United States Coast Guard Career
On 17 January 1920, Prohibition was instituted by law in the United States. Soon, the smuggling of alcoholic beverages along the coastlines of the United States became widespread and blatant. The Treasury Department eventually determined that the United States Coast Guard simply did not have the ships to constitute a successful patrol. To cope with the problem, President Calvin Coolidge in 1924 authorized the transfer from the Navy to the Coast Guard of twenty old destroyers that were in reserve and out of commission. Tucker was activated and acquired by the Coast Guard on 25 March 1926, as part of a second group of five to augment the original twenty.
Designated CG-23, Tucker was commissioned on 29 September, and joined the "Rum Patrol" to aid in the attempt to enforce prohibition laws. She served as the flagship of Division 4 of the Destroyer Force through October 1927, when she was transferred to Division 1. On 4 April 1933, the greatest disaster which aeronautics had experienced up to that time occurred off the New Jersey coast. The Navy airship Akron crashed in a storm killing 73 men, including Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Tucker received word of the crash and sped to the scene. Upon arrival, she found that the German motorship Phoebus had rescued four men from the sea—one of whom died shortly after being rescued. The survivors were transferred to Tucker and were disembarked at the New York Navy Yard.
After the United States Congress proposed the Twenty-first Amendment to end prohibition in February 1933, plans were made for Tucker to be returned to the Navy. On 26 May, Tucker arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and was decommissioned ten days later, on 5 June. Tucker was transferred back to the Navy on 30 June. On 1 November, Tucker was renamed DD-57 in order to free the name Tucker for a new destroyer of the same name. For a time, DD-57 served as a Sea Scout training ship at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. She was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 24 October 1936. DD-57 was sold on 10 December and reduced to a hulk on 23 December.
Read more about this topic: USS Tucker (DD-57)
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