Ships
- USS Aylwin (DD-355) Captain from 28 June 1936
Dennis Leo Ryan, of Unionville, Connecticut, was born on 16 April 1894. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1916 and stayed in the Navy through a career that carried him from the junior officer ranks to retirement as a rear admiral.
On 28 June 1936 he became commanding officer of the destroyer Aylwin (DD-355). She was a Farragut-class ship, commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 1 March 1935 with Clarence Gulbranson as her first commanding officer. Ryan's date of rank as commander was 1 July 1936. His tour in Aylwin belonged to the peacetime years of fleet work, well before the ship went to war in the Pacific.
He next commanded the destroyer Branch (DD-197). He had her from 4 December 1939 until 8 October 1940, still as a commander, in the months when the Navy was bringing older destroyers back into service.
The Navy made him a temporary captain on 1 January 1942 and a captain on 1 March 1942. From November 1944 to July 1945 he commanded a transport division in the western Pacific. The division took part in operations at Lingayen Gulf, along the Zambales coast of Luzon, and at Okinawa. For that service he received the Legion of Merit.
Aylwin fought through the Pacific war under later commanding officers. Robert Henry Rodgers had the ship by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ryan's own late-war duty was the transport division, and he finished his service as a rear admiral.