USS Ellis (DD-154) - Service History

Service History

Ellis's first cruise, between 16 June 1919 and 15 August, was to the Black Sea, carrying United States Food Administration officials for famine relief work, and British and American military officers between Constantinople, Turkey; Varna, Bulgaria; and Batum, Georgia. She returned to a year of exercises on the east coast and in the Caribbean. From 29 September 1920 to 16 March 1921 she was in reserve at Charleston. She sailed north to fire test torpedoes off Newport, lay again at Charleston from October 1921 through February 1922. On 27 February she entered Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she was out of commission from 17 June 1922 to 1 May 1930.

Ellis served with the Scouting Fleet along the east coast, off Panama and Cuba, and from March 1932 through October in exercises between San Diego and San Francisco. She was in rotating reserve at Norfolk and Boston in 1932 and 1933. In April 1933, she searched for Akron, and found wreckage off the New Jersey coast. Based on New York through the summer of 1933, she escorted the Presidential yacht along the New England coast to Campobello, Nova Scotia, where on 1 July she embarked President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his party, transferring them to Indianapolis. She escorted Indianapolis to Annapolis, where the President again visited Ellis on 4 July. She also trained members of the Naval Reserve before departing New York 8 September for Key West.

The next year, Ellis cruised to Cuba, again escorted the President, this time in a private yacht, and on 24 October 1934 passed through the Panama Canal to be based on San Diego. Training operations took her to Alaska and Hawaii during the next year and a half, and on 7 June 1936 she returned to Miami for east coast reserve training duty until decommissioned at Philadelphia 16 December 1936.