in the Armistice Day observances on the 11th. In April 1932, two years after being recommissioned, Wickes reported for duty with Rotating Reserve Squadron 20 and subsequently shifted back to the Pacific. From 1933 to 1937, Wickes operated out of San Diego, commanded by Lt. Comdr. Ralph U. Hyde, ('17), with Lt. Milton E. Miles as Exec. Decommissioned on 6 April 1937, the destroyer remained in reserve only a short time because of the increase of tension in Europe and the Far East. Fighting broke out in Poland on 1 September 1939 as German forces invaded that country and thus triggered British and French assistance to Poland. World War II was on. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt promptly directed that the Navy establish a "Neutrality Patrol" off the eastern seaboard, in the approaches to the Panama Canal and Guantánamo Bay, and at the two entrances to the Gulf of Mexico. To help patrol these stretches of sea, the Navy quickly reactivated 77 destroyers and light minelayers. Wickes was recommissioned on 30 September 1939. Over the ensuing month, the destroyer was fitted out while moored at the destroyer base alongside . Early in November, she shifted to the Mare Island Navy Yard, Vallejo, California, for drydocking. After returning to San Diego on 21 November, Wickes departed the west coast on 27 November, bound for Panama in company with her division, Destroyer Division (DesDiv) 64. En route, she fueled from the oiler and arrived at Balboa, Panama, on 6 December. Transiting the canal the next day, the destroyer arrived at the Naval Operating Base (NOB), Key West, Florida, on 11 December and commenced neutrality patrol duty. Wickes and her sister ships patrolled alternately in the Yucatán Channel between the east coast of Cuba and the Yucatán Peninsula and in the passage between Florida and the west coast of Cuba. They shadowed belligerent merchantmen and warships of the British and Commonwealth navies searching for German freighters or passenger ships caught in or near American coastal waters by the outbreak of war. On her first patrol, Wickes spotted a cruiser—possibly or (her log is not specific here)—at 1058 on 14 December. The destroyer shadowed the cruiser, changing courses and speeds to conform to the other ship's movements, until well after nightfall. Anchored off Port Everglades, Florida, just before Christmas of 1939, Wickes noted the British destroyer maintaining a diligent patrol off the Florida coast between