USS Sturtevant (DD-240) was a in the United States Navy during World War II. She was the first ship named for Albert D. Sturtevant. Sturtevant was laid down on 23 November 1918 and launched on 29 July 1920 by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation; sponsored by Mrs. Curtis Ripley Smith; and commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 21 September 1920. Inter-war period Sturtevant sailed to Newport, Rhode Island, and thence proceeded to New York City. On 30 November, she departed New York to join the United States Naval Forces, European Waters. She reached Gibraltar on 10 December, and after four days continued on to the Adriatic Sea. On the 19th, she arrived at her new base, Split on the Croatian coast (then in Kingdom of Yugoslavia). For the next six months, she conducted various missions from Split to the ports on the Adriatic littoral. On 16 June 1921, the destroyer was reassigned from the Adriatic detachment to the Constantinople detachment, and, three days later commenced docking and overhaul at Constantinople. During this assignment, Sturtevant conducted drills in the Sea of Marmara, between the twin straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, and operated in the Black Sea. She visited Samsun, Turkey; Burgas, Bulgaria; and Sulina and Brăila on the coast of Romania. From 25 October to 28 November, she flew the flag of Admiral Mark L. Bristol. Following this duty, the ship visited the ports of Beirut and Jaffa and then Alexandria, Egypt, and the Isle of Rhodes. In late December, she returned to Turkey at Samsun, thence to Constantinople in January 1922, before reentering the Black Sea to visit southern Russia. From 1921 to 1923, the Russian Civil War and a drought brought a great famine to Russia, particularly to the usually food-rich Volga region of southern Russia. America responded with nearly of food which the Bolsheviks accepted, often as surreptitiously as possible. Sturtevant investigated potential ports of debarkation in southern Russia for the supplies soon to be shipped by the American Relief Administration. To this end, she visited Odessa, Sevastopol, Novorossiysk, Theodosia, and Yalta between early February and mid-April. Thereafter, through the end of the year, she made voyages across the Black Sea to various Russian ports in conjunction with the relief operation. She stopped at numerous other foreign ports on the voyages, including Samsun, Trebizond, and Mudanya, Turkey. From July–October, she made a round-trip voyage back to