Ships
- USS Porterfield (DD-682) Captain from 4 July 1945
On 4 July 1945, Lieutenant Commander Arthur Frederick Fischer, Jr., became captain of the United States Navy destroyer Porterfield (DD-682). His date of rank as lieutenant commander was 1 July 1945. He remained in command until 17 November 1945.
Porterfield was a Fletcher-class destroyer built at Bethlehem in San Pedro, California. Her keel was laid on 12 December 1942, she was launched on 13 June 1943, and she was commissioned on 30 October 1943. The name honored Rear Admiral Lewis Broughton Porterfield. In the year and a half before Fischer took her, she screened fast carriers and supported operations in the Marshall Islands, the Marianas, the Palaus, the Philippines, the South China Sea, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Her crew recovered downed aviators, sank a Japanese picket boat on 26 February 1945, and off Okinawa fought kamikaze attacks, bringing down four Japanese aircraft in one engagement with a gun already out of action, and went to the aid of the damaged destroyers Newcomb and Leutze. Ten battle stars for World War II mark that service. Fischer's tour opened in the last summer of the war, after the campaigns that earned those stars.
He had Porterfield from 4 July through Japan's surrender in August 1945 and into the first autumn of peace. Shipmates serving in her with him included John Carl Woelfel, Donald Wesley Wulzen, and Neil Bruce MacIntosh. His command ended on 17 November 1945. The destroyer finished that first commission the following summer and was decommissioned on 15 July 1946.
Porterfield returned to the fleet for the Korean War. She was recommissioned on 27 April 1951, earned four battle stars in that war, and stayed in service until she was decommissioned again on 7 November 1969. Her name was struck from the Navy list on 1 March 1975, and she was sunk as a target on 18 July 1982. Fischer's recorded command is the short passage from Independence Day 1945 to November of that year, at the close of her first commission.