Ships
- USS Murray (DD-576) Captain from 20 April 1943
Richard Farnum Stout was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on 26 September 1902. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1924 and remained in the United States Navy through a career that ran from destroyer command in the Pacific war to retirement as a vice admiral.
On 10 August 1941, as a lieutenant commander, he took command of the destroyer Hull. He was her captain when the United States entered the war, and he stayed with her until 11 February 1943. The Silver Star he received grew out of the first weeks at Guadalcanal. On 7 August 1942, and again from 7 to 15 September, Hull screened the landings and furnished gunfire support in the Guadalcanal-Tulagi area. Stout brought the ship back into those waters more than once, under repeated Japanese air attack, to guard the vessels carrying reinforcements and supplies to the Marines ashore.
His next command was a new ship. Consolidated Steel laid the Fletcher-class destroyer Murray down at Orange, Texas, on 16 March 1942, and the hull was launched on 16 August 1942 with Mrs. Frank T. Leighton as sponsor. Commander Stout commissioned Murray on 20 April 1943 and became her first commanding officer.
The opening months were spent making the ship ready and working her at sea. After shakedown in the Caribbean she took up escort duty in the Atlantic. On 11 May 1943 she steamed down the Sabine Pass from Orange toward a dry dock at Galveston. Early in July, at the Charleston Navy Yard, her 40-millimeter battery was increased from the six guns she had been delivered with to the ten-gun fit then becoming usual on ships of her class. On 1 June 1943, during that first season in commission, Stout was advanced to temporary captain.
In September 1943 Murray sailed for Pearl Harbor and joined Destroyer Squadron 25. With a carrier task force she took part in the strikes on Wake Island on 5 and 6 October. Stout's tour ran on into November. On 8 and 9 November the destroyer supported the landings on Bougainville, and her guns brought down three Japanese aircraft. Two days later, while Third Fleet carriers struck Rabaul, a Japanese raid of roughly one hundred fifty planes hit the formation, and Murray shot down two of them. He was relieved later that month.
During the first months of the Korean War he commanded the heavy cruiser Toledo. From 26 July to 23 October 1950 the ship operated against enemy forces in Korean waters, and for that cruise he received the Legion of Merit with Combat V. The award, approved in June 1951, reached him as a rear admiral for duty he had performed as a captain. He retired as a vice admiral. Stout died in Monterey County, California, on 6 November 1982, at the age of eighty.