USS Aaron Ward, a 1090-ton Wickes class destroyer built at Bath, Maine, was commissioned in April 1919. Her first active mission was to help cover the May 1919 trans-Atlantic flight of the Navy's NC flying boats. In September 1919 the destroyer went to the Pacific where, in November, she helped salvage an Army plane that had crashed off Mexico and recovered the bodies of its crew. She was designated DD-132 in July 1920 and remained active in the eastern Pacific for the next two years. In February 1921 she rescued the survivors of USS Woolsey (DD-77) after that destroyer was sunk in a collision. Aaron Ward was decommissioned at San Diego, California, in June 1922.

Following almost a decade in reserve Aaron Ward recommissioned May 1930. She served both with the active fleet and as part of the Rotating Reserve until April 1937, when she was again laid up. The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 brought Aaron Ward back into commissioned service. She spent the next year operating in the Pacific and in the Caribbean area as part of the Neutrality Patrol. In September 1940 USS Aaron Ward was transferred to the United Kingdom as part of the Destroyers for Bases agreement.

Serving in the Royal Navy as HMS Castleton, the now-elderly destroyer was assigned primarily to North Atlantic convoy escort duties, though she also screened minelaying forces off Scotland. She rescued survivors of two torpedoed merchant ships on 21 November 1940, helped capture the crew of the sunken German submarine U-464 in August 1942 and, nearly a year later, rescued survivors of a downed Canadian patrol plane and of German submarine U-489. HMS Castleton paid off in March 1945, as the European War was nearing an end. She was scrapped in Scotland in 1947.

USS Aaron Ward was named in honor of Rear Admiral Aaron Ward, USN, (1851-1918), who served actively in the U.S. Navy from 1867 to 1913.