USS Trippe (DD-33) - World War I

World War I

The threat of war, however, made her retirement a brief one. Trippe was placed in full commission once again at Boston on 25 July 1916, Lieutenant, junior grade Roy P. Emrich in command. During the following eight months, Trippe trained along the coast in preparation for the increasingly probable entry of the United States into World War I. The United States declared war on the German Empire on 6 April 1917. Trippe continued to operate off the coast until early May, when she entered Boston and commenced preparations for duty overseas.

On 21 May, the destroyer cleared Boston for Britain. After a call at St. John's, Newfoundland, she arrived in Queenstown on the southern coast of Ireland, the location of a major wartime American destroyer base. She paused only long enough to refuel and make voyage repairs before clearing the harbor on 5 June for her first patrol. From Queenstown, she escorted Allied convoys on the last leg of their voyage from America to France and England. Her field of operations, situated as it was in the war zone which had been established around the British Isles by Germany on 5 February 1915, was the prime hunting ground of High Seas Fleet U-boats. When not engaged in escorting convoys, Trippe patrolled the waters around Queenstown in an effort to detect and destroy as many enemy submarines as possible.

The warship had only one verified scrape with German U-boats. On 18 September 1917, she and Jacob Jones were steaming in company some 350 mi (560 km) west of Brest, France, when — shortly after 0200 — she sighted the distinctive wake of the periscope of a submarine running on a parallel course, but in the opposite direction. Trippe dropped depth charges, but without "visible results", and continued on to rendezvous with an eastbound convoy. That night, she dueled with another adversary — the sea. In a raging storm, waves carried her starboard waist gun platform overboard. Trippe, however, successfully shepherded her convoy into Quiberon Bay, France, made repairs quickly, and resumed her grueling routine.

Through the final year of the war, Trippe and her sister ships slowly bested the enemy. Convoys of merchant ships carried troops and supplies to France, where the armies of the Allies grew steadily. By the fall of 1918, they reached a point of overwhelming superiority over those of the Central Powers. On 11 November, the day of the signing of the armistice, Trippe was in port at Queenstown. Just over a month later, she cleared that Irish port, refueled at the Azores and Bermuda, and returned to Boston on 3 January 1919. After six months of operations along the eastern seaboard, the destroyer entered the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 23 July for preinactivation overhaul. On 6 November 1919, Trippe was decommissioned and placed in reserve at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.