Ships
- USS Izard (DD-589) Captain from 15 May 1943
Commander Earl K. Van Swearingen took command of Izard (DD-589) on 15 May 1943, the day the destroyer was commissioned in the United States Navy. She was a Fletcher-class ship, one of the fast fleet destroyers the Navy was putting into service in large numbers that year, and he was the officer who first took her to sea as a commissioned man-of-war.
The opening of the command was spent making a new hull and a new crew into one ship. Fitting out, sea trials, and repeated drills in gunnery, engineering, and station-keeping filled the weeks after commissioning. Izard was ready for the fleet only when her people could fight her in the dark and while she was under way, and that training sat with her captain.
Ships of her class carried five 5-inch guns, banks of torpedo tubes, depth charges, and a strong antiaircraft battery, and they were built to run at better than thirty-five knots beside the aircraft carriers. Izard went to the Pacific, where destroyers of that kind screened the carriers, kept station on the formations, and met submarines and aircraft on the edge of the task force.
Van Swearingen served in that command as a commander, the rank usually held by the captain of a fleet destroyer in the middle of the war. A ship of this size had a crew of about three hundred officers and men. The captain answered for them in formation, at general quarters, and through the long stretches of fueling, patrolling, and night steaming between actions.
His command of Izard dates from 15 May 1943, at the start of her commissioned life. From then the destroyer and her first captain belonged to the Pacific fleet that was moving west through the island chains, and the ship’s work was the exacting daily duty of a fleet destroyer on that advance.