USS Bearss (DD-654) was a Fletcher-class destroyer. She was named for Hiram Iddings Bearss, a Marine officer born at Peru, Indiana, on 13 April 1875. On Samar, on 17 November 1901, during the Philippine-American War, he led a small force in a sharp action along the Cadacan and Sohoton Rivers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented him the Medal of Honor for that fight in 1934. Bearss also served in the First World War and was later advanced to brigadier general. He died in an automobile accident near Columbia City, Indiana, in August 1938.
Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation laid her keel at Chickasaw, Alabama, on 14 July 1942. The hull entered the water on 25 July 1943, sponsored by Louise Bearss, the general's widow. The Navy commissioned her at Mobile, Alabama, on 12 April 1944, and Commander John Alden Webster took command the same day.
Webster carried the new destroyer out to the Pacific. She spent July 1944 in Hawaiian waters, then reached Adak, in the Aleutians, on 9 August 1944. That northern station was her base for the rest of the war, and Emmett Mobley Compton assumed command in April 1945. Bearss was still in service when the fighting ended. She survived the war.
She returned to the United States and arrived at Charleston, South Carolina, on 22 December 1945. On 12 July 1946 she was placed in commission in reserve. On 31 January 1947 she went out of commission in reserve and settled into the inactive fleet.
The Navy ordered her back to sea on 7 September 1951. She joined Destroyer Division 322 in Destroyer Squadron 32 and served with the Atlantic Fleet, on the ordinary peacetime work of an East Coast destroyer. That second active career closed with another decommissioning in 1963.
Bearss then lay in reserve for more than a decade. Her name was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 1 December 1974. On 14 April 1976 she was sold for scrap to the Union Minerals and Alloys Corporation of New York.