citations and the man on that bridge are the same officer, and the records do not offer a psychological theory to join them. What they offer is a contrast that does not need one. In Kula Gulf and off Bougainville he was praised for thinking more clearly because the night was bad, and for knowledge of the water he had learned in a destroyer. Off Norfolk he would not hear the navigator, the executive officer, or the radar, in a channel he could have walked ashore from, on a ship whose size he had never handled, after a month in which he had taught the wardroom not to volunteer. He said the blame was his. The court agreed, and then measured the punishment in places on a list.
No wife is named in the register, the directory, the citations, the court story, or the obituary. The Bath recollection of “the Browns” as hosts is the nearest thing to a household during the war, and it does not say who she was, or whether the plural was a wife, a family, or a courtesy. In November 2013 a grandson, Will R. Shaw, sent the alumni text to a website and called him “Pappa Bill.” That is evidence that a family remembered him under a private name, and that at least one grandchild existed. It is not a genealogy. No child is named. No address except the hospitals and the stations already given. The Florida debutante of the yearbook joke is not identified, and she may never have existed. What he left them, on the paper that survives, is a Navy career with a hole in the middle of it, a nickname, and a grave.
After
The obituary’s account of the last tours is the only continuous one, and it should be kept at that strength. After the squadron, it gives him chief of staff and aide to the commander of destroyers in the Pacific Fleet, then the mine countermeasures station at Panama City, then Missouri, then Submarine Group 5, and then the Florida Group of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet. Muir, who was writing about the grounding and not about a biography, says the last four years were command of a reserve district in Florida. Four years before a retirement on 30 June 1955 would be the summer of 1951, which is after the court-martial and not in conflict with a Florida shore job. It does not confirm every tour in the obituary’s list. Missouri is confirmed. The rest is the obituary.
He retired, the obituary says, on 30 June 1955, and it calls him a rear admiral. The Destroyer History Foundation also says he retired as a rear admiral. Muir says the loss of 250 numbers was meant to keep him from flag rank. Both can be true if the star was a retired-list advancement and not a promotion on the active list. That was a practice the Navy still had in 1955 for certain decorated officers. No retired register was opened to see whether his name is printed as rear admiral or as captain. The conflict is real, and it is not settled here by preferring the kinder title. What is settled is that he did not go back to sea in command of a ship that mattered.
He lived a long time after that. The obituary says he died on 11 January 1991 at the Gainesville, Florida, Medical Center Hospital, and that he was buried with full military honors at Arlington on 28 January. The grandson’s submission repeats that text and does not add a illness, a last address, or a list of survivors. No will, no local obituary, and no Arlington record were read for this essay. If the Shipmate notice is right, he was eighty-eight, and the Navy that had dropped him 250 places in 1950 buried him as one of its own forty-one years later.
What survived is uneven, and the unevenness is the life as the paper has it. A Florida boy, bow-legged and quick, who learned submarines in Chewink and S-17, commanded S-38 when the directory is believed over the obituary, taught at the Academy, ran Selfridge as executive officer, and fitted out a transport he did not take to Guadalcanal. He commissioned a new destroyer and took her into the Solomons convoy war, and the Navy’s own citation remembered him as the officer who knew that water because he had commanded a destroyer there. For two short, very loud periods in 1943 he was the calm man on Merrill’s staff, and the register recorded two Legions of Merit. Then Washington, perhaps a squadron with the fast carriers, shore duty, and one battleship. The battleship lasted five weeks in his hands before he put her on Thimble Shoal in front of the Atlantic Fleet, pleaded guilty, and spent the rest of his service where a captain who has used up his sea luck is sent. Nicholas went on without him, through Kula Gulf in July, Kolombangara, the Philippines, and two later wars. Gregory was already on the bottom, under another captain, before he commissioned Nicholas. Missouri came off the sand, went to Korea, and carried on being the ship the public knew. He did not command any of them for those endings. The record he left is the night work the citations describe, and the morning he would not turn.