Ships
- USS Haggard (DD-555) Captain from 31 August 1943
Commander D. A. Harris of the United States Navy took command of the destroyer Haggard on 31 August 1943, the day the ship was placed in commission. He was her first commanding officer, responsible for a new hull, a new crew, and the long passage from the builder’s yard into the Pacific fleet.
Haggard (DD-555) was a Fletcher-class fleet destroyer, built on the West Coast by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation and finished in the late summer of 1943. Ships of her class were a little over 376 feet long, fast enough to run with the carriers, and armed with five 5-inch guns, a dense battery of lighter anti-aircraft weapons, torpedoes, and depth charges. They were the escorts the Navy was turning out in numbers for the Central Pacific drive.
Harris’s first task was to make that armament and the men behind it work as one ship. Fitting out, trials, and shakedown filled the weeks after commissioning. Gun crews, sonar and radar teams, engineers, and deck hands drilled until watches, shiphandling, and general quarters settled into routine, and yard defects were cleared before Haggard was sent forward.
Destroyers commissioned at that moment were headed for the fast carrier force. Their ordinary work was the screen: anti-submarine search on the flanks, plane guard during flight operations, and close anti-aircraft defense when Japanese aircraft found the formation. They also bombarded shore positions for landings and stood ready for a night surface action. Through the Marshalls operation, the carrier strikes of early 1944, and the move into the Marianas, that was the employment of a ship that had left the West Coast under a commander appointed at her commissioning.
Haggard stayed in the Pacific war into 1945. Off Okinawa in late April of that year she was badly damaged in combat and was withdrawn from further fighting. Harris’s command is the start of her commissioned life, when he took the new destroyer from the yard and put her into the fleet that was then gathering for the long advance across the Central Pacific.