page_title: Allen B. Reed
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Allen B. Reed / Naval service / World War II
caption_attribution_description: English: US Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs online catalog
context_page_description: Captain Allen Bevins Reed was a U.S. Naval officer whose career began aboard vessels in the Asiatic and Pacific Fleets. Early in his career he was Captain Takeshita Isamu's escort during a ceremonial visit to the mayor of San Francisco, and he was a member of a Naval Board of Inquiry. Reed assumed the command of a landing force of 120 men in Nicaragua in 1912 to protect a railway line following a coup d'état attempt by General Luis Mena.
  Over his career, Reed commanded eight ships, and after he was made captain, he was commander of Division 80 of Destroyer Squadron 11, Division 30 of Battle Fleet from the flagship USS McCawley, and Division 45 of the Battle Fleet from USS Preble. Reed received the Navy Cross for his command of the USS Susquehanna during dangerous transatlantic voyages of World War I. Reed was the plank owner commanding officer of the newly commissioned heavy cruiser USS New Orleans, and in the summer of 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a cruise on the ship through the Panama Canal and the Pacific Ocean.
context_section_description: He retired by October 1, 1939, but he remained on active duty during the initial years of World War II. He was head of the United States Maritime Commission in the second half of 1939 and in 1940. Reed was a liaison to the Office of Production Management in Washington, D.C., which with the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board later became the War Production Board. He was an advisor to the Council of National Defense in 1941, which was a World War I organization that was reactivated for World War II and operated in 1940 and 1941.
  On September 6, 1944, his wife, Bess M. Reed, sponsored the USS Torsk at its launch from the Portsmouth (Maine) Navy Yard.
caption: Captain A.B. Reed, U.S. Navy Ret., liaison officer, Navy, and Office of Production Management, circa 1940
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