Ships
- USS Farragut (DD-348) Captain, 25 June 1939 – 15 April 1941
George Washington Welker was a United States Navy line officer, carried in the service registers as George Washington Welker, Jr. He was born on 20 October 1902, his home of record was Salisbury, Missouri, and he graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1923. He was promoted to lieutenant commander on 23 June 1938.
On 25 June 1939 he took command of the destroyer Farragut (DD-348). She was the lead ship of her class, built at the Bethlehem yard in Quincy, Massachusetts, launched in March 1934, and commissioned on 18 June 1934. Elliott Buckmaster was her first commanding officer. Edward Paul Sauer relieved Buckmaster in June 1936, and Peter Kalsh Fischler commanded her from May 1937 until Welker came aboard.
Farragut displaced about 1,365 tons and was 341 feet long, a fast fleet destroyer of the type the Navy had only recently begun to build again. In her early years she worked from Norfolk into the Caribbean and along the East Coast. Welker's tour covered the close of that duty and the move of the fleet to Hawaii. In October 1940 Pearl Harbor became her home port, and through the winter and spring she trained with the Pacific Fleet and screened the heavier ships.
He left Farragut on 15 April 1941, the day George Porter Hunter relieved him. The ship was still based at Pearl Harbor when Japanese aircraft attacked on 7 December 1941. Hunter was ashore that morning, and the engineering officer on board took her out of East Loch. The long wartime cruise that followed, and the fourteen battle stars the ship received, came under the captains who succeeded Welker. They included Henry Dirk Rozendal, who had her for the Attu landing in May 1943, and Edward Franklin Ferguson. Farragut spent the rest of the war in escort and radar-picket work and was decommissioned in New York on 23 October 1945.
Welker's own war service was on the staff of Commander, Amphibious Force, South Pacific, from October 1942 to July 1943. He received the temporary rank of commander on 20 July 1942. On that staff he carried out difficult missions during the occupation of the Russell Islands and the assault on New Georgia, and he was awarded the Legion of Merit for his leadership in that work. On 15 May 1943, while the staff tour was still underway, he was advanced to the temporary rank of captain. The lieutenant commander's years in Farragut, ending as the fleet settled at Pearl Harbor, and the Solomons staff duty that followed, are the assignments that define his record.