Ships
- USS Halford (DD-480) Captain from 10 April 1943
G. N. Johansen, Gustave Norman Johansen, took command of the new Fletcher-class destroyer Halford on 10 April 1943, the day the ship was commissioned at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington. He was a lieutenant commander. The destroyer had been launched there the previous October, with Eunice Halford as sponsor, and was named for William Halford, the sailor who survived an open-boat voyage for help after Saginaw was wrecked in the mid-Pacific in 1870.
Halford was among the few destroyers of her class finished with a catapult and a single scout seaplane. The gear sat aft of the second stack and took the place of a 5-inch gun and a bank of torpedo tubes, a trade the ship made so she could scout for the fleet. Her aviator later remembered that Johansen wanted a fully armed fighting destroyer and had little enthusiasm for the airplane. On 5 July 1943 Halford left San Diego for Pearl Harbor and arrived five days later. For the next three and a half months she tried out aircraft operations from a destroyer's deck.
The experiment ended that autumn. Carrier aviation was expanding, and a plane on a small hull no longer looked worth the guns and torpedoes it displaced. Halford returned to Mare Island on 27 October 1943. The catapult and seaplane came off, and the ship was altered back toward a conventional destroyer battery. Johansen then took her west again.
Late in 1943 Halford called at Pearl Harbor, Funafuti, Espiritu Santo, and Tutuila in Samoa, and settled into convoy duty. Over Christmas she helped guard the big troopship Lurline, which was carrying Marine reinforcements to Guadalcanal. Off Lunga Point she took charge of the antisubmarine screen. She also supported the beachhead on Bougainville, screening supply runs and joining coastal bombardments.
In February 1944 Halford served as flagship for Rear Admiral T. S. Wilkinson's attack force against the Green Islands. The force sailed from Vella Lavella and the Treasury Islands on 12 and 13 February with Major General Barrowclough's 3rd New Zealand Division embarked in the transports, and put the troops ashore at Barahun Island on 15 February. Johansen left Halford on 3 April 1944, after just short of a year in command. He remained in the Navy, rose to rear admiral, and retired in 1959.