Ships
- USS Luce (DD-522) Captain from 21 June 1943
Commander D. C. Varian, Donald Cord Varian, was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, on 7 March 1901. He was a lieutenant commander by 1 August 1939, received a temporary promotion to commander on 1 August 1942, and was given the temporary rank of captain on 20 July 1943. He retired from the Navy on 1 August 1961 and died on 18 September 1969.
His first listed wartime command was the flush-deck destroyer Conway (DD-70). As a lieutenant commander he took her on 9 August 1940, the day she returned to commission after years in reserve, and remained in command until 23 October 1940, when the United States turned the ship over to the Royal Navy. She entered British service as Lewes. On 11 December 1940 he assumed command of Stringham (APD-6), a destroyer rebuilt as a high-speed transport, and stayed with her until 10 March 1942.
In the summer of 1942 he had a short command of the destroyer Lansdale (DD-426), from 5 July to 16 September, still as a lieutenant commander. The appointment placed him in the Atlantic destroyer force during the period when those ships were covering convoys and training for overseas work.
The command that ties him to the Pacific War is Luce (DD-522). Bethlehem Steel laid the Fletcher-class destroyer down at Staten Island on 24 August 1942 and launched her on 6 March 1943. Varian became her first commanding officer when she was commissioned on 21 June 1943, then holding the rank of commander. She spent the rest of that summer fitting out and working up around New York. Early in August she left Charleston, South Carolina, with the carrier Ranger and other destroyers, then joined the heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa in the ocean escort of the liner Queen Mary, which was carrying Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the British chiefs of staff toward the Quebec conference.
Luce sailed from New York on 5 September 1943, called at Trinidad and San Diego, and reached Bremerton, Washington, on 28 October. On 1 November she left for Pearl Harbor as plane guard for the carrier Enterprise and began gunnery exercises in Hawaiian waters. Commander Hinton A. Owens relieved Varian at Pearl Harbor on 22 November 1943. Under the captains who followed, the destroyer patrolled the Aleutians, bombarded the Kuriles, and served in the Philippines and off New Guinea. A kamikaze sank her west of Okinawa on 4 May 1945.