Ships
- USS Farragut (DD-348) Captain, 25 May 1944 – 23 October 1945
Commander Charles Conway Hartigan was a United States Navy destroyer officer, the son of Rear Admiral Charles Conway Hartigan. The admiral, a Naval Academy graduate of 1906, had earned the Medal of Honor at Veracruz in 1914, commanded the battleship Oklahoma from 1937 to 1939, and left active duty in 1941. He died in February 1944. That spring the younger Hartigan, already a combat officer in the Pacific, received a destroyer of his own.
Earlier in the war Hartigan was gunnery officer of the destroyer Hammann. A Japanese torpedo sank her during the Battle of Midway. He was awarded the Silver Star for his conduct in that action.
On 25 May 1944 he took command of Farragut (DD-348), name ship of her class. Built at Bethlehem’s Fore River yard, she had gone into commission on 18 June 1934 under Elliott Buckmaster. She was in Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Her commanding officer, George Porter Hunter, was ashore when the attack began, and the senior officer left on board took her to sea, firing as she cleared the channel. By the time Hartigan relieved, she was a veteran of the central Pacific.
His tour carried Farragut through the last amphibious campaigns of the war. In June 1944 she operated with the force invading Saipan, and in July she took part in the landings on Guam. In November she reached Ulithi and screened oilers off central Luzon. In February 1945 she supported the assault on Iwo Jima. From May she screened carriers and escorted convoys between Ulithi and Okinawa.
On 21 August 1945 Farragut sailed from Saipan for the United States. Hartigan’s command ended on 23 October 1945, the day the destroyer was decommissioned at the New York Naval Shipyard. She was struck from the Navy list in January 1947 and sold for scrap that August.