Ships
- USS Alden (DD-211) Captain, 8 August 1930 to 30 May 1931
John Franklin McClain served in the United States Navy through the interwar years and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. His documented command was the destroyer Alden (DD-211), which he captained from 8 August 1930 to 30 May 1931.
Alden was a Clemson-class destroyer, laid down during the First World War and commissioned in 1919. By the time McClain took her, she was a veteran of the Asiatic Fleet's rotating destroyer force, the ships that kept a small American presence on the China coast and in the Philippines between the wars. The duty was long cruises, port visits, and the ordinary work of keeping an aging four-piper ready for sea.
McClain's tour in Alden lasted less than ten months. He relieved the previous commanding officer in August 1930 and turned the ship over at the end of May 1931. Officers who served in the same Asiatic destroyer circle in those years included William Alexander Ancrum, Eldred Bewes Armstrong, Edmund Weyman Strother, William Alexander Glassford, Jr., Lloyd Robert Gray, Paul Augustus Stevens, Oliver Owen Kessing, Stanley Martyn Haight, Thomas Lee McCann, Stanley Fletcher Patten, Lewis Elliott Coley, and Jacob Elliott Cooper.
The public record of McClain's career is thin outside that command. He is identified as a lieutenant commander at the time of the Alden assignment, and the dates of his captaincy are fixed by the ship's record. Further details of his earlier billets, later service, and private life are not carried in the same account of the ship.