USS Overton (DD-239) - Service History

Service History

Following shakedown, Overton operated with the 3rd, then 5th, Destroyer Squadrons off the east coast. While with the latter in early September 1920, she assisted in the rescue of S-5. She was then assigned to the 2nd Destroyer Squadron and ordered to European Waters. Departing New York, 14 September, she joined the Black Sea Detachment at Constantinople, 5 October. For the next year and a half she performed quasi-diplomatic and humanitarian roles necessitated by the aftermath of World War I. Cruising regularly to Caucasian, Romanian, and Turkish Black Sea ports, she also steamed into the Mediterranean to visit Levantine cities. She distributed relief supplies, provided transportation and communication services and relocated refugees. Much of the latter was accomplished following the capitulation of General Pyotr N. Wrangel's White Army to Bolshevik forces in the Crimea in November 1920. In July, 1922, Overton returned to the US for abbreviated exercises with the Scouting Fleet and, then, in October, as Turkish-Greek hostilities flared at Smyrna, rejoined the Turkish Waters Detachment for another six month tour.

In mid-May 1923, the destroyer sailed west to Italy, from where she returned to New York, arriving 12 June. Independent, squadron, and fleet exercises over the next eight years kept her in the Atlantic with but two interruptions, deployments in 1925 and 1926 to the Pacific for Fleet Problems.

On 3 February 1931, Overton was placed out of commission in reserve. The following year she was placed in rotating reserve commission, and served in that capacity until again decommissioned, in reserve, 20 November 1937.