Ships
- USS Alden (DD-211) Captain, 30 May 1931 to 10 July 1934
Paul Augustus Stevens was a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy. From 30 May 1931 to 10 July 1934 he was captain of the destroyer Alden (DD-211). He relieved John Franklin McClain and, a little more than three years later, turned the ship over to Oliver Owen Kessing.
Alden was a Clemson-class flush-deck destroyer, built by William Cramp and Sons at Philadelphia and first commissioned on 24 November 1919 under William Alexander Ancrum. She was named for Rear Admiral James Alden, Jr. After early duty she was laid up at San Diego on 24 January 1923, while William Alexander Glassford, Jr. was in command. The Navy brought her back into service at San Diego on 8 May 1930, with Lloyd Robert Gray as commanding officer, and assigned her to the destroyer squadrons of the Battle Fleet, later the Battle Force.
Stevens took a ship that had been back in commission for only a year. Her home port was San Diego and her home yard was Mare Island. In those years she served with Destroyer Division 46 and later with Destroyer Division 10. The work was the ordinary labor of a peacetime four-piper: gunnery and torpedo drills, engineering runs, and fleet maneuvers along the California coast and out into Hawaiian waters.
The cruise record places her at Lahaina, Maui, in February 1932, in the middle of the winter exercises held in the islands, and at San Diego on Memorial Day 1933. For the rest of his tour she stayed with the West Coast fleet, training and keeping a full crew ready on a ship the Navy had only recently returned to service.
Stevens left Alden on 10 July 1934. Kessing succeeded him the same day. The destroyer remained in the Battle Force for a time after that, and only later went out to the Asiatic Fleet. Stevens’s three years were the quiet middle of her life, spent on drills and maneuvers from San Diego rather than on the wartime escort work that came after he had gone.