Ships
- USS Portland (CA-33) Captain from 23 February 1933
Herbert Fairfax Leary was born in Washington, D.C., on 31 May 1885, the son of Rear Admiral Richard P. Leary. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1905, a classmate of Chester W. Nimitz, and spent the years before the First World War in the destroyer and gunnery duties that shaped his generation of line officers.
In March 1911 he took command of the destroyer Lamson and kept her until the autumn of 1912. He then commanded Preston from October 1912 until March 1913. After the United States entered the First World War he joined the staff of Admiral William S. Sims, who commanded American naval forces in European waters. He served as a liaison with Admiral David Beatty of the British Grand Fleet and spent part of 1917 in the British ship Furious. Promoted to commander on 1 February 1918, he finished the war on that staff and received the Navy Cross for the work.
Leary stayed with ordnance after the peace. Detached from the Bureau of Ordnance in May 1922, he reported to the battleship Maryland as fleet gunnery officer on the staff of Admiral Hilary P. Jones, commander in chief of the United States Fleet. He was promoted to captain on 2 June 1927. Later tours took him to the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren, Virginia, and the Naval Powder Factory at Indian Head, Maryland, as an inspector of ordnance. In May 1931 he began the senior course at the Naval War College in Newport. A year later the Navy sent him to the Fore River yard at Quincy, Massachusetts, to see a new heavy cruiser through the last months of fitting out.
On 23 February 1933 he placed Portland (CA-33) in commission at Quincy and became her first commanding officer. The cruiser left Boston on 1 April and anchored in Gravesend Bay two days later. The next night word arrived that the Navy dirigible Akron had crashed at sea off New Jersey. Thirty-six minutes after the message, Portland was underway. She was the first naval ship on the scene, and Leary took charge of the search. Seventy-three lives were lost, including that of Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Sailors who stood watches outside his door remembered a big man with a big pipe and a full-rigged ship tattooed on his chest. The cruise carried Portland through the Panama Canal to the California coast, where she lay at San Pedro by the middle of June. Leary remained in command until June 1934, when he became chief of staff to Rear Admiral Edward C. Kalbfus, who commanded the destroyers of the Battle Force.
He was promoted to rear admiral on 1 June 1938. From November 1940 he directed the fleet training division in the Bureau of Navigation, and on 1 February 1941 he hoisted his flag as commander of the cruisers of the Battle Force. He was ashore in Honolulu on the morning of 7 December 1941 when Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor. In the reorganization that followed he received a task force organized around the carrier Saratoga. When that ship was torpedoed in January 1942, the Navy turned him toward the South Pacific.
On 27 January 1942 Leary was ordered to command the ANZAC naval force, with his headquarters in Australia. That spring the force passed into the Southwest Pacific Area under General Douglas MacArthur, and Leary became the Allied naval commander in the theater, serving as a vice admiral through the early months of the fighting in New Guinea. The Army awarded him the Silver Star for his conduct of those operations from March to September 1942. Differences with MacArthur ended the appointment that September, and Rear Admiral Arthur S. Carpender relieved him. Leary then commanded the Pacific Fleet's battleships, and Task Force One, until 22 April 1943. A Legion of Merit covered his Pacific service from the start of the war through that date.
In June 1943 he took command of the Fifth Naval District at Norfolk. From November 1943 to September 1945 he commanded the Eastern Sea Frontier, the Navy's seaward defense of the Atlantic coast, and a second Legion of Merit followed that duty. He retired in June 1946 in the rank of vice admiral. Leary died at Newport, Rhode Island, on 3 December 1957, and was buried in the cemetery of the Naval Academy.