Ships
- USS Nevada (BB-36) Captain from 7 September 1924 · Relieved on 11 June 1926
David Wooster Todd was a career officer of the United States Navy. He graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis with the class of 1895 and remained in the service through the First World War and the peacetime fleet of the 1920s, retiring as a captain.
His earlier sea commands were in smaller ships. On 16 May 1907 he became captain of the monitor Monterey and stayed in her into the following year. In 1915 he commanded Dixie, then employed as a tender for destroyers.
During the First World War his principal duty was ashore. He served as Director of Naval Communications, the office that handled the navy's message traffic, and for that service he received the Navy Cross.
After the armistice he returned to a cruiser. On 30 April 1919 he took command of Pittsburgh, the armored cruiser that had been launched as Pennsylvania and given her new name in 1912.
On 7 September 1924 Todd relieved John McClane Luby as captain of the battleship Nevada (BB-36). He remained in command until 11 June 1926, when Clarence Selby Kempff relieved him. From July to September 1925, with Todd as captain, Nevada sailed in the United States Fleet's goodwill cruise to Australia and New Zealand. Places to take on fuel were scarce along the way. The ships completed the outward run and the voyage home, a plain demonstration of how far the battle fleet could steam.
By then Nevada had been in commission for eight years. William Sowden Sims had been her first captain, in 1916, and the captains of her postwar years included Thomas Pickett Magruder, William Dugald MacDougall, Luke McNamee, and Douglas Eugene Dismukes. Todd's tour belonged to that stretch of fleet cruising, before the battleship went into the yard to be modernized.