Ships
- USS Preston (DD-379) Captain, 27 October 1936 – 30 April 1938
Charles Davis Swain was born on 8 September 1890 and spent his career as an officer of the United States Navy. He was promoted to commander on 12 December 1934, during the long peacetime years after the First World War, when the fleet was replacing its older destroyers with larger and faster ships. Officers of his seniority were the men the Navy chose to take those new hulls out of the builder's yard. The command that ties his name to the Pacific destroyer force came in the autumn of 1936.
The ship was Preston (DD-379), a Mahan-class destroyer and the fifth Navy vessel named for Lieutenant Samuel W. Preston. The namesake had graduated at the head of his Naval Academy class, served with the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron in the Civil War, and was killed in January 1865 while leading a landing party against Fort Fisher. The new destroyer was laid down at the Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo, California, on 27 October 1934, and launched on 22 April 1936 with Mrs. Edward H. Campbell as sponsor. As completed she carried five 5-inch guns and twelve 21-inch torpedo tubes, with a designed speed in the middle thirties. Mare Island commissioned her on 27 October 1936, two years to the day after the keel was laid, and Commander Swain took command that morning as her first captain.
His tour lasted from 27 October 1936 to 30 April 1938. Commissioning was the beginning of the work, not the end of it. A new destroyer still had to shake down, expose the faults in machinery and ordnance, and train a crew that had never handled her at sea. After shakedown, Preston operated for a short time under the Chief of Naval Operations and then joined the Battle Force of the United States Fleet. Her squadron assignment moved from Destroyer Squadron 2 to Destroyer Squadron 5. For the rest of Swain's time in her she lived the Pacific training year: fleet steaming, gunnery and torpedo practice, and the precise station-keeping expected of a destroyer screening battleships and carriers. He left behind a ship that had already found her place in the battle fleet.
On 30 April 1938 he turned Preston over to Clayton Shadek Isgrig, who remained in command until 25 June 1940. Timothy Joseph O.'Brien then had her until 31 October 1941. On that date Max Clifford Stormes relieved O'Brien and was still the commanding officer when war reached the Pacific on 7 December 1941. Swain's own months in the ship already lay more than three years behind. Preston carried on the routine he had started, shifting from peacetime exercises to patrol and coastal escort along the West Coast. In June 1942 she went west to Hawaii and into the carrier war in the South Pacific.
Stormes took her into battle. At the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in late October 1942, Preston fought in the carrier screen and her guns shot down two aircraft. She came through that action intact and retired to Nouméa to rearm. Her last engagement was the night surface battle off Guadalcanal on 14–15 November 1942. Steaming in the destroyer column ahead of the American battleships near Savo Island, she was hit by gunfire, settled, rolled over, and sank, with heavy loss of life. Stormes was killed. Other American ships, among them Meade, took off the survivors. Preston received two battle stars, one for Santa Cruz and one for the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. That wartime record, and the loss of the ship, belongs to Stormes and the crew he commanded. Swain had left her on 30 April 1938.
His rank continued to rise. The Navy promoted him to captain on 1 April 1941. Late in the war he returned to sea in a different kind of ship, commanding the destroyer tender Whitney (AD-4) from 29 January 1944 to 8 August 1945. A tender was a mobile repair and supply ship. Destroyers came alongside for upkeep, battle-damage work, stores, and the spare parts that kept a squadron running far from a navy yard. His tour covered the last Pacific campaigns and ended in the month of Japan's surrender. The two commands mark the public shape of his service: commissioning captain of Preston while she was worked up for the fleet in the late 1930s, and wartime captain of a tender that supported the destroyer force until the fighting stopped.