Named for Charles Vernon Gridley, they were part of a series of USN destroyers limited to 1,500 tons standard displacement by the London Naval Treaty and built in the 1930s.

Based on the preceding Mahan-class destroyers with somewhat different machinery, they had the same hull but had only a single stack and mounted sixteen 21 inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes, an increase of four.

[3] USS Maury (DD-401) made the highest trial speed ever recorded for a United States Navy destroyer, 42.8 knots.

[4] All four ships served extensively in World War II, notably in the Solomon Islands and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, with Maury receiving a Presidential Unit Citation.

[10] As with most other US destroyers of this period, the 5 inch guns featured all-angle power loading and were director controlled, making them as effective as the technology allowed against aircraft.

However, in common with all US surface combatants in the 1930s, the light AA armament was weak; only four .50 caliber machine guns (12.7 mm) were equipped.

It was apparently felt that the heavy AA armament would shoot down most incoming aircraft in all situations, but the attack on Pearl Harbor showed that this was not true.

[11] The Gridleys' weak AA armament was partially remedied after Pearl Harbor by replacing the machine guns with seven 20 mm Oerlikon cannon (0.8 in).

Based at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the squadron was at sea escorting USS Enterprise (CV-6) on 7 December 1941, then was dispersed among carrier task forces during the Marshalls-Gilberts raids of early 1942.

Maury, with a crack in her deck that was no longer deemed worth repairing, was decommissioned in October, two months after hostilities ceased.