The DD-130 was the second warship to carry the name Jacob Jones, honoring the War of 1812 commodore who captured HMS Frolic. The first USS Jacob Jones, a destroyer designated DD-61, had been torpedoed by a German U-boat in December 1917 during World War I, becoming one of the first American destroyers lost to enemy action. When the DD-130 went down in 1942, her depth charges detonated as she sank, killing survivors clinging to nearby rafts. The same grim fate had befallen the crew of the first Jacob Jones twenty-five years earlier. No other ship name in the U.S. Navy carries such a haunting symmetry: two different vessels, two different wars, both torpedoed by German submarines, both losing men to their own exploding depth charges as they slipped beneath the waves.

Built by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation at Camden, New Jersey, Jacob Jones was laid down on February 21, 1918, and commissioned on October 20, 1919, too late for the war she was designed to fight. The interwar decades sent her on a globe-spanning odyssey. She ran anti-aircraft drills off San Diego, guarded early aircraft carriers from Alaska to Mexico, transited the Panama Canal, and escorted President Franklin D. Roosevelt on his 1934 Good Neighbor visit to Haiti. She served with Squadron 40-T in the Mediterranean during the Spanish Civil War, patrolling from Villefranche to Gibraltar to protect American citizens. From Rotterdam to Lisbon, she steamed through the anxious ports of a continent sliding toward catastrophe. By the time she joined the Neutrality Patrol out of Charleston in April 1940, the old four-stacker had seen more of the world than most sailors dream of.

After Pearl Harbor, the German Navy launched Operation Drumbeat, sending U-boats to hunt along the American East Coast. The results were devastating. Merchant ships silhouetted against the glow of coastal cities made easy targets, and the Navy had few escorts to spare. Jacob Jones drew convoy duty in the brutal North Atlantic, battling force 9 storms that scattered convoys and left her limping into Hvalfjordur, Iceland, with a broken gyro compass, an erratic magnetic compass, and nearly empty fuel tanks. In February 1942, Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews assigned her to a roving anti-submarine patrol along the coast. On February 22, she attacked a possible contact off Lightship Ambrose, running twelve attack patterns and dropping 57 depth charges over five hours. Oil slicks appeared but no kill was confirmed. She returned to New York to rearm.

Jacob Jones departed New York on the morning of February 27, 1942, ordered to patrol between Barnegat Light and Five Fathom Bank off the Delaware Capes. That afternoon, she came upon the burning wreckage of a tanker torpedoed the previous day and circled for two hours searching for survivors. She reported her position at 2000 hours and went to radio silence. The night was clear, the sea calm. At first light on February 28, U-578 fired a spread of torpedoes. The first struck just aft of the bridge and detonated the ship's magazine, shearing off the entire forward section. A second torpedo hit near the stern, destroying the aft crew's quarters. Only the midships section remained intact. Lieutenant Commander Hugh Black and most of the crew died instantly. The 25 to 30 survivors scrambled over oily, wreckage-strewn decks to launch life rafts. Jacob Jones stayed afloat for about 45 minutes before plunging bow-first into the Atlantic.

At 0810, an Army observation plane spotted the life rafts and radioed their position to the Inshore Patrol. By 1100, rising seas forced the rescue vessel to break off her search after pulling twelve men from the water. One died en route to Cape May. The search continued by air and sea for two more days, but no other survivors were ever found. Of the destroyer's full complement, only eleven men lived. The wreck of Jacob Jones lies on the Atlantic seabed off the Delaware Capes, a war grave marking the spot where the Battle of the Atlantic reached America's doorstep. She remains a stark reminder that in the early months of 1942, German submarines operated with near impunity within sight of the American coast, and the thin line of aging destroyers sent to stop them paid a terrible price.