Ships
- USS Worden (DD-352) Captain, 15 January 1935 – 10 December 1935
Commander Robert Earle Kerr took the new destroyer Worden into commission at the Puget Sound Navy Yard on 15 January 1935 and remained her captain until 10 December of that year. She was the third ship of the name, honoring John Lorimer Worden, who had commanded the ironclad Monitor against Virginia in 1862. The hull had been laid down at the Bremerton yard on 29 December 1932 and launched on 27 October 1934, with Mrs. Katrina L. Halligan, wife of Rear Admiral John Halligan, as sponsor. Worden was a Farragut-class destroyer, one of the new fleet destroyers then joining the Pacific force, and Kerr’s task was to finish her, shake her down, and hand a working ship to the destroyer squadrons.
Fitting out occupied the rest of the winter. On 1 April 1935 Kerr took Worden out of Puget Sound on her shakedown. She called first at San Diego, then worked down the coasts of Lower California and Mexico to San José, Guatemala, and Punta Arenas, Costa Rica. On 6 May she passed the Panama Canal and continued north to Washington. On 17 May she embarked Rear Admiral Joseph K. Taussig, Assistant Chief of Naval Operations, with a party from Congress, and carried them down the Potomac to Mount Vernon. In a few weeks the new crew had handled the ship in tropical harbors, in the canal, and on the river below the capital.
At the Washington Navy Yard her guns were taken down for alteration. On 21 May she shifted to the Norfolk Navy Yard for voyage repairs. The yard period was broken by trials and tests off Rockland, Maine, and the work was finished early in the summer. Worden left Norfolk on 1 July, spent the Fourth of July weekend at New Bedford, Massachusetts, and shaped a course back to the Pacific by way of Guantánamo Bay and the Panama Canal. She reached the Puget Sound Navy Yard again on 3 August. The builder’s yard then gave her the post-shakedown refit that closed the cruise.
With that work done, Kerr brought Worden south to San Diego, arriving on 19 September 1935. She joined the destroyer squadrons of the Scouting Force and began the routine that would fill her peacetime years: local tactics and type training, duty as a school ship for the Fleet Sound School at San Diego, and fleet exercises that later carried her from Alaskan waters to the Peruvian coast. Kerr had her only for the opening of that duty. His command covered the whole passage from a commissioning pennant at the builder’s yard to a destroyer settled into a West Coast squadron.
On 10 December 1935 he turned Worden over to Clarence Edward Olsen. Other officers followed in the years before the war, among them Henry Bryan Broadfoot and Julian DuBois Wilson. The destroyer was at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, got to sea during the attack, screened carriers at Midway, and later served off Guadalcanal and in the Aleutians. On 12 January 1943, while supporting the landing on Amchitka, a current set her onto the rocks. She lost power, the sea broke her up, and fourteen of her crew were drowned. William Grady Pogue was in command at that loss. Kerr’s own service in her had ended with the change of command in December 1935, after the ship’s first year afloat.