Cutler

Thomas J. Cutler is a retired lieutenant commander and former gunner’s mate second class who served in patrol craft, cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers. His varied assignments included an in-country Vietnam tour, small-craft command, and nine years at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he served as Executive Assistant to the Chairman of the Seamanship & Navigation Department and Associate Chairman of the History Department. Winner of the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Naval Literature, the U.S. Naval Institute Press Author of the Year, and the Commodore Dudley W. Knox Naval History Lifetime Achievement Award, his published works include The Battle of Leyte Gulf and Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal & Riverine Warfare in Vietnam

Articles by Thomas Cutler

Captain William Sterling “Deak” Parsons on Tinian in 1945. Although he was hoping for a seagoing command, his technical prowess got him drafted into the Manhattan Project, which kept him ashore for the duration of the war.

Deak and the Little Boy

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
June 2025
With World War II in its fourth year, Navy Captain William Parsons had wanted—indeed expected—to be commanding ships at sea at this point in his career.
In January 1967,  the Viet Cong mined the dredge Jamaica Bay, trapping one of her civilian mariners in the mangled hull. It would take a heroic effort to free him from the rapidly sinking craft.

Saving Rather than Taking a Life

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
May 2025
During the war in Vietnam, keeping open the vital waterways of the Saigon River and Mekong Delta was essential to the South Vietnamese economy.
Jim and Taimi Leavelle at Pearl Harbor, the site of Jim’s first brush with history in 1941. Two decades later, as a detective with the Dallas Police Department, he would be witness to another momentous event in the nation’s history.

Jim Leavelle—Fate Knocks Twice

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
February 2025
When Jim Leavelle left the destroyer USS Hammann (DD-412) in spring 1941 and reported to his new assignment, he expected a quiet tour of duty...
Civilians laden with their earthly possessions flee their homes and make for the landing beaches to be transported from the Communist-bombed Dachen Islands to Formosa (Taiwan) by the U.S. Seventh Fleet, 7 February 1955. Right: Chinese Nationalist soldiers load ammo aboard the USS Ford County (LST-772) as evacuation operations continue.

Crisis in the Taiwan Strait

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
December 2024
It was the opening round of a struggle that continues to this day—and may yet end in superpower conflict. Here is how it all started.

Books by Thomas Cutler