Ships
- USS Edsall (DD-219) Captain, 27 February 1934 – 17 February 1935
Lieutenant Commander Frederick Dodge Powers, United States Navy, commanded the destroyer Edsall from 27 February 1934 to 17 February 1935. For that year he was her commanding officer on the Asiatic Station, answerable for the crew, the ship’s condition, and the duty she was given.
Edsall, hull number DD-219, was a Clemson-class flush-deck destroyer completed just after the First World War. William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia launched her on 29 July 1920, and she was commissioned on 26 November 1920. The name honored Norman Eckley Edsall, a United States sailor killed at Apia, Samoa, on 1 April 1899 while serving with a landing party.
By the time Powers took command, Edsall was a long-serving unit of the United States Asiatic Fleet. Destroyers on that station kept a seasonal round between the Philippines, with Manila and Cavite as the usual base, and summer anchorages on the China coast such as Chefoo and Tsingtao. Their days were filled with gunnery and torpedo practice, boiler and engine work in tropical water, and the port visits that made up the Navy’s presence where American trade and diplomacy still depended on a ship offshore. Admiral Frank B. Upham was commander in chief of the Asiatic Fleet throughout Powers’s tour, with his flag in the cruiser Augusta.
The station was quiet in routine and unsettled in its surroundings. Japan had held Manchuria since 1931, the Shanghai fighting of 1932 was still close in memory, and the Asiatic Fleet remained a small force of a cruiser flagship, a few divisions of older destroyers, and gunboats on the rivers and along the South China coast. A lieutenant commander in a flush-decker lived near his men. Powers’s year covered navigation in crowded harbors, discipline in a narrow ship, and readiness for a sudden change of orders brought on by weather or by trouble ashore.
He left Edsall on 17 February 1935, after just under twelve months in command. The ship stayed with the Asiatic Fleet. On 1 March 1942, south of Java, Japanese warships sank her after carrier aircraft had already hit her, and the company then on board was lost with the ship. Powers’s recorded command is the peacetime tour of 1934 and 1935, when Edsall was still making her rounds between the Philippines and the China coast.