Ships
- USS Kidd (DD-661) Captain, 12 April 1945 – 29 April 1945
Lieutenant Richard Layfield Kenney of the United States Navy commanded the destroyer Kidd from 12 April 1945 to 29 April 1945. Kidd, hull number DD-661, was a Fletcher-class ship named for Rear Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd, killed on 7 December 1941 on the bridge of the battleship Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The destroyer was launched at Kearny, New Jersey, on 28 February 1943 and commissioned on 23 April 1943.
Allan Barkhurst Roby was her first commanding officer. She shook down from Casco Bay, Maine, spent the early summer of 1943 escorting heavy ships in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and that August crossed to the Pacific with the battleships Alabama and South Dakota. She then stayed with the fast carrier forces in the drive west from the Gilbert Islands, screening the large ships and fighting aircraft.
On 19 February 1945 she sailed to join Task Force 58 for the Okinawa campaign. In the opening weeks she screened battleships, shelled shore targets, picked up downed pilots, sank floating mines, and stood radar picket. On 19 March she was one of the destroyers that guarded the carrier Franklin after explosions ripped through that ship. On 11 April, on picket station with Black, Bullard, and Chauncey, the division and its combat air patrol turned back three raids. That afternoon a single kamikaze crashed into Kidd’s forward fireroom. Thirty-eight men were killed and fifty-five wounded. The bomb passed through the hull and burst just outside. Her commanding officer, her executive officer, and the ship’s doctor, Broox C. Garrett, Jr., were seriously wounded. Lieutenant (junior grade) George P. Grieshaber, the chief engineer, was killed after he went below to look at a leaking gauge.
Kenney, then a lieutenant, took command the next day. The forward fireroom was wrecked, but the engineering plant could be cross-connected, and Kidd could still make about twenty knots. As she headed south to rejoin the task group, her guns drove off aircraft that came after the damaged ship. She reached Ulithi, in the western Carolines, for temporary repairs. Kenney remained in command through that withdrawal and the first days of patching, until 29 April 1945.
On 2 May Kidd left Ulithi for Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco and arrived on 25 May. On 1 August she sailed for Pearl Harbor. Kenney’s command was the short, hard interval between the kamikaze and the navy yard: a lieutenant on a Fletcher-class destroyer getting clear of the Okinawa air attacks with a ruined fireroom, thirty-eight shipmates dead, and the guns still in action until the ship was inside Ulithi.