Alden was laid down at William Cramp & Sons in Philadelphia on October 24, 1918 — weeks before the armistice ended World War I. She was launched on May 14, 1919, sponsored by Sarah Alden Dorsey, a niece of the Rear Admiral for whom the ship was named. Commissioned that November, she arrived too late for the war she was built for. Instead, the Navy sent her east. Within months of leaving the shipyard, she was in the Adriatic, carrying mail and passengers between Split, Venice, and Kotor, investigating political conditions and showing the American flag during the turbulent aftermath of Austro-Hungarian collapse. She then sailed for Constantinople to assist Russian Civil War refugees — a ship built for fleet combat suddenly doing humanitarian work in one of history's most complicated corners.

After years in reserve through the late 1920s, Alden was recommissioned in 1930 and assigned to the Asiatic Fleet — the small, aging force of American warships that patrolled the Far East from their base at Cavite in the Philippines. For six years she followed the fleet's seasonal rhythm: north to China in the spring, summer operations out of Chefoo, back to Cavite in the fall. She visited Shanghai, Hankow on the Yangtze, and Vladivostok — the latter in 1937, the first American naval visit to a Soviet port since diplomatic relations were established in 1933. It was a remarkable tour of a region about to explode. When Japan and China went to open war in July 1937, Alden was already there, watching.

In December 1937, the ocean liner SS President Hoover ran aground on Kasho-to island east of Formosa during a typhoon. Alden and her sister destroyer Barker were ordered to assist immediately. The rescue operation brought Alden into waters she would come to know well — the western Pacific approaches where American ships scrambled to protect lives in the growing chaos of the Sino-Japanese conflict. Then Pearl Harbor changed everything. On December 8, 1941 (Philippine time), as Japanese aircraft struck Cavite and Manila Bay, Alden was already at sea. The ship that had been doing peacetime patrol duty was now at war.

Three weeks into the Pacific War, Alden was escorting the oiler USS Trinity toward Darwin, Australia, when Japanese submarine I-123 spotted Trinity and fired four torpedoes. All four missed, though Trinity sighted three of them. Alden immediately moved to attack — making sound contact with the submarine and launching a depth charge attack at 06:41 before losing contact. I-123 escaped. It was a brief, inconclusive engagement in a sea full of them during those dark weeks. The action off Darwin placed Alden at the epicenter of the war's opening Pacific campaign: the desperate fight to hold the Malay Barrier and keep supply lines to the Philippines alive, even as those lines were being severed one by one.

Many of Alden's sister ships from the Asiatic Fleet did not survive. USS Pope, USS Pillsbury, USS Edsall, and others were lost in the desperate battles around Java in February and March 1942. Alden made it to Fremantle. She continued serving in the Pacific through the rest of the war before being decommissioned in 1945. She was the only ship of the US Navy ever named for Rear Admiral James Alden, Jr. — a man who had himself served through the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the survey voyages of the Pacific coast. The ship carried that legacy across more miles and more years than anyone who named her could have anticipated.