Ships
- USS Bullard (DD-660) Captain from 31 May 1945
Lieutenant Henry Frederick Rodner of the United States Navy became captain of the destroyer Bullard on 31 May 1945. Bullard, hull number DD-660, was a Fletcher-class fleet destroyer of about 2,050 tons, a little over 376 feet long, with a designed speed near 35 knots. Her main battery was five 5-inch guns, backed by torpedo tubes and a dense antiaircraft armament. Rodner held her as a lieutenant, the rank under which his command is carried, and the appointment ran from 31 May 1945 through 16 June 1945. Those weeks fell at the end of the ship's long Pacific cruise.
The destroyer took her name from Rear Admiral William Hannum Grubb Bullard, a Pennsylvania officer born in 1866 who had entered the Naval Academy in the 1880s and risen to flag rank. Workers at the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Kearny, New Jersey, laid the keel on 16 October 1942. The hull went into the water on 28 February 1943, sponsored by the admiral's widow, and the Navy commissioned Bullard on 9 April 1943. Commander Glenn Roy Hartwig was in command on commissioning day. From that spring the ship belonged to the wartime Pacific fleet.
Her first months were spent working up along the eastern seaboard and in the Caribbean. She then crossed to Hawaii and arrived at Pearl Harbor on 29 August 1943. She went back to California once, from 10 September 1944 to 18 February 1945, and otherwise kept to forward waters. On that duty she bombarded invasion beaches, guarded carriers during flight operations, patrolled, and stood radar picket. In the autumn of 1943 she was in the raid on Wake Island on 5 and 6 October, the strike on Rabaul on 11 November, and the invasion of Tarawa from 19 November to 1 December. In 1944 she covered the occupation of Kwajalein and Majuro from 22 January into March and the Admiralty Islands landings from 30 March to 13 April, then supported the Hollandia operation and the seizures of Saipan and Guam.
In the spring of 1945 Bullard was committed to the Okinawa campaign, her share of that battle running from March into May. Lieutenant Rodner assumed command on 31 May 1945, as that employment was drawing to a close, and he remained captain until 16 June 1945. The destroyer he inherited had already spent nearly two years in the Central Pacific and off the beaches of the western ocean. Bernard William Freund Nov and Eigel Thornton Steen were officers of Bullard in the same war, part of the company that carried the ship through those campaigns before and around Rodner's short turn on the bridge.
After Japan's surrender, Bullard spent most of 1946 along the West Coast and then reported to San Diego for inactivation. On 20 December 1946 the Navy decommissioned her and placed her in reserve. Her name left the Naval Vessel Register on 1 December 1972. Buyers took the hull on 3 December 1973, and she was broken up for scrap. Rodner's part in that life of the ship was the lieutenant's command of a battle-worn Fletcher at the close of the Okinawa cruise, from the last day of May 1945 into the middle of June.