Ships
- USS Lardner (DD-487) Captain, 13 May 1942 – 16 June 1943
- USS Hickox (DD-673) Captain from 10 September 1943
William M. Sweetser was born in Gray, Maine, on 9 June 1902, where his parents kept a grocery store. He attended the town grade schools and Pennell Institute, then Severn School in Maryland. He entered the United States Naval Academy in 1922 and graduated in 1926. Ancestors who had been shipmasters had already drawn him toward the sea, and the Academy made that a career.
Before the Pacific war he served in the Atlantic in Marblehead, Charles Ausburne, and Wyoming, and in the Pacific in Lexington and Mississippi. On the Asiatic Station he served in Tracy and in the river gunboat Panay of the Yangtze Patrol. He was in Panay when Japanese aircraft attacked her at anchor on the Yangtze in December 1937 and sank her. In the same prewar years he completed two tours as assistant professor of naval science at Yale and spent a year in Shanghai studying Russian.
On 13 May 1942, as a lieutenant commander, he commissioned the new Gleaves-class destroyer Lardner at Kearny, New Jersey. Her shakedown off New England ran from 28 May to 1 July. The ship investigated reports of submarines near the Maine coast and searched for a reported U-boat off Guantánamo Bay. Promoted to commander that August, he took Lardner from Balboa on 21 August and reached Tongatabu on 3 September. Through the autumn the destroyer escorted convoys and fleet units between Nouméa and Espiritu Santo, screened transports landing troops on Guadalcanal, and shelled Japanese positions ashore.
On 15 September 1942, Lardner was screening Task Force 18 on the passage from the Santa Cruz Islands toward Espiritu Santo when a Japanese submarine torpedoed the carrier Wasp. The carrier sank. On the night of 30 November, Lardner fought with the cruiser and destroyer force off Tassafaronga. The American cruisers took heavy damage, and the Japanese destroyers drew off. That night closed the run of large Japanese surface sorties into the fight for Guadalcanal. Sweetser stayed in command through the following months of the Solomons campaign and turned Lardner over on 16 June 1943 to Otto Carl Schatz. Jefferson David Parker and, later, James Boyd commanded the destroyer in turn.
He next commissioned the Fletcher-class destroyer Hickox at Kearny on 10 September 1943 and took her as commanding officer. After a Caribbean shakedown she left Norfolk on 21 November and reported at Pearl Harbor on 12 December. She joined the screen of Admiral Marc Mitscher’s fast carrier task force and sortied on 16 January 1944 for the first carrier strikes against airfields in the Marshall Islands. Sweetser left Hickox on 4 March 1944. He then commanded Destroyer Division 92. From February 1945 until the end of the war he served in Washington on the staff of the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, and the Chief of Naval Operations. For his wartime service he received the Silver Star, two Bronze Star Medals with the Combat V, and two commendation ribbons with the Combat V.
After the war he was naval attaché at the American embassy in Belgrade, and in 1948 he advised the United States representative at the international conference on the Danube. He later served as professor of naval science at Dartmouth College, commanded Destroyer Squadron 32, and was chief of staff to the commander of the Atlantic hunter-killer force. Another attaché tour took him to the embassy in Moscow. He also presided over the general court-martial of the First Naval District. He retired in 1956 and was advanced to rear admiral on the strength of his combat citations.
In retirement he earned a master’s degree at Purdue University and taught mathematics and statistics at La Salle University in Philadelphia. He had married Martha Callanan, and after her death he married again. Sweetser died on 30 November 2007 in South Paris, Maine, at the age of 105. He was then the oldest living graduate of the Naval Academy.