The 32nd Street destroyer base — where the tin cans came home.

San Diego didn't inherit a destroyer base in 1922 — it campaigned for one. When the Navy Department convened its postwar Pacific basing review, delegations from San Francisco, Seattle, and San Pedro arrived in Washington with competing petitions, but San Diego's harbor commission brought something more persuasive: precise soundings, tidal tables, and the argument that no other Pacific port combined a sheltered all-weather anchorage with immediate access to open water for fleet exercises. Congress was convinced. By midsummer the new Destroyer Base San Diego was taking shape on reclaimed mudflats at the foot of 32nd Street, and within months the most haunting armada in American naval history had begun arriving in the channel — row upon row of flush-deck four-stackers with their boilers banked, their crews dispersed, and their lines doubled twice on the pilings as if the ships themselves needed restraining from some long-cancelled errand at sea.

The ships were the residue of a wartime production miracle turned peacetime embarrassment. Between 1917 and 1922, American shipyards had launched 273 flush-decked destroyers in two principal classes: the 111-ship Wickes class and the 156-ship Clemson class — standardized 314-foot hulls displacing roughly 1,200 tons, driven by oil-fired steam turbines to better than 35 knots, and fitted with four funnels, four torpedo tubes, and a quartet of four-inch guns. They had been designed to flood the North Atlantic and break the U-boat stranglehold on Allied shipping; the yards built them so fast that hundreds commissioned after the Armistice of November 1918 never heard a hostile shot. By 1922 the Navy held more than two hundred of them on the books and the peacetime budget to man perhaps a third. The rest were towed to reserve anchorages on both coasts — and to San Diego, where as many as a hundred hulls at a time lay in long gray ranks along the 32nd Street fence, their stacks throwing no smoke, their gun bores stopped with wooden plugs against the salt air rolling in off Point Loma.

The diplomatic architecture that ratified this surplus was the Washington Naval Treaty of February 1922, which imposed tonnage ratios on capital ships and effectively guaranteed a decade of naval austerity across the five great powers. Destroyers were not directly capped by the treaty's schedules — that restriction arrived with the London Naval Treaty of 1930 — but the budget logic was inescapable: with battleship construction frozen, Congress saw no reason to fund the full destroyer force required to screen a battle line it had just agreed not to build. The San Diego reserve was designated the Pacific Reserve Fleet, maintained by rotating caretaker parties of a dozen enlisted men per hull who kept the machinery sealed in cosmoline and the log books current against the day, never quite specified, when the ships might be wanted again.

The base was not merely a parking lot for surplus iron. Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, an active flotilla of forty-odd destroyers operated continuously from the 32nd Street piers, running exercises from the mouth of San Diego Bay north through the Santa Barbara Channel. The tactical emphasis was relentless: crews rehearsed the long high-speed runs at dusk, the staggered spreads of Mark 8 torpedoes launched against an imagined battle line, the sharp retiring turns, the smoke screens laid by the trailing ships. Night operations were a particular obsession — exercises run without navigation lights in the waters between Coronado and the Zuniga Jetty, each ship navigating on relative bearings and the dim silhouettes of neighbors. The lessons of the Battle of Jutland, where British and German destroyer flotillas had simultaneously demonstrated the potential and the terrible cost of night torpedo attacks, drove the curriculum with an urgency that civilian Washington rarely grasped.

The officers who learned their trade in that channel read today as a roll call of the war that was coming. William F. Halsey Jr. commanded destroyer squadrons out of San Diego in the late 1920s, absorbing an attack-first doctrine that would define his carrier task force operations from Guadalcanal to Leyte Gulf. Ernest J. King passed through in multiple capacities, each assignment reinforcing his conviction that destroyers were not screening vessels but offensive weapons — instruments of initiative to be handled aggressively or not at all. The lieutenant commanders working the torpedo plot tables in those exercises — men whose names history would not learn for another fifteen years — would rise to command cruisers and carrier divisions across the Pacific War, carrying reflexes formed in the calm water south of Point Loma.

The mothballed fleet found its final commission in 1940, when the Roosevelt administration struck a deal with a Britain fighting for survival. Under the Destroyers for Bases Agreement of September 2, 1940, fifty of the reserve's four-stackers were transferred to the Royal Navy in exchange for ninety-nine-year base leases across the British Atlantic world. The ships departed with new names — HMS Broadway, HMS Churchill, and forty-eight of their sisters — their American pennant numbers painted over but their four funnels still unmistakably announcing their origins on the North Atlantic convoy routes. A few of the remaining tin cans found their own distinguished endings closer to home. USS Ward (DD-139), a Wickes-class ship that had rested in Pacific reserve for years, fired the first American shots of the Second World War at 6:37 a.m. on December 7, 1941 — sinking a Japanese midget submarine at the entrance to Pearl Harbor more than an hour before the aircraft arrived overhead.

The city that won the destroyer base in 1922 became, over the generation that followed, the institutional home of American naval power in the Pacific. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz ran Pacific logistics through 32nd Street's piers; the base expanded steadily through the war as destroyer tenders, repair ships, and barracks hulks joined the active fleet along the waterfront. Today Naval Base San Diego homeports more than sixty ships and supports some 20,000 active-duty personnel — the largest surface warfare base on the West Coast — its piers occupying the same tideland fill that the harbor commission's surveyors mapped a century ago. The Pacific Fleet flies its flag from Pearl Harbor, but San Diego remains where the tin cans live: where the guided-missile destroyers depart on deployment and come home through the same buoyed channel the four-stackers worked in the twenties.

The flush-deckers are gone — scrapped in the yards, sunk as targets, or lying somewhere in the silted dark of Iron Bottom Sound — but the institution they anchored persists, and so does something harder to name. Every destroyer crew that trades torpedo solutions and drives at speed through the dark south of Point Loma is doing, in updated form, exactly what the men in USS Clemson and USS Wickes did a century ago in this same water. The four-stackers trained the fleet that held the Pacific; the bay trained the four-stackers. The same summer westerly. The same kelp beds off Zuniga. You could sail it tonight — and feel the weight of what that water still remembers.