Ships
- USS Princeton (CVL-23) Captain from 26 February 1944 · Relieved on 24 October 1944
William Houck Buracker was born in Luray, Virginia, on 25 July 1897 and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1920. As a Navy pilot he flew with the squadron that made the first nonstop flight from California to Central America. From 1928 to 1930 he studied aeronautical engineering at MIT, where he met Dorothy Martin of Winchester, Massachusetts, whom he married.
When the war began he was on Admiral Halsey's staff. He was operations officer of the task force that carried the Doolittle raiders toward Japan and of the carrier raids on the Gilberts, Marshalls, Wake and Marcus, and he won the Silver Star. From August 1942 to May 1943 he commanded NAS Pensacola during its wartime expansion and earned the public praise of Navy Secretary Forrestal. He then became fleet aviation officer to Admiral Nimitz.
In early 1944 he took command of Princeton. On 24 October 1944, at Leyte Gulf, a single Japanese bomb set off fires and explosions that wrecked the light carrier. Buracker fought to save her, then ordered her abandoned when it was decided she would have to be sunk by American guns. He received the Navy Cross, the Legion of Merit with Combat "V" and the Purple Heart. His relief, Captain John Hoskins, was already aboard when the battle began.
After the war he taught naval science at MIT. On 1 May 1947 he retired to become Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Works, and he pushed through the expansion of Boston's Logan Airport, with a central terminal and four runways. He resigned in January 1949 so the new governor could appoint his own man, and he then worked for the engineering firm Jackson & Moreland. He died in Winchester on 7 March 1977. Actors portrayed him in The Eternal Sea (1955), Tora! Tora! Tora! and War and Remembrance.