[1] On July 30, 1919, he was ordered to the Pacific Coast for further duty, first serving on the cruiser Brooklyn (CA-3) as gunnery officer, and receiving promotion to lieutenant commander on January 27, 1920.

In August he began fitting out new destroyers, commissioning, and delivering them to the fleet; they included the William Jones (DD-308), Yarborough (DD-314), Marcus (DD-321), and Melvin (DD-335).

On July 11, 1921, Rosendahl assumed command of the destroyer Claxton (DD-140), before being ordered to duty at the Naval Academy as an instructor in Department of Electrical Engineering and Physics in September.

Promoted to lieutenant commander on January 5, 1925,[2] he distinguished himself by successfully bringing the bow section of the shattered airship safely to earth after she broke up in the air on September 3, 1925, over Noble County, Ohio.

Los Angeles also took part in the searches for Nungesser and Coli's aircraft The White Bird, and Frances Wilson Grayson's Dawn, both of which went missing during attempts on trans-Atlantic flights.

[2] In January 1928 Rosendahl flew Los Angeles out to sea off Newport, Rhode Island, to rendezvous with the aircraft carrier Saratoga (CV-3) and moored to the ship's stern to take on fuel and stores.

Rosendahl served as an official observer on the German airship Hindenburg, on transatlantic flights between Frankfurt and Rio de Janeiro in August and September 1936.

[2] He later testified at the Department of Commerce inquiry into the accident[1] and stated: When I saw the first blaze I knew the ship was doomed and I also thought that there would immediately be an explosion which would flatten every building at the field and kill everybody looking on.

[4] On May 15, he returned to NAS Lakehurst and assumed duty as the Chief of Naval Airship Training Command, receiving promotion to rear admiral on May 26, 1943.

[5] These include notes for an unpublished study of the attack on Pearl Harbor written with the assistance of Vice Admiral Ryūnosuke Kusaka, who Rosendahl had first met and befriended on the Graf Zeppelin circumnavigation in 1929.