USS Melville, a 7150-ton destroyer tender, was built at Camden, New Jersey. Commissioned in early December 1915, she was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet. In May 1917, soon after the United States entered World War I, she steamed to Queenstown, Ireland, to provide base services for U.S. Navy destroyers conducting anti-submarine operations from that port. Melville returned to the U.S. in January 1919, nearly two months after the fighting ended. During the next half year she served off the U.S. East Coast, in the Caribbean, and in the Azores, where she supported the May 1919 trans-Atlantic flight of the Navy seaplane NC-4.

In July 1919 Melville was transferred to the Pacific Coast, but her arrival was delayed for three months by a boiler explosion that took the lives of five of her crew. Once repaired and on station at her new home port, San Diego, California, she began two decades of work maintaining the Fleet's destroyers. During this time the tender also served in Hawaii waters, the Caribbean and along the Atlantic Coast. After December 1940 Melville supported warships taking part in Neutrality Patrols and other "short of war" operations out of Norfolk, Virginia, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Bermuda.

After an absence of twenty-three years, in January 1942 Melville returned to the eastern Atlantic to support convoy escort ships. Initially based at Londonderry, Northern Ireland, she was later stationed at Iceland, Brazil, Scotland, England and the U.S. East Coast. Beginning in May 1944 she helped minesweepers and landing craft as they got ready for the June invasion of Normandy and the subsequent land campaign across northwestern Europe. In July 1945, following the German surrender, Melville went to New York, en route to a planned assignment to the Pacific. This was cancelled after Japan capitulated in mid-August and she spent most of the next year at Jacksonville, Florida, helping to lay up excess warships. Decommissioned at Norfolk, Virginia, in August 1946, USS Melville was stricken from the list of Navy ships in April 1947, transferred to the Maritime Commission in March 1948 and sold for scrapping in August of that year.

USS Melville was named in honor of Rear Admiral George W. Melville (1841-1912), a noted Arctic explorer and Chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering from 1887 to 1903.