Charles Rozier '44 His “welcome aboard” saw him initially billeted in a fold-up bunk in the officers’ country passageway, but it wasn’t long before Rozier had a berth in the junior officers’ bunkroom with duty as assistant main battery plotting room Officer (and a battle station in Fire Control Plot). It was from this D-Day vantage point that the ensign was able to “make the longest spot applied in naval gunnery fire.”

“Our air spotter reported that his wingman had been shot down, and he couldn’t stay much longer,” Rozier recalled. But the aviator was able to confirm that Tuscaloosa was raining steel on the bevy of German supply trucks and troop carriers Rozier was after.

When the spotter reported a large collection of trucks “about three miles farther down the road,” the Academy grad “picked off a point three nautical miles (beyond) the current target, measured the difference in bearing with (my) parallel arm plotter, and gave the plotting room officer the spot, ‘up six thousand, left three and one-half degrees.’”

“The spot was cranked into the Main Battery Mark Eight rangekeeper and a spotting round was fired,” said Rozier. “To our surprise and my delight, the spot from our Spitfire pilot was,‘twelve o’clock, 50; fire for effect.’”

The report from the air was that “rounds were falling into the road and damaged trucks were stopping the advance.” Rozier heard similar good news from the Fourth Army Division an hour after Tuscaloosa fired on German infantry to the American soldiers’ immediate front, “Mission successful; resistance was heavy; you knocked hell out of them.”

“Words like that kept our spirits at a high level,” said Rozier. Dispatched to provide further combat support to the south, operating out of Algiers, Tuscaloosa was then overhauled in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in the fall of 1944, steamed through the Panama Canal, and joined the fight off Iwo Jima and Okinawa in l945. By then, Rozier was the ship’s plotting room officer.

He was also officer of the deck for Tuscaloosa’s decommissioning ceremony in San Francisco in l946.