Ships
- USS Edsall (DD-219) Captain, 3 February 1928 – 19 December 1928
Chauncey A. Lucas, whose full name was Chauncey Armlyn Lucas, served as a commander in the United States Navy. In the latter half of 1924 and into 1925 he commanded the destroyer Kidder, following Walter S. Anderson. On 3 February 1928 he became captain of Edsall.
Edsall, designated DD-219, was a Clemson-class destroyer from the yard of William Cramp and Sons in Philadelphia. She was launched on 29 July 1920 and commissioned on 26 November 1920, with A. H. Rice in command. The ship honored Norman Eckley Edsall, a seaman from Columbus, Kentucky, who enlisted in 1898. On 1 April 1899, during a landing near Apia, Samoa, Edsall was killed while serving in Philadelphia as he tried to carry his wounded commander out of the fighting. He is buried on Samoa.
Her first cruise took her from Philadelphia to San Diego for shakedown and drills with the fleet on the West Coast. In 1922 she sailed for the Mediterranean and joined the American naval detachment in Turkish waters, on watch through the war between Greece and Turkey and the disorder left by revolution in Russia. When Turkish forces took Smyrna in September 1922, Edsall helped move civilians out of the city. On 14 September she took 607 refugees from Litchfield and carried them to Salonika, then returned. Halsey Powell, her captain, was soon the senior U.S. Navy officer directing that evacuation.
She afterward joined the Asiatic Fleet and remained in the Far East for the rest of her life. Lemuel Earl Lindsay commanded her through the middle of that decade, and Jules James was the captain Lucas relieved. From 3 February to 19 December 1928, Lucas kept Edsall on the Asiatic station. The destroyer worked from the Philippines along the China coast, drilling at her guns and torpedoes and calling at ports where one of these small warships was the usual American presence.
On 19 December 1928 Lucas turned Edsall over to Thomas Cross Slingluff. The ship was still in the Far East when war with Japan began. Under Lieutenant Joshua J. Nix she fought through the loss of the Netherlands East Indies. On the afternoon of 1 March 1942, south of Java, she ran from Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers and twisted clear of heavy shellfire until carrier dive bombers sank her. Of the 185 Navy men and 31 Army Air Forces pilots aboard, nearly all were lost in the action or killed after capture. The Royal Australian Navy found the wreck in 2024 on the Indian Ocean floor east of Christmas Island.