Ships
- USS Blue (DD-387) Captain from 14 August 1937
Jerauld Wright, the officer entered in the record as J. Wright, took command of the destroyer Blue (DD-387) on 14 August 1937. He was a lieutenant commander, and that day was also the ship's commissioning day. Norfolk Navy Yard had laid her down on 25 September 1935 and launched her on 27 May 1937, the same morning as her sister ship Helm. Kate Lilly Blue, sister of Rear Admiral Victor Blue, sponsored Blue, the first Navy ship to carry the admiral's name.
She was a Bagley-class destroyer, a fleet ship armed with four 5-inch guns and sixteen torpedo tubes. On 24 August 1937 Wright took her out of Portsmouth for builder's trials. The rest of her first year was shakedown and training along the East Coast and in the Caribbean, the steady work of making a new destroyer and her crew ready for the fleet.
In August 1938 he brought Blue into the Pacific. There she became flagship of Destroyer Division 7, Battle Force, and for the rest of his tour she exercised with the Battle Fleet in West Coast waters. The work was peacetime steaming, gunnery, and formation work with the main fleet.
Wright was relieved on 15 May 1939 by Lieutenant Commander Charles Owen Camp. By that change of command he held the rank of commander. He had had Blue from the hour she joined the Navy, through her first cruise to the Pacific, a tour of a little less than two years. He was an avid duck hunter.
After Blue, Wright commanded the battleship Mississippi during the Second World War. His later service carried him to four-star rank, to command of the Atlantic Fleet, and to duty as Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic. Blue remained in the Pacific under later commanding officers. She was at Pearl Harbor when the war began, and she was lost off Guadalcanal in August 1942.