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Samuel Booker Roberts Jr. (12 May 1921 – 27 September 1942) was a U.S. Navy coxswain who was killed in the Battle of Guadalcanal, and became the namesake of three U.S. Navy warships.

Roberts was born in San Francisco, California, on 12 May 1921. He enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1939 and was called to active duty in 1940. Roberts served aboard the USS California (BB-44) and the transport USS Heywood (AP-12), before being transferred to the cargo transport USS Bellatrix (AK-20, later AKA-20).

In 1942, Bellatrix was assigned to Task Group Four and became part of the Guadalcanal Assault Force. As a coxswain for the Bellatrixs assault boats, Roberts helped ferry supplies from the transport ships to a tenuous beachhead. He survived the ship's sinking at Samar.

  • , a , commissioned in 1946 and struck in 1970.
  • , an guided missile frigate, commissioned in 1986 and decommissioned in 2015. She survived an explosion from an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf in 1988. The blast also broke the keel of the ship; such structural damage is almost always fatal to most vessels. The crew fought fire and flooding for five hours and saved the ship.

Other honors

In 2009, the U.S. Navy named a damage control trainer at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii after FFG-58. It trains sailors to fight shipboard flooding of the sort the frigate faced after striking a mine in 1988.

References

Further reading

  • (Gives fuller bio of Roberts; discusses the ships named for him)