Ships
- USS Bradford (DD-545) Captain from 12 June 1943
Commander R. L. Morris, Robert Lee Morris, took command of the Fletcher-class destroyer Bradford (DD-545) when she was commissioned on 12 June 1943. Bethlehem Steel had built her at Terminal Island, California, with the keel laid on 28 April 1942 and the launch on 12 December 1942. Mrs. Sarah Bradford Rose, a descendant of the Revolutionary-era privateer captain Gamaliel Bradford, sponsored the ship that carried his name. Morris was her first commanding officer.
Bradford spent nearly ten weeks shaking down and working along the West Coast. On 18 August 1943 she sailed for Hawaii and entered Pearl Harbor on the 24th. The next day she put to sea for Baker Island and covered the landing that reoccupied that outpost on 1 September. She then screened the carriers Lexington, Princeton, and Belleau Wood for the strike on Tarawa on 18 September and the strike on Wake Island on 5 and 6 October. At Pearl Harbor she joined the San Pedro-built destroyers Boyd, Brown, and Cowell in Destroyer Division 92 of Destroyer Squadron 46.
In November 1943 Bradford screened carriers during the Gilbert Islands assault. From Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides she covered carrier strikes on the harbor and shipping at Kavieng, on the northern tip of New Ireland, over Christmas 1943 and the first days of January 1944. Between 29 January and 8 February she took part in the occupation of Kwajalein and Majuro in the Marshall Islands. On 17 and 18 February, in the attack on Truk, she went in with the battleships Iowa and New Jersey, the cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans, and the destroyers Izard, Charette, and Burns. That surface group sank the light cruiser Katori and two destroyers, and Bradford put torpedoes and 5-inch shells into an enemy cruiser and a destroyer. Carrier raids in the Marianas followed on 21 and 22 February.
Through the spring and summer of 1944 Morris kept Bradford with the fast carrier force. She supported the Hollandia operation on New Guinea from 21 April to 1 June, then the landings on Saipan from 11 to 24 June. In those same weeks she joined raids on the Bonin Islands, screened carriers in the Battle of the Philippine Sea on 19 and 20 June, and went back to the Bonins later in June and again in July and August. She covered the assault on Guam from 12 July into the middle of August and a strike on Palau, Yap, and Ulithi late in July. In September she took part in the carrier attack on the Philippines mounted from the western Carolines.
Morris left Bradford on 18 October 1944 as the destroyer came into the Mare Island Navy Yard for overhaul. His tour had run from the commissioning day through the Central Pacific campaign of 1943 and 1944, from the first strikes out of Pearl Harbor to the edge of the Philippines.