USS Lloyd Thomas (DD-764)
1945 Gearing-class destroyer
The third USS Lloyd Thomas (DD/DDE-764) was a Gearing-class destroyer in the United States Navy during the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
Namesake
Lloyd Thomas was born on 10 March 1912 in Nelsonville, Ohio. He was the second son and the fifth of six children of Perry Rice Thomas, a miner, and Donna Maria Fisher Thomas. He attended the local schools, graduating from Chauncey Dover High School and earning a degree from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio in June 1935. Thomas was appointed as an aviation cadet on 4 October 1938, and commissioned as an ensign on 26 October 1939. He joined Torpedo Squadron 6 (VT-6) aboard aircraft carrier USS Enterprise on 13 December 1939 and a year later was promoted to lieutenant, junior grade. He married Mildred Macklin, a Navy nurse, in Yuma, Arizona, taking out a marriage license on 1 March 1941.
Piloting a Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bomber on 4 June 1942, he died in his squadron's attack during the Battle of Midway. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.
The name Lloyd Thomas was assigned first to the destroyer escort USS Lloyd Thomas (DE-312) and then to the destroyer escort USS Lloyd Thomas (DE-374), but both were canceled in 1944 before their construction was complete.
“USS Lloyd Thomas (DD-764)” enters the record as 1945 Gearing-class destroyer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lloyd, Thomas and DD-764 can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7871305. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1912, 1935, 1938 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Lloyd Thomas (DD-764)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.