USS Richard P. Leary
1943 Fletcher-class destroyer
USS Richard P. Leary (DD-664) was a Fletcher-class destroyer of the United States Navy. In 1959, the ship was transferred to the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and renamed Yūgure. The destroyer remained in service with the Japanese until 1974, when she was returned to the US, who then sold the ship for scrap in 1976.
Namesake
Richard Phillips Leary was born on November 3, 1842, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Cornelius Leary. He entered the United States Naval Academy in 1860. During the American Civil War, he served on the screw sloop USS Canandaigua and the monitor USS Sangamon assigned to the Atlantic blockade.
During tension with Germany over Samoa, Leary commanded USS Adams at Samoa from October to December 1888. In the Spanish–American War, he commanded the USS San Francisco off Havana, Cuba. From 1899 into 1900, Captain Leary served as Naval Governor of Guam. Retiring in 1901, Rear Admiral Leary died on 27 December at Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “USS Richard P. Leary” is 1943 Fletcher-class destroyer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Richard, Leary and Fletcher-class, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1943 Fletcher-class destroyer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7873445. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1974, 1976 and 1842.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Richard P. Leary” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.