heading south. She shifted to Hampton Roads in mid-October and participated in exercises there and at Lynnhaven Bay for a month before returning to Boston. The warship spent December and the first three weeks of 1915 in the Boston area and, on 26 January, arrived in Guantanamo Bay to resume her schedule of winter drills in the Caribbean. Late in March, Trippe pointed her bow northward once more and reached Boston on 6 April. After her normal round of maneuvers off the northeastern coast, the torpedo boat destroyer returned to Boston on 23 October. A little less than two months later — on 13 December 1915 — Trippe became a unit of the newly organized 2nd Reserve Flotilla. On 5 January 1916, she was designated a "Destroyer operating with reduced complement;" and, on the 27th, she was placed in ordinary at the Boston Navy Yard. 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. 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 were steaming in company some west of Brest, France, when — shortly after 0200 — she