Ships
- USS Hutchins (DD-476) Captain from 17 November 1942
Edwin Warren Herron, who appears in wartime Navy usage as E. W. Herron, was born in Adair, Oklahoma, on 7 November 1905. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1927 and received his commission in the Navy. The service advanced him to lieutenant on 30 June 1936 and to lieutenant commander on 1 August 1941.
In 1935 he married Marie Standley, a daughter of Admiral William H. Standley, then Chief of Naval Operations. The couple had five daughters. Herron later served with the Asiatic Fleet, and from 1937 to 1939 he commanded the yacht Isabel at Shanghai.
On 2 December 1941 he took command of the destroyer minelayer Pruitt. He was her commanding officer five days later, when Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor. He remained in Pruitt until October 1942.
On 17 November 1942, at the Boston Navy Yard, Lieutenant Commander Herron commissioned the new Fletcher-class destroyer Hutchins and became her first commanding officer. The yard had launched her on 20 February 1942. She was named for Lieutenant Carleton B. Hutchins, a naval aviator killed in a midair collision off southern California on 2 February 1938, who received the Medal of Honor for staying at the controls of his damaged seaplane so his crew could escape. Herron then took Hutchins through shakedown training in Casco Bay, Maine.
Hutchins left Boston on 17 March 1943 and escorted two tankers to Galveston, Texas. She passed the Panama Canal and reached San Diego on 11 April, then made an escort voyage to New Caledonia and Espiritu Santo. On 30 May she entered Pearl Harbor for changes to her armament. On 25 June, during gunnery trials in Hawaiian waters, an electrical failure caused a gun to fire into the ship's stack. Nine men were killed and twenty were wounded. Repair work at Pearl Harbor included installation of a new combat information center.
After those repairs Hutchins operated in the northern Pacific. She left those waters on 18 November 1943, bound for New Guinea, and reached Milne Bay on 19 December. Soon afterward she screened tank landing ships for the landings at Cape Gloucester, on the western end of New Britain. The assault opened on 26 December and was intended to secure the straits between New Britain and New Guinea. Herron stayed in command through the start of that campaign and left Hutchins on 11 February 1944, after about fifteen months as her captain.
He was promoted to temporary captain on 20 March 1945. He retired from the Navy as a rear admiral. Herron died in Alexandria, Virginia, on 25 December 1982, at the age of seventy-seven.