USS Young (DD-580), a , was the second ship of the United States Navy of that name. She was the first to be named for Rear Admiral Lucien Young (1852–1912). Young was laid down on 7 May 1942 at Orange, Texas, by the Consolidated Steel Corp. The ship was launched on 15 October 1942, sponsored by Mrs. J. M. Schelling and commissioned on 31 July 1943. Service history 1943 Following a shakedown cruise in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, USS Young briefly operated out of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During that assignment, she formed part of the escort for the battleship when Iowa carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt across the Atlantic on the first leg of his journey to the Teheran Conference of November 1943. In the midst of that voyage, the destroyer received orders instructing her to head for the Pacific theater. She transited the Panama Canal on 24 November and reported for duty with the Pacific Fleet. She arrived in Pearl Harbor early in December and received orders assigning her to the small U.S. 9th Fleet in the northmost Pacific Ocean. USS Young remained at Pearl Harbor for several weeks, and she then headed for the Aleutian Islands, where she arrived in mid-January 1944. 1944 The arrival of USS Young in Alaskan waters, however, came some three months after the Aleutians campaign ended. Her duties for the next eight months, therefore, consisted of escort and patrol missions spiced with an occasional bombardment of Japanese installations in the Kuril Islands. She was an element of Rear Admiral Wilder D. Baker's striking force on 2 February 1944 when that unit conducted the first bombardment of Japanese home territory in the Kurils. She twice returned to those islands in June, shelling Matsuwa on the 13th and Paramushiro on the 26th. Otherwise, her only enemy during the first eight months of 1944 proved to be the foul Aleutians weather. During September, she returned to the United States for an overhaul. Upon completing repairs, the destroyer departed San Francisco Bay on 6 October, bound for the western Pacific. Reporting in at Manus Island in the Admiralty Islands late in the month, she received orders to join the escort of a supply convoy bound for the newly invaded Philippines. She reached Leyte Island on 18 November in the midst of an enemy air attack on the invasion fleet. She and her colleagues