Norfolk Harbor Cruise Part II

This is the part of the cruise that I was waiting for.

 Naval Station Norfolk was established in 1917 after the Navy bought the land used for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition.  However, there were Naval facilities here prior to this.  During the Civil War, the Naval facilities were highly contested.  In fact, it was from one of those where the Confederates got the hulk for the USS Merrimac which would eventually become the CSS Virginia, one of the first ironclad warships.  It was near this spot where the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the first battle between two ironclad warships.  The base now supports ships that operate in the Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.  Currently there are four aircraft carriers, three helicopter carriers and several support ships.
In this picture alone, I think there are more warships than many countries have ships.

 The USS Normandy is one of several Ticonderoga Class Warships.  She was commissioned in 1989 and was sent to Operation Desert Shield during her maiden voyage.  She was the first cruiser since 1945 to do so.  She is equipped with the Aegis combat system and can track multiple targets at once.    In 1998, she was awarded with the most Tomahawk fired by a US Navy Cruiser.  She was part of the 50th Anniversary of the Normandy