USS William M. Wood (DD/DDR-715) was a Gearing-class destroyer in the United States Navy during the final year of World War II.

Following shakedown out of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and type training in the Norfolk, Virginia area, William M. Wood operated in the Caribbean Sea from April to June 1946.

The destroyer operated out of Pearl Harbor from mid-July to late September, when she received orders to duty along the coast of China.

That task lasted until February 1947 when she headed back to the United States, arriving in San Diego early in March.

In the ensuing seven months, the ships called at Sydney, Australia; Hong Kong; Shanghai and Tsingtao in China; and Yokosuka, Japan.

She returned to San Diego with the unit in May 1948 and resumed normal training and upkeep operations which were broken once by a two-month overhaul at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

She returned to Newport in July and, after a voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia in company with the aircraft carrier Midway late in September, entered the Boston Naval Shipyard to begin conversion to a radar picket destroyer.

The summer of 1954 brought the ship a two-month midshipman cruise to European waters where she made port calls at Cadiz, Spain, and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Mounting tensions in the Middle East precipitated an Israeli invasion of the Egyptian Sinai on 29 October, and William M. Wood hastened to the eastern Mediterranean in November to join Task Force (TF) 26.

In March, she escorted Canberra when that cruiser carried President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Bermuda to confer with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

President Eisenhower responded immediately by sending Marine Corps units ashore in the troubled country and stationing 6th Fleet ships offshore to support them.

That employment, however, was interrupted in October when President John F. Kennedy declared the "quarantine" of Cuba in response to the siting of offensive, nuclear missiles on the island.

For 57 days, William M. Wood participated in the quasi-blockade patrols conducted around Cuba to prevent the importation of further missiles and to ensure the removal of those already there.

Their efforts proved to be in vain for the terrorists eluded capture, entered the Brazilian port of Belém, and received political asylum.

Following her return from her 11th Mediterranean deployment in the spring of 1964, William M. Wood entered the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on 18 May 1964 to begin a Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization (FRAM) overhaul.

She was redesignated DD-715 on 1 July 1964 and completed her FRAM conversion on 11 March 1965 when she headed back to Norfolk to rejoin the Atlantic Fleet.

During her last eight years of active service, William M. Wood made two more routine Mediterranean cruises and then served there on a three-year extended deployment.

While deployed escorting amphibious task force anchored at East of Crete anchorage, she detected a Soviet submarine and alerted other destroyers and they began to hold down the sub.

While there, certain equipment and parts were removed and used in the restoration of the museum ship USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., currently berthed in Fall River, Massachusetts, and open to the public.

William M. Wood earned: This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.