Ships
- USS Farragut (DD-348) Captain, 21 June 1943 – 25 May 1944
Edward Franklin Ferguson was born in Connecticut on 30 July 1908. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1931. He held the rank of lieutenant from 1 July 1939 and the rank of lieutenant commander from 15 June 1942. From 21 June 1943 to 25 May 1944 he was captain of the destroyer Farragut (DD-348).
He relieved Henry Dirk Rozendal while Farragut was serving in Alaskan waters. The ship had already screened the Attu landings that May. Ferguson’s command opened on the next island in the chain. From 5 July 1943 Farragut patrolled off Kiska and kept up the blockade. On 22 July she bombarded suspected antiaircraft positions on Sunrise Hill.
Before dawn on 26 July 1943, radar reported contacts about ninety miles southwest of Kiska that looked like Japanese ships. Farragut took a place in the antisubmarine screen for the battleships Idaho and Mississippi, with the destroyers Abner Read and Perry, in Task Group 16.12. The formation opened fire on the plotted targets. The returns were false, the episode later called the Battle of the Pips, and the water ahead of the guns was empty.
The Japanese finished evacuating Kiska on 28 July, and fog hid the withdrawal from the ships offshore. Farragut shelled the island again in the days before Allied troops landed on 15 August. The landing force came ashore on an island the garrison had already left. She stayed to cover those troops until 4 September, then left Adak in convoy for San Francisco and a short overhaul.
On 19 October 1943 Farragut sailed from San Diego for training in Hawaiian waters and at Espiritu Santo. She joined Operation Galvanic, the seizure of the Gilbert Islands, and served in that operation from 13 November to 8 December 1943. Her duty was with the carriers whose aircraft covered the landings on Tarawa on 20 November. She remained in the screen until the force shaped course for Pearl Harbor on 8 December, and afterward she returned to the West Coast for repairs and further training.
She left San Diego on 13 January 1944 for Operation Flintlock, the occupation of the Marshall Islands. At Kwajalein and at Eniwetok she guarded carriers, patrolled, and searched for submarines. In the spring she was still with the fast carrier groups. On 2 May 1944 she lay alongside Yorktown while Task Group 58.2 steamed toward Majuro. On 25 May 1944 Ferguson turned Farragut over to Charles Conway Hartigan.
Ferguson died on 28 July 1969. His eleven months in Farragut ran from the Kiska blockade, through the carrier screens at Tarawa, and on to the Marshalls landings.