Ships
- USS Wilson (DD-408) Captain, 5 July 1939 – 25 May 1942
Russell Groesbeck Sturges, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1922, was a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy when he brought a new destroyer into service on the eve of the Second World War. He had been promoted to lieutenant commander on 23 June 1938. On 5 July 1939 he took command of USS Wilson (DD-408) at her commissioning at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington, where the Benham-class ship had been built and launched that April.
The opening months were spent working the ship up. After fitting out, Wilson reached San Francisco in mid-September 1939, loaded exercise torpedoes at the Mare Island Navy Yard, and trained from Long Beach and San Diego and on runs toward the Canal Zone. Her shakedown took her to Guayaquil in Ecuador, Callao in Peru, Balboa, and Manzanillo Bay on the Mexican coast. She returned to San Diego in November 1939 and then went back north to the builder’s yard for post-shakedown repairs, upkeep, and machinery trials.
For the rest of that year and into 1940, Wilson operated along the west coasts of the United States, Central America, and South America. In April 1940 she went to Hawaii for Fleet Problem XXI and spent most of the following year in Hawaiian waters. In June 1941 she was ordered to the Atlantic, and Sturges kept her there through the following spring.
In early April 1942, still under Sturges, Wilson was at sea with Task Force 39, in company with the heavy cruisers Wichita and Tuscaloosa and the destroyers Lang and Sterett, for a meeting with a British cruiser force that had sailed from Scapa Flow. In those same northern waters she also steamed in an escort that included the British destroyers Faulknor, Inglefield, and Icarus and the American destroyers Sterett and Madison.
Sturges left Wilson on 25 May 1942, when Walter H. Price assumed command. Sturges was advanced to temporary commander on 17 July 1942 and to temporary captain on 15 May 1943. The destroyer he had commissioned later continued in the Pacific under Charles Kenney Duncan, Colin Jack MacKenzie, and Willis L. Roberts.