Ships
- USS Louisville (CA-28) Captain from 8 May 1937 · Relieved on 29 October 1938
Captain Rufus Wellington Mathewson commanded the United States heavy cruiser Louisville from 8 May 1937 until he was relieved on 29 October 1938. For that year and a half he had charge of one of the Navy’s principal scouting ships in the Pacific, while the fleet was still at peace and training for a war that had not yet come.
Louisville, designated CA-28, was a Northampton-class cruiser. The Puget Sound Navy Yard built her, and she was commissioned in January 1931. She displaced a little over nine thousand tons, carried eight 8-inch guns in four twin turrets, and was designed to steam at more than thirty knots, fast enough to range ahead of the battleships, scout, and fight other cruisers. Several hundred officers and enlisted men formed her company. When Mathewson took command in the spring of 1937, the ship already had six years of fleet service behind her.
Her station in those years was the Pacific, with San Pedro on the California coast as a principal base. Mathewson’s work was the steady business of a cruiser captain: gunnery practices, engineering drills, inspections, and the handling of a large ship in formation with the rest of the fleet. Passages out to Hawaii and back were part of the routine. They trained his watch officers in navigation and station-keeping over open ocean and kept the crew familiar with the waters where the Navy expected a Pacific campaign to begin.
In the spring of 1938 the United States Fleet conducted Fleet Problem XIX across the eastern Pacific, between the West Coast and the Hawaiian Islands. The exercise practiced long-range search, carrier attack, and the defense of those islands. Louisville went to sea under Mathewson with the cruiser force charged with scouting and screening. The weeks underway tested the ship’s fuel endurance, her communications, and the drill of the 8-inch gun crews, all of it carried out under fleet orders while the country remained at peace.
Mathewson was relieved on 29 October 1938 and left Louisville on the Pacific station. The cruiser continued in commission under the officers who followed him, and those later captains took her through the fighting of the Pacific war. His own tour in her ran from 8 May 1937 to 29 October 1938, a captain’s command of a heavy cruiser in the last peacetime years of the fleet.