JAMES B. CANNON, CDR, USN

James Cannon '40

Date of birth: December 19, 1916

Date of death: October 28, 1955

Age: 38

Lucky Bag

From the 1940 Lucky Bag:

JAMES BUFORD CANNON

Lawrenceburg, Tennessee

Jim

Jim hails from Tennessee and is probably the only Cannon in the Navy that did not have to go to Dahlgren before being accepted. We remember him from Plebe year as the man under the hat that was bobbing up when the others were going down. Since then he has been bobbing up effectively wherever the regiment has an active interest. Soccer has claimed his wholehearted and individual attention every fall. The Boat Club and Quarterdeck Society have received their share of interest from this conscientious sailor man who looks forward to joining the Fleet as most of us look forward to September leave.

Soccer 4, 1; Quarterdeck Society 4, 3, 2, 2, 1 Vice-President 1; Boat Club 4, 3, 2, 1; Track 4; 1 Stripe.

JAMES BUFORD CANNON

Lawrenceburg, Tennessee

Jim

Jim hails from Tennessee and is probably the only Cannon in the Navy that did not have to go to Dahlgren before being accepted. We remember him from Plebe year as the man under the hat that was bobbing up when the others were going down. Since then he has been bobbing up effectively wherever the regiment has an active interest. Soccer has claimed his wholehearted and individual attention every fall. The Boat Club and Quarterdeck Society have received their share of interest from this conscientious sailor man who looks forward to joining the Fleet as most of us look forward to September leave.

Soccer 4, 1; Quarterdeck Society 4, 3, 2, 2, 1 Vice-President 1; Boat Club 4, 3, 2, 1; Track 4; 1 Stripe.

Loss

Jim was lost on October 29, 1955 when his plane crashed in Montgomery, Alabama. (Information from December 1955 and January 1956 issues of Shipmate.)

Obituary

From History of Class of 1940:

When the war started December 7, 1941, Jim was in the battleship USS TENNESSEE in the gunnery department. A large bomb hit Turret Three to which he was assigned. Many men in his division were killed. The ship subsequently returned to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard for repair, after which it joined Task Force One. When TENNESSEE returned to Puget Sound for modernization, Jim was ordered to the shipyard, Orange, Texas, to the destroyer USS AULICK as gunnery officer. After it was commissioned, and following shakedown, the ship deployed to the South Pacific.
In May of 1943, Jim left the Pacific for flight training, receiving his wings in December of 1943. From 1944 to 1945, he served as flight instructor at NAS Lake City. With the end of the war, he was ordered to flight training for carrier qualification.
Returning to the Pacific in 1946, Jim joined COMNATSPAC, in Honolulu as Air Traffic Control Officer. From there, he went to VR-6 as Operations Officer, to fly the Berlin Airlift until it was terminated in August of 1949.
A nice sojourn in the United States as NAS Monterey, California, as Operations Officer, preceded his orders to Saigon, Vietnam, as Commanding Officer of the Navy Section of MAAG, Indochina. He spent two and one-half years there as advisor to the French Navy. He became fluent in French and conversational in Vietnamese. He returned to the United States in February, 1954, just before the fall of Dien Bien Phu.
Jim's last assignment was at Headquarters, Air Intelligence, Op- 552, Washington, D.C. He was killed when the plane he was piloting crashed en route from Anacostia to Pensacola, October 29, 1955.
Jim is survived by his wife, Betty; daughter, Christy; son, Michael; grandson, Obie Porteous and granddaughter, Elinor Cannon. His son, Jim Jr., then a LT in the Navy, was killed in the crash of an F-8 Crusader (in 1970) while attached to NAS Miramar as a combat flight instructor, Fighter Squadron 124.

As mentioned in his obituary, his son was also lost in a Navy aircraft accident.

James is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Photographs

From the Lucky Bag

Navy Directories & Officer Registers

The "Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps" was published annually from 1815 through at least the 1970s; it provided rank, command or station, and occasionally billet until the beginning of World War II when command/station was no longer included. Scanned copies were reviewed and data entered from the mid-1840s through 1922, when more-frequent Navy Directories were available.

The Navy Directory was a publication that provided information on the command, billet, and rank of every active and retired naval officer. Single editions have been found online from January 1915 and March 1918, and then from three to six editions per year from 1923 through 1940; the final edition is from April 1941.

The entries in both series of documents are sometimes cryptic and confusing. They are often inconsistent, even within an edition, with the name of commands; this is especially true for aviation squadrons in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Alumni listed at the same command may or may not have had significant interactions; they could have shared a stateroom or workspace, stood many hours of watch together… or, especially at the larger commands, they might not have known each other at all. The information provides the opportunity to draw connections that are otherwise invisible, though, and gives a fuller view of the professional experiences of these alumni in Memorial Hall.