Ships
- USS Yarnall (DD-541) Captain, 30 December 1943 – 8 August 1944
Benjamin Francis Tompkins was born in Newberry, South Carolina, on 20 September 1902. He studied at the Citadel from 1920 to 1922, then entered the United States Naval Academy and graduated with the class of 1926. He spent his career in the Navy and retired as a rear admiral.
Early in the Pacific war he commanded the destroyer Coghlan. On 26 March 1943 he took her into action against Japanese naval forces off the Komandorski Islands. The Navy awarded him the Silver Star for gallantry and intrepidity in that fight.
On 30 December 1943, in the temporary rank of captain and still borne on the rolls as a commander, he placed the new Fletcher-class destroyer Yarnall in commission at San Francisco. Bethlehem Steel had laid the ship down there in December 1942 and launched her in July 1943. Through January and February 1944 she shook down and trained off San Diego. She left the West Coast early in March, reached Oahu on the 19th, and spent the next ten weeks in further tactical exercises among the Hawaiian Islands.
Those drills led straight into the Marianas campaign. In June 1944 Yarnall gave bombardment and antiaircraft support for the landings on Saipan. On 19 June, the first day of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, she was with Task Group 58.7, stationed in the path of the Japanese air attack between Saipan and the Philippines. Dive bombers and torpedo planes struck at her repeatedly. Her gunners shot down three of them and helped turn the rest away. For that day he received a Gold Star in lieu of a second Silver Star. In July the ship carried out the same kind of gunfire and antiaircraft duty during the assault on Tinian.
Tompkins left Yarnall on 8 August 1944, when James Henry Hogg relieved him. James Beattie Denny took the destroyer later that year. Tompkins died in Hawaii on 17 October 1991, at the age of eighty-nine.