Ships
- USS Morris (DD-417) Captain from 5 March 1940
Commander Harry Bean Jarrett was a United States Navy officer who ended his career as a vice admiral. Born in 1898, he graduated from the Naval Academy and began his sea duty with the Atlantic Fleet. In October 1934 he took command of the submarine S-14 in the Canal Zone and brought her north to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she was placed out of commission in May 1935. He next served as assistant engineer of the heavy cruiser Northampton on the West Coast, remaining in that billet until the summer of 1937.
From June 1937 to December 1939 he was a discipline officer at the Naval Academy. In the summer of 1938 he made the midshipmen's training cruise in the battleship New York, which steamed along the East Coast and into European waters. That December he was ordered to Norfolk to fit out a new Sims-class destroyer. On 5 March 1940 he placed Morris in commission at the Norfolk Navy Yard and became her first commanding officer.
Morris flew the flag of Destroyer Squadron 2. After shakedown and training she joined the North Atlantic Patrol in the summer of 1941, and Jarrett stayed in command through those last months of uneasy peace, on routes where German submarines were already striking at escorts. The crew knew him as Uncle Beanie. After the United States entered the war, Morris went into the Charleston Navy Yard and received the first fire-control radar fitted to an American destroyer. She sailed for Pearl Harbor on 3 January 1942 and rejoined the squadron there at the end of February.
With Task Force 17, Morris left for Noumea on 16 March 1942 and steamed into the Battle of the Coral Sea. Before the carrier duel she screened the force while its aircraft hit Japanese shipping at Tulagi and in the Louisiade Archipelago. From 4 to 8 May she stayed with Yorktown and Lexington. Her guns shot down one Japanese aircraft and damaged two others. On 8 May, with Lexington on fire and breaking apart under explosions, Jarrett laid Morris alongside and took off about five hundred of the carrier's men. The rescue damaged the destroyer, and she turned back to Pearl Harbor. He received the Navy Cross for holding his ship there and for the lives that boarding saved.
Hurried repairs returned Morris to sea for the Battle of Midway in June 1942. She screened Yorktown, and when that carrier was torpedoed Jarrett again went alongside and embarked survivors. He left the ship on 23 June 1942. In August he returned to the Naval Academy for a second tour as discipline officer, which ran until November 1943.
In December 1943 he took command of Destroyer Squadron 53 and held it through June 1945. The squadron screened convoys and bombarded shore targets at Kwajalein and, during the Marianas campaign, at Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. From August 1944 he also commanded Task Groups 58.8 and 38.8 with the fast carrier force, leading the destroyer picket line on a thrust toward Tokyo and meeting kamikaze attacks off Okinawa in 1945. He received the Legion of Merit for the Marianas fire-support work, the Silver Star for leading the screen during carrier strikes on the Palaus, the Philippines, and the Marianas, and the Bronze Star for command of the scouting line on the early 1945 raids against Okinawa, Tokyo, and Formosa.
After the war Jarrett commanded the light cruiser Astoria. He served on the staff of the Training Command, Atlantic Fleet, and in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations as plans and policy officer for the Naval Reserve. He was senior military attaché on Taiwan, then held successive command of Destroyer Flotilla 4 and Cruiser Flotilla 4. He retired as a vice admiral and died on 9 April 1974. The frigate Jarrett was named for him.