Ships
- USS McCord (DD-534) Captain, 19 August 1943 – 26 August 1944
Commander William Talty Kenny was the first commanding officer of the destroyer McCord. He became her captain on 19 August 1943, the day the ship was commissioned, and he remained in command until 26 August 1944. McCord, hull number DD-534, was a Fletcher-class destroyer sent into the Pacific while the island campaign was still moving west.
The ship was named for Commander Frank C. McCord, a naval aviator lost when the airship Akron went down in 1933. Kenny's first months were spent making a new destroyer ready for war. The crew finished fitting out, ran trials, and drilled at gunnery, station-keeping, and antisubmarine work until McCord could take a place in a task force.
In the winter of 1944 McCord joined the central Pacific offensive as the fleet struck the Marshall Islands. Destroyers of her type formed the screen around the fast carriers. They watched for submarines and aircraft and recovered airmen who came down at sea. Under Kenny the ship took part in the carrier operations that accompanied the capture of the Marshalls and in the February raid on the Japanese base at Truk in the Carolines.
The same duty carried McCord forward as the offensive reached the Marianas in the early summer of 1944. In June the carrier force fought the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the two-day air battle in which Japan lost most of what remained of its carrier air groups. McCord kept station in the screen while the carriers launched and recovered aircraft. She stayed with those forces for the strikes that followed, including operations against the Bonin Islands and Palau.
Kenny turned McCord over to a new commanding officer on 26 August 1944, a year and a week after he had commissioned her. In that year the destroyer had gone from a new hull at the fitting-out pier to a working ship of the fast carrier forces. She remained in the Pacific for the rest of the war after he left the bridge.