Ships
- USS Perkins (DD-377) Captain, 27 May 1938 – 4 June 1940
John Peter Vetter was born on 18 August 1896 and served as an officer in the United States Navy. On 27 May 1938 he became captain of the destroyer Perkins (DD-377). He held the rank of lieutenant commander when he took the ship, was promoted to commander on 1 August 1939, and remained in command until 4 June 1940.
Perkins was a Mahan-class destroyer built at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington. Her keel was laid in November 1934, she was launched on 31 December 1935, and she was commissioned on 18 September 1936. Samuel P. Jenkins was her first commanding officer. The ship was named for Commodore George Hamilton Perkins, a Civil War officer who had served with David Farragut.
Vetter’s two years aboard Perkins fell in the last peacetime seasons of the Pacific Fleet. The destroyer was homeported at San Diego and operated in the eastern Pacific with the fleet’s destroyer forces, in the training and exercises that filled those years. On 4 June 1940 he turned the ship over to Timothy Francis Wellings.
Command later passed to Stephen Ray Bedford, then to Walter Chilcott Ford, and then to Gerald Lyle Ketchum. On 18 June 1942 Vetter was appointed a temporary captain. By then Perkins was at war under other officers. On the night of 29 November 1943, while she was on an independent run from Milne Bay toward Buna, the Australian troopship Duntroon struck her port side in the Solomon Sea off New Guinea. The destroyer broke in two and sank, and nine of her crew were killed. Ketchum was her captain that night. Vetter was not the captain, and his own command had ended in June 1940.