Ships
- USS Hazelwood (DD-531) Captain from 12 September 1951
Commander R. M. Niles, Richard Martin Niles of the United States Navy, assumed command of the destroyer Hazelwood (DD-531) on 12 September 1951, the day the ship recommissioned at San Diego. He was a commander, and the Navy gave him a Fletcher-class destroyer that had spent more than five years laid up in reserve.
Hazelwood carried the name of John Hazelwood, an English-born officer of the Pennsylvania Navy who directed the naval defense of the Delaware River approaches to Philadelphia in 1777 and died in that city on 1 March 1800. Bethlehem Shipbuilding laid the second Hazelwood down at San Francisco on 11 April 1942. She was launched on 20 November 1942 and entered commission on 18 June 1943 with Hunter Wood as her first commanding officer. She screened fast carrier forces through the Pacific war. Off Okinawa on 29 April 1945, two suicide aircraft struck her and killed her commanding officer, Commander Volckert P. Douw, along with a large part of the crew. She made Ulithi, continued to Mare Island for lasting repairs, and left active service on 18 January 1946 for the Pacific Reserve Fleet at San Diego.
Niles's work was to bring that repaired ship back into the fleet. After recommissioning, Hazelwood finished shakedown on the Pacific coast, sailed from San Diego on 4 January 1952, and reached Newport, Rhode Island, on 21 January to join the Destroyer Forces of the Atlantic Fleet. Through the rest of his tour she exercised along the East Coast and in the Caribbean and trained in hunter-killer operations with carrier groups. The Navy had returned ships of her kind to service as the fleet expanded during the Korean War, and this Atlantic duty was the employment Niles gave her.
He remained in command until 8 July 1953, when Commander James Alexander Marks relieved him. On 7 December 1953 Hazelwood left Newport for the Far East, arrived at Tokyo on 12 January 1954, and spent the following months with a fast carrier force and on patrol along the Korean coast before returning to Newport by way of the Suez Canal on 17 July 1954. That western Pacific cruise followed his relief.