Ships
- USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24) Captain from 26 January 1945 · Relieved on 15 December 1945
William Gosnell Tomlinson commanded the light aircraft carrier Belleau Wood in the last year of the Pacific War. He took the ship as captain on 26 January 1945 and remained in command through the surrender of Japan and the first months of the return home, until he was relieved on 15 December 1945.
By the time he came aboard, Belleau Wood was already a veteran of the fast-carrier war. An Independence-class light carrier converted from a cruiser hull, she operated with the large task forces that struck Japanese bases and covered amphibious landings. Tomlinson’s tour covered the final drive against the home islands rather than the earlier battles in which the ship had made her name.
Belleau Wood spent the opening months of his command with the fast carriers off Japan and the Bonins. In February 1945 her aircraft flew in support of the assault on Iwo Jima, striking airfields and shipping and covering the troops ashore. Through the spring the ship shifted to the long Okinawa campaign, sending planes against Kyushu and the Ryukyus as the fleet stayed at sea for weeks at a time.
On 5 June 1945 a typhoon caught the force east of Okinawa. Belleau Wood took heavy weather damage, including harm to the flight deck that put her out of the fighting line. She left for temporary repairs and did not share the last carrier strikes of July and early August. The interruption was weather, and the ship survived it.
After Japan’s surrender, Belleau Wood turned to occupation duty and the troop lift home. Under Tomlinson she carried servicemen back across the Pacific in the first wave of that repatriation. He left the ship on 15 December 1945, closing a command that had run from the Iwo Jima operation through the typhoon and into the postwar return of the fleet.