Ships
- USS Hunt (DD-674) Captain, 8 December 1943 – 18 December 1943
- USS Aylwin (DD-355) Captain, 31 May 1944 – 27 June 1945
William Kittredge Rogers (25 October 1915 – 7 May 1998) was a United States Navy officer from Haddonfield, New Jersey, a graduate of the Naval Academy in the class of 1938. He served in the battleship Idaho and then in the destroyer O'Brien from her early Pacific service until she was torpedoed in September 1942 and lost a month later. He was executive officer of the destroyers Hilary P. Jones and Hunt and, according to hobbyist command lists, briefly in command of Hunt for ten days in December 1943. From 31 May 1944 to 27 June 1945 he commanded the destroyer Aylwin. On 18 December 1944, in the typhoon that sank three destroyers of Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet, she rolled to seventy degrees and lay on her side for some twenty minutes, and he and his crew brought her through. The Navy later credited him with the Legion of Merit for his conduct against Japanese forces. He later commanded the destroyers Tingey and Benner, served as executive officer of the heavy cruiser Rochester, and retired as a captain. He married Jane Bronson Williams and they had two daughters.
He was born in Haddonfield, New Jersey, on 25 October 1915. A compilation of Social Security records names his parents as Guy W. Rogers and Mary F. Kittredge; the middle name matches his mother's maiden name as given there. The sources examined here say nothing more about his parents, their work, or any brothers or sisters.
A biographical note printed in the 1955 cruise book of the heavy cruiser Rochester, when he was her executive officer, supplies the little that is known of his boyhood. He played football and basketball at Haddonfield High School and graduated "with honors" in 1933. He was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1934 by Senator W. Warren Barbour "on the basis of a competitive examination in which he placed first in the state." He was eighteen when he entered. The Academy's yearbook adds that after Haddonfield High he "elaborated on the 'three R's' under the tutelage of Commander Cochran," without saying where.
The 1938 Lucky Bag, the midshipmen's yearbook, gives him the nicknames "Bill" and "Willie," and a page of the kind that classmates wrote about one another. "BILL embarked upon his naval career with a clear conception of what was ahead of him," it begins. Academics were "fruit" for him, though "starring is not Bill's big objective." Tennis, football and basketball were "his big weaknesses." He was "a good mixer," popular "with the fair sex as he is with his classmates," and the pictures in his locker and his correspondence "testify to this fact." The sketch ends with a character reference rather than a joke: "With a sense of humor that never lets him down and a modesty that is real, Bill is a man's man and a man's friend — a true shipmate and a credit to the service that he loves." His activity line lists tennis and battalion football.
He graduated on 2 June 1938, at twenty-two, and was commissioned an ensign. The Navy Directories of 1938 and 1939 list him in the battleship Idaho. By the directory of 1940 he was an ensign in the new destroyer O'Brien, which had been commissioned on 2 March 1940, and the register of 1941 lists him as a lieutenant (junior grade). The sources examined here do not date his transfer or say what his duties were in either ship.
He therefore came to the war as a junior officer of a single, relatively new destroyer, one that spent 1940 and 1941 along the Atlantic seaboard before leaving Norfolk on 15 January 1942 for the Pacific.
The O'Brien reached San Francisco on 31 January 1942. Her official history follows her from there through a collision with the destroyer Cass that forced her back for repairs at Mare Island, then to Pearl Harbor, Midway, where she escorted the seaplane tender Curtiss to evacuate civilians in March, and Pago Pago, where she was kept for local escort work and for the occupation of Wallis Island in May. In August she sailed with the task force built around the carrier Wasp. On 15 September 1942, while escorting transports toward Guadalcanal, the force was attacked by the Japanese submarines I-15 and I-19. Wasp was sunk, the battleship North Carolina was damaged, and at about 1454 a torpedo struck O'Brien's port bow. The cruise book says he was aboard her when this happened. He was twenty-six.
