Ships
- USS McKean (APD-5) In command, 7 August 1942
John D. Sweeney, whose full name was John Driscoll Sweeney, was a career officer of the United States Navy. He was born in Belmont, Massachusetts, on 28 September 1902, and graduated from the Naval Academy in the class of 1926. He was promoted to lieutenant on 30 June 1936 and to lieutenant commander on 1 May 1941.
On 9 November 1941 he took command of McKean, a Wickes-class destroyer of the First World War that had been rebuilt as a high-speed transport and returned to service at Norfolk in December 1940. The conversion gave her landing craft and room for a company of troops, and she spent the following months in the Atlantic. On 21 March 1942 McKean picked up eight men from the tanker Esso Nashville after a German submarine torpedoed the tanker northeast of the Frying Pan lightship, off the North Carolina coast.
In May 1942 McKean left the East Coast for the Pacific and the first American offensive of the war in the Solomon Islands. Early in July she screened the carrier Saratoga on the run out from Pearl Harbor, then left that force to embark part of the 1st Marine Raider Battalion at Nouméa in New Caledonia. She rejoined the invasion fleet late in the month with Transport Division 12, alongside the fast transports Little, Colhoun, and Gregory.
Sweeney was in command on 7 August 1942, the first day of the landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi. McKean went in with the Tulagi group and put her Marines ashore. He was made a temporary commander on 15 August, and the ship stayed in the southern Solomons on escort and supply work between the islands, New Caledonia, and the New Hebrides. He left McKean on 4 January 1943. The ship later returned to the Solomons under another commanding officer and was sunk by a Japanese aerial torpedo off Bougainville on 17 November 1943.
Sweeney was appointed a temporary captain on 1 August 1943. He remained in the Navy after the war and retired as a rear admiral. In his later years he lived with his family in Annapolis, Maryland. His son, John Driscoll Sweeney Jr., a torpedoman, was lost with the submarine Scorpion in 1968.