USS Cushing, a 1465-ton Mahan class destroyer built at the Puget Sound Navy Yard, was commissioned August 1936. She mainly operated in the Pacific during the half-decade of peace that followed her entry into service, participating in Fleet Problems, training and other activities. Among the latter was the mid-ocean search in July 1937 for the missing aviator Amelia Earhart.

When Japan began the Pacific War on 7 December 1941, Cushing was finishing an overhaul at the Mare Island Navy Yard. During the war's first months she escorted convoys between the U.S. mainland and Hawaii, patrolled off the Midway Islands and operated with the residual U.S. Pacific Fleet battleship force off the west coast. In mid-1942, the destroyer was ordered to the south Pacific to join in the campaign to hold Guadalcanal. In addition to convoy escort duties, she screened the aircraft carrier Enterprise during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in late October.

A few weeks later, on 13 November 1942, Cushing was at the head of the U.S. line during the first night action of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. In an intense gun and torpedo action, she bravely engaged several Japanese ships, among them the battleship Hiei. With their ship battered by shellfire and burning badly, the destroyer's surviving crewmen were forced over the side into the water, from which they were rescued the following morning. Cushing's hulk remained afloat until the late afternoon of 13 November, but then suffered a magazine exposion and sank. However, she had helped thwart an enemy bombardment of U.S. positions ashore on Guadalcanal, and thus played a vital role in the successful fight to retain that vital island.

Cushing's sunken wreck was located and examined in 1991-92. She rests nearly upright nearly a half-mile below the surface of Iron Bottom Sound, southeast of Savo Island. Her hull has been destroyed aft of the forward part of the after deckhouse, but is essentially intact from there to the bow. Cushing's forward superstructure, weakened by intense fires before she sank, has largely collapsed, and much of the rest of her upperworks are severely damaged. Her forward five-inch guns are intact and point toward the port and starboard bows. Also trained to port are her centerline quadruple torpedo tubes, pointing exactly as they were during the chaotic night of 13 November 1942.

USS Cushing was named in honor of Commander William B. Cushing (1842-1874), one of the Navy's leading heros of the Civil War.