The explosion did little visible damage but set up severe structural stresses through the hull. The destroyer reached Espiritu Santo on 16 September, went on to Nouméa for repairs, and on 10 October sailed for San Francisco. On 18 October, as her leaking increased and topside weight was jettisoned, preparations were made to abandon her. At 0600 on 19 October the bottom "suddenly opened up considerably," the forward and after parts of the hull began to work independently, and by 0800 she had gone under, "after steaming almost 3000 miles since torpedoed." All her crew were saved. The sources examined here preserve nothing of what he said or did in her during those five weeks.
His next assignment, by the cruise book's account, was as executive officer of the destroyer Hilary P. Jones, a ship whose official history places her in North Atlantic convoy duty until January 1944, and after that as executive officer of the new Fletcher-class destroyer Hunt, commissioned on 22 September 1943 under Commander Frank P. Mitchell. The dates of these assignments are not given in the sources examined here. The hobbyist command lists credit him with a ten-day command of Hunt from 8 to 18 December 1943, when he was twenty-eight; the ship's official history places her at that time on passage from Norfolk, which she left on 2 December, to Pearl Harbor, where she arrived on 24 December. The same history takes her through the Marshalls and the carrier raid on Truk in February 1944, the Palau strikes at the end of March, and the Hollandia landings in April. The cruise book calls Hunt "his third destroyer duty station" and does not say when he left her.
On 31 May 1944 he took command of Aylwin, a Farragut-class destroyer commissioned in 1935, then at Majuro in the Marshalls. He was twenty-eight. She had behind her Pearl Harbor, the Aleutians, the Gilberts and the Marshalls. She sailed with Task Force 58 for the Marianas on 6 June, and on the thirteenth she was one of the ships that bombarded the northern coast of Saipan. The ship's history records two rescues of downed carrier aviators in the next three days: two men from Bunker Hill on the fourteenth, and the pilot of a plane that crashed 1,800 yards astern on the sixteenth. On the seventeenth she was ordered to screen the transports and so missed the Battle of the Philippine Sea. In July she screened cruisers shelling Guam and then, with underwater demolition teams working near Asan beach, fired harassing fire and starshell on the night of 21 July from 1,500 yards off shore. She went to Bremerton for overhaul in August, trained in Hawaii in October and early November, and reached Ulithi on 21 November.
On 10 December 1944 she left Ulithi as flagship of Captain Jasper Acuff's replenishment group, Task Group 30.8, to refuel the Third Fleet as it supported the Philippine operations. The ship's history records that as the weather worsened the fleet's fueling stopped, "leaving many ships with depleted tanks, some improperly ballasted for the coming 'blow.'"
Three accounts of 17 and 18 December survive: the ship's entry in the Navy's destroyer history, the narrative in Samuel Eliot Morison's official history of naval operations, and a memoir by Erwin S. Jackson, who was the ship's gunnery officer. The first two give the outline. On the afternoon of the seventeenth, with fueling halted and the weather worsening, Rogers had the ship ballasted with seawater to make up for her empty tanks, and ordered all ready ammunition and movable topside gear struck below. Morison writes that she "water-ballasted her high side." On the eighteenth the ship lost steering, and she rolled seventy degrees to port. The ship's history says Rogers then ordered the engines stopped, and that she hung over for fifteen seconds before slowly righting herself. Any attempt to move forward increased the roll. A second roll of seventy degrees was followed by a recovery to only sixty degrees. According to Morison she "lay down on her side for twenty minutes," and the ship's history says that for the next twenty minutes she was pushed over to rolls of between thirty and seventy degrees. Steering came back intermittently, and Morison says it was used to bring her stern to windward, with the bow acting like a headsail. The engine-room ventilators failed, the temperature in the engine room reached 180 degrees, and the space was abandoned.
The chief engineer, Lieutenant Elwood R. Rendahl of the Naval Reserve, and Machinist's Mate First Class T. Sarenski had stayed at their stations to protect the electrical circuits. The ship's history records that Sarenski was swept overboard and, ten minutes later, Rendahl; Morison says that when they crawled out on deck through the only exit they were overcome and washed overboard. Neither was rescued.
Jackson's account, published in Naval History in December 2004, supplies the bridge. He describes the captain in the wardroom on the evening of the seventeenth saying he feared rough weather the next day and that the ship carried too much topside weight, and telling his gunnery officer to move the ready-service ammunition back to the magazines. In the worst hours of the storm he has Rogers call the engine room on the telephone and tell the engineer that if the ship's head could not be brought around he would secure the engines and abandon the spaces, so that no more men would be lost, and then give that order when the attempts failed. Jackson also describes him learning, with the ship unable to maneuver, that Sarenski and then Rendahl had gone over the side. Hull, Monaghan and Spence were lost in the same storm, each with heavy loss of life. Aylwin reached Ulithi three days before Christmas.
She was back with the replenishment groups in February 1945, and on 23 and 24 February, off Iwo Jima, she relieved the cruiser Tuscaloosa in fire-support sector 1 and fired 330 rounds of five-inch at enemy positions on call. During the Okinawa campaign she worked between Kerama Retto and Ulithi. On 5 June 1945 she met a second typhoon, "much less destructive than the first," and Rogers reported in writing: "with the present sea-keeping and stability characteristics, the Farragut-class destroyers are unable to adequately cope with severe typhoon conditions." It is the most direct statement of his professional judgment in the sources examined here, written six months after the December storm. She then helped look for the bow of the cruiser Pittsburgh, which the storm had torn away, and put into Apra Harbor, Guam, on 10 June for repairs.
The command lists end his time in Aylwin on 27 June 1945. He was twenty-nine. They date his command of Tingey from 7 July 1945, but that ship's official history says only that she reached Mare Island on 9 July and stayed there to the end of the war, and it does not name her captain. For his service in Aylwin the Rochester cruise book says he was later awarded the Legion of Merit for "exceptionally meritorious conduct" against Japanese forces. The citation itself was not found.
The 1955 cruise book records the rest of his career in outline. After Aylwin and Tingey he went to the battleship West Virginia as gunnery officer and acting executive officer, then to the Naval War College at Newport for postgraduate study and the staff of the General Line School there. He commanded the destroyer Benner and received a letter of commendation from the Commander, Destroyers, Atlantic Fleet, "as a result of his ship's placing first in the Battle Efficiency competition." On 6 July 1954 he became executive officer of the heavy cruiser Rochester, then flagship of the Seventh Fleet's cruiser force in the western Pacific. He was thirty-eight. The cruise book lists his ribbons: the Legion of Merit, the American Defense, American Theater, European Theater, Asiatic-Pacific and Philippine Liberation ribbons, and the Navy Occupation Medal, with eight engagement stars. It does not say where he served in Europe.
A Social Security compilation records that he was released from active duty on 30 June 1968, when he was fifty-two, and that he died on 7 May 1998, at eighty-two, with a Coronado, California, postal code. The obituary notices for his elder daughter call him "Captain William Kittredge Rogers, USN Ret.," a career naval officer, and "longtime resident" of Coronado.
He and his wife, Jane Bronson Williams Rogers, had two daughters. The elder, Ann Hadwen Rogers, was born in San Francisco in 1945. The family moved often, between Newport, Alexandria, Virginia, Long Beach, Coronado and London, and she did most of her schooling in Coronado. She became an art teacher in Baltimore and died on 10 March 2021, aged seventy-five. A younger daughter, Kitt, survived her and was living at Coronado in 2021. The date and place of his marriage are not known.
What remains of him in the record is a yearbook page that calls him modest, a good mixer and a true shipmate, a chain of destroyers' histories in which he is a name, one short written judgment about the ships he commanded, and one day in a typhoon in which his ship was brought through.