Ships
- USS Edsall (DD-219) Captain, 17 July 1930 – 23 February 1932
Lieutenant Commander Byron Scott Dague commanded the destroyer Edsall from 17 July 1930 to 23 February 1932. He relieved Lieutenant Commander Thomas Cross Slingluff and was succeeded by Lieutenant Commander Bruce Pepper Flood.
Edsall was a Clemson-class flush-deck destroyer, one of the four-stack ships built as the First World War ended. William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia launched her on 29 July 1920, and the Navy commissioned her at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 26 November 1920 with Commander A. H. Rice in command. She was named for Seaman Norman Eckley Edsall, who was mortally wounded on 1 April 1899 near Apia, Samoa, while a landing party from the cruiser Philadelphia tried to bring a wounded officer out of the fight. On a displacement of about 1,190 tons she carried four 4-inch guns and twelve 21-inch torpedo tubes, and her design speed was 35 knots.
By the time Dague took her, Edsall had long been part of the Asiatic Fleet. The fleet’s destroyers worked from Cavite, in Manila Bay, drilled with the squadron, and shifted north to Chinese ports when the ships made their seasonal move up the coast. His tour ran through a sharpening crisis in East Asia. Japanese forces seized Mukden in September 1931 and occupied Manchuria, and in January 1932 fighting between Japanese and Chinese troops spread across Shanghai. American ships on the station watched that fighting and stayed ready to protect American lives and trade, and Edsall remained in his charge through those months.
Dague left the ship on 23 February 1932 after a little more than nineteen months in command. Edsall stayed with the Asiatic Fleet for the rest of the decade. In December 1941 she was at Balikpapan, Borneo, with Destroyer Division 57, and she then served in the early campaign through the Netherlands East Indies. On 1 March 1942, south of Java, Japanese carrier aircraft and a force of battleships and cruisers caught her in the Indian Ocean and sank her. Her crew, and the passengers aboard her, were all lost.