Ships
- USS Wren (DD-568) Captain, 20 May 1944 – 31 August 1945
Commander Edwin Anderson McDonald of the United States Navy was captain of the destroyer USS Wren (DD-568) from 20 May 1944 to 31 August 1945. He took her as a new Fletcher-class ship at the start of her commissioned service and remained in command through the last year of the Pacific War.
Wren was built for work with the fleet. In McDonald's time she carried the battery usual for her class: five 5-inch guns, torpedoes, depth charges, and automatic guns against aircraft. His first months were spent fitting the ship out, training her crew, and working her up until she could keep station at speed with a task force.
After that preparation, McDonald took Wren west into the operations that were closing on Japan. Through late 1944 and 1945 she screened heavier ships, stood antisubmarine and antiaircraft watches, and shared the close support expected of a destroyer during the Philippine campaign and the assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Much of the tour was simply time at sea, in the long series of air and surface actions that wore down what remained of Japanese strength.
One of the officers who served in Wren with him was Clayton Ross. The ship's company had to stay ready for sudden air attack and for the ordinary cycle of fueling, screening, and night steaming that filled a destroyer's days with the fast forces.
McDonald left Wren on 31 August 1945. Japan had accepted the Allied surrender terms in the middle of that month, and the formal signing in Tokyo Bay followed on 2 September. His fifteen months in command had carried the ship from a new destroyer in home waters through the fleet's final campaigns.