Ships
- USS South Dakota (BB-57) Captain from 20 June 1946 · Relieved on 21 December 1946
William K. Parsons was a commander in the United States Navy who held one recorded command of the battleship South Dakota in the months after the Pacific War ended. He was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on 7 December 1917, graduated from Duke University in 1940, and died on 6 May 2010. He was not a Naval Academy graduate. Little of his naval career was written down for the public, and this command of South Dakota is the one that can be stated with confidence.
He is not the officer the Navy remembers for the atomic bomb. William Sterling Parsons, called Deak, was a Naval Academy man of the class of 1922 and a weaponeer at Hiroshima. William Seavey Parsons was another Academy graduate, of the class of 1928. The commander who took South Dakota in 1946 shares neither career. Nothing from their service belongs to him.
South Dakota had already finished her war when he came aboard. She had fought at Santa Cruz and off Guadalcanal in 1942 under Thomas L. Gatch, screened the fast carriers across the Pacific, and entered Tokyo Bay for the surrender. Emmet P. Forrestel had her when the fighting stopped. By the summer of 1946 she was at Philadelphia, being put into reserve. Parsons became her commanding officer on 20 June 1946 and was relieved on 21 December 1946.
He was not in command on the night of 14-15 November 1942. That was Gatch. Washington sank Kirishima. South Dakota did not. Parsons fought no battle in her. His months were the quiet work of a reduced crew on a battleship the Navy was laying up, not a cruise and not a gun action.
Matthew S. Schmidling relieved him on 21 December 1946. Schmidling still had her when the Navy decommissioned her at Philadelphia on 31 January 1947. Parsons had left more than a month before that day. She was struck on 1 June 1962 and sold for scrap that October.