Ships
- USS Edsall (DD-219) Captain, 17 February 1935 – 25 June 1935
Andrew Mack Parks, a lieutenant in the United States Navy, was captain of the destroyer Edsall (DD-219) from 17 February 1935 to 25 June 1935. The command came while the ship was serving with the Asiatic Fleet, the duty that occupied most of her peacetime life.
Edsall was a Clemson-class destroyer of the flush-deck type built in large numbers at the end of the First World War. William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia laid her keel on 15 September 1919 and launched her on 29 July 1920. She carried the name of Seaman Norman Eckley Edsall, who was killed on 1 April 1899 while helping a wounded officer during a landing near Apia, Samoa. The ship commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 26 November 1920.
A. H. Rice was her first captain. In the early 1920s the destroyer passed in turn to Halsey Powell, Harry Robert Bogusch, William Callender Irving Stiles, and Robert Todd Young. In January 1925 she left the United States East Coast, exercised at Guantanamo Bay, San Diego, and Pearl Harbor, and joined the Asiatic Fleet at Shanghai that June. During the disorders in the city she sent landing parties ashore, and in later years she served on the Yangtze as well as in Philippine and Japanese waters.
Lemuel Earl Lindsay had her through the middle of that decade, followed by Jules James, Thomas Cross Slingluff, and Byron Scott Dague. When Parks took command in February 1935, Edsall was a regular visitor at Manila, Chefoo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, watching American interests as Japanese pressure on China increased. During 1935 destroyers of the Asiatic Fleet, Edsall among them, visited French Indochina.
Parks left Edsall on 25 June 1935. The destroyer remained with the Asiatic Fleet into the war. On 1 March 1942 she was sunk south of Java in action with Japanese battleships, cruisers, and carrier aircraft, and the men aboard her were lost. His command of the ship belongs to those months in 1935, well before that last fight.