Ships
- USS Monaghan (DD-354) Captain from 19 April 1935
Commander R. R. Thompson, United States Navy, was the first captain of the destroyer Monaghan. He took command on 19 April 1935, the day the Boston Navy Yard placed the ship in commission.
Monaghan was a Farragut-class destroyer and the second Navy ship of that name. The yard laid her down on 21 November 1933 and launched her on 9 January 1935. Miss Mary F. Monaghan, niece of the namesake, sponsored the ship. The name honored Ensign John R. Monaghan, who was killed at Samoa in 1899 while trying to protect a wounded officer during a fight ashore.
Thompson worked the new destroyer up through the rest of that spring and summer. Trials complete, Monaghan entered operational service on 30 August 1935 and joined Destroyer Division 61 of Destroyer Squadron 20 in the North Atlantic. She served with Aylwin, Dale, which carried the division commander, and Mahan. Farragut, the lead ship of the class, flew the squadron flag. Before the year ended the destroyer crossed the Atlantic and lay at Belfast from late September into early October.
Those months fixed the pattern of her peacetime duty. The Navy used the new destroyers to train the officers and sailors who would fill out the fleet, and Monaghan did much of that work in the North Atlantic. Thompson's captaincy covered the commissioning and that first season with the squadron. He left the ship in June 1936.
Under the captains who followed, Monaghan moved to the Pacific and became one of the war's widely known destroyers. On 7 December 1941 she was the ready-duty destroyer at Pearl Harbor. She fired on the attacking aircraft, got underway, and rammed and depth-charged a Japanese midget submarine inside the harbor. Over the next three years she screened carriers and supported landings from the Coral Sea and Midway through the Aleutians and the Central Pacific, and she received twelve battle stars. In December 1944 she foundered east of the Philippines in the typhoon later called Cobra, lost with Hull and Spence. Six of her crew were saved.