Qualla: USS John A. Bole

USS John A. Bole: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The widow launched the ship. On 1 November 1944, at Bethlehem Steel's Staten Island yard, Mrs. John A. Bole Jr. swung a champagne bottle against steel and sent the destroyer that bore her husband's name down the slipway. Lieutenant Commander John Archibald Bole Jr. had died the previous year somewhere off Rabaul, aboard the submarine Amberjack, which vanished into the waters he had been sent to patrol. He was thirty-six. The ship that took his name would spend the next twenty-six years returning again and again to the Pacific he never came home from - to Okinawa, to Korea, to Vietnam, to the same New Britain coast where Amberjack had gone down.

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USS John A. Bole: The Name on the Hull

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John Archibald Bole Jr. was born in Elmhurst, Queens, in March 1906. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1928 and volunteered for the submarine service - in those years, an ambitious young officer's way to stand apart. He took command of the USS Amberjack when she commissioned...

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USS John A. Bole: A War Already Ending

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the time Bole was commissioned in March 1945, the Pacific War had a foregone conclusion but still plenty of dying to do. She arrived off Okinawa on 29 June, just as ground fighting there was ending. The kamikazes, though, were not. For six weeks she stood picket duty - the lon...

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USS John A. Bole: The Sitting Duck

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 11 April 1951, Bole anchored three miles off Swatow on the coast of mainland China. General Douglas MacArthur had ordered her there. The orders were, in MacArthur's understanding, to provoke a Chinese response that might justify wider war. Bole was, in the words of the ship's ...

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USS John A. Bole: Yankee Station Regular

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Through seven Korean deployments, Formosa Patrols, antisubmarine exercises off Okinawa, and a stint as air-sea rescue ship for President Eisenhower's 1960 Pacific flight, Bole became something like a regular at the busiest intersections of the Cold War. In 1961 she underwent Flee...

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USS John A. Bole: The Final Transfer

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bole was decommissioned at San Diego on 6 October 1970 at 1003 hours - the Navy records the minute, because the Navy is like that. She was struck in 1974 and transferred to Taiwan, where she was cannibalized for spare parts to keep her sister ships running. One battle star from W...

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