USS Manley (DD-74/AG-28/APD-1), a , served in the United States Navy. She was the second Navy ship named for Captain John Manley (c.1733–1793).
Manley was laid down on 22 August 1916 by the Bath Iron Works, Bath, Maine; launched on 23 August 1917; sponsored by Miss Dorothy S. Sewall; and commissioned on 15 October 1917. She was redesignated DD-74 on 17 July 1920.
World War I
After fitting out in Boston Navy Yard, Manley sailed in company with Battleship Division Nine on 25 November 1917 to join the convoy escort and patrol forces based at Queenstown, Ireland. On the morning of 19 March 1918, while Manley escorted a convoy, she rolled against the British auxiliary cruiser HMS Montagua, which caused the accidental detonation of Manleys depth charges. Her stern was practically destroyed, and 33 enlisted men as well as her executive officer, Lt. Comdr. Richard M. Elliot Jr., were killed in the subsequent explosion. Fragments pierced two drums of gasoline and two tanks containing of alcohol. The leaking fluids caught fire as they ran along the deck and enveloped the ship in flames which were not extinguished until late that night.
Then the sloop HMS Tamarisk edged up to the shattered destroyer and unsuccessfully tried to put a towline on board. Manley remained adrift until British tugs Blazer and Cartmel took her in tow after daylight on 20 March. She reached Queenstown at dusk the following day with more than of her hull awash or completely under water.
Inter-war years
Manley completed repairs in Liverpool and sailed on 22 December 1918 for operations along the eastern seaboard of the United States. She got underway on 11 April 1919 to join U.S. Naval Forces in the Adriatic Sea transporting passengers, carrying mail, and performing diplomatic missions. In June 1919 she began carrying, mail and members of the U.S. Food Commission among Turkish ports in the Black Sea. The destroyer returned from the Mediterranean to New York on 1 August 1919 and decommissioned at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 14 June 1922.
The destroyer recommissioned on 1 May 1930 for service as an experimental torpedo-firing ship at Newport, Rhode Island. On 19 August 1930 she joined the Scouting Fleet in battle practice along the eastern seaboard and in the Caribbean. She performed similar duty on the coast of California out of San Diego during 1932. She returned to the Atlantic early in 1933 for operations which continued until she sailed for the Panama Canal Zone on 10 September 1935 and joined the Special Service Squadron that patrolled the Caribbean.
Manley sailed for Norfolk, Virginia on 1 February 1937 to join DesRon 10 in training midshipmen. On 26 October 1937 she sailed from Boston, Massachusetts with to serve with Squadron 40-T in protecting American interests in the Mediterranean during the Spanish Civil War. She operated principally from Villefranche, Naples, Algiers, and Tangiers until she departed Gibraltar on 29 October 1938, arriving Norfolk on 11 November 1938. Reclassified a miscellaneous auxiliary on 28 November, she was redesignated AG-28.
As an auxiliary and high-speed transport
Manley was outfitted as a high-speed transport in the New York Navy Yard by 7 February 1939. Her first marine landing force drill was carried out on 21 February when she landed marines in Target Bay, Culebra Island in the first of many landing exercises on the Virginia and North Carolina beaches and in the Caribbean that would prove of great benefit to the United States in the vast overseas conflict then just over the horizon. Manley briefly visited the California coast in the spring of 1940 for marine landing force drills off Coronado Roads. Back in the Atlantic, Manley was officially designated the Navy's first high-speed transport on 2 August 1940 when she became APD-1.
World War II
At dusk on 11 April 1942, she picked up 290 survivors from the torpedoed merchant passenger steamer SS Ulysses, and landed them at Charleston, South Carolina the following day. On 13 July 1942 Manley transited the Panama Canal for duty with the Pacific Fleet. Touching the Society and Fiji Islands, she reached Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides on 14 August, and loaded special cargo for Guadalcanal, invaded only one week earlier.