Ships
- USS McCord (DD-534) Captain from 26 August 1944
Commander Fred Daniel Michael, United States Navy, became captain of the destroyer McCord (DD-534) on 26 August 1944. He succeeded William Talty Kenny in command of a Fletcher-class ship that had already spent a year with the Pacific Fleet. He held that command in the rank of commander.
McCord was built to run with the fast carriers. Her main battery was five 5-inch guns, backed by a heavy antiaircraft outfit and a bank of torpedo tubes, and her speed let her hold station on the largest ships in the force. In the screen she guarded the carriers against submarines and aircraft, took a turn at plane-guard duty when pilots went into the water, and came alongside the oilers when the task force refueled at sea.
Michael took the bridge as that force turned toward the Philippines. In the weeks after 26 August 1944, McCord steamed with the carrier groups through strikes on the island approaches, Formosa, and Luzon, and through the operations that covered the landings at Leyte. Japanese aircraft came out against the fleet in strength that autumn. The destroyers’ directors, lookouts, and guns formed the close defense around the flight decks while the carriers launched and recovered their own planes.
The same duty carried McCord into 1945. She served with the fast carriers in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns and in the closing strikes on the Japanese home islands. Watches turned on station-keeping, fueling, plane guard, and antiaircraft defense. Off Okinawa the fleet fought a long battle against suicide aircraft, and destroyers in that campaign spent weeks cycling between quiet hours of steaming and sudden calls to general quarters.
A captain in that screen answered for the ship’s place in formation, for the readiness of her weapons and engineering plant, and for a crew that lived for months in a hull shaped for speed. Michael’s command of McCord began on 26 August 1944, during the drive that carried the Pacific Fleet from the Philippines to the waters off Japan.