Ships
- USS Hunt (DD-674) Captain, 23 November 1955 – 17 August 1957
Eugene Harrison Farrell was born on 17 April 1918 in rural Bosque County, Texas, the son of Enoch Harrison Farrell and Adeline Arnold Bible. He was a fourth-generation Texan, and his mother's grandfather, James Richard Arnold, had been among the early settlers of that county. In 1933 he moved to Florida, finished Tarpon Springs High School in 1936, and enlisted in the Navy soon afterward as an apprentice seaman.
He was appointed to the United States Naval Academy and graduated with the Class of 1942 on 19 December 1941, twelve days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The same day he reported to the battleship USS Idaho (BB-42). For the next thirty-nine months he served as a main-battery fire-control officer, directing the ship's heavy guns in support of landings. Those operations ran from Attu in the Aleutians through the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.
After the war he became executive officer of the destroyer USS Fiske with the occupation forces in the Mediterranean. Between sea tours he earned a postgraduate degree in communications engineering at Harvard. In 1953 he served with the United States diplomatic mission in Madrid. His Spanish was strong enough that he acted as recorder and interpreter in the negotiations for American base rights in Spain.
Farrell took command of the destroyer USS Hunt (DD-674) on 23 November 1955, still a commander, and held her in the Atlantic Fleet until 17 August 1957. He relieved Robert Hoitt Alexander. Hunt was a Fletcher-class ship that had first commissioned on 22 September 1943 under Frank Paull Mitchell, Jr., served through the Pacific war, and gone out of commission in December 1945. The Navy returned her to service at San Diego on 31 October 1951 under Lynn F. Barry, and she moved on to Newport for antisubmarine and plane-guard duty. From that port Farrell worked her in western Atlantic exercises and on cruises into the Caribbean. On 17 August 1957 he turned her over to Albert Louis Stickles II, who kept the ship only until Samuel Lloyd Collins took command nine days later.
He afterward completed the senior course at the Naval War College in Newport. A paper he wrote there, on a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, was selected as the best in his class. Promoted to captain, he commanded Destroyer Division 132 in the Seventh Fleet and Destroyer Division 232 in the Third Fleet. He then returned to the Atlantic as commanding officer of USS Northampton, the ship maintained as a national command post for the president.
A later assignment in Newport put him at the head of the Navy officer candidate school, the officer candidate school conducted there for the Vietnamese navy, and the Naval Schools Command. In that tour he was promoted to rear admiral and sent to the Defense Communications Agency as director of operations. His decorations included the Legion of Merit. Counting his time as a sailor, a midshipman, and an officer, he served thirty-eight years, and he was the first Texan to rise from apprentice seaman to rear admiral.
He married Melinda Haynes, the daughter of Rear Admiral Kenneth Haynes. In retirement he published Anecdotes and Sea Stories, a series of episodes drawn from a career that ran through three wars. Farrell died on 28 April 2019, at the age of 101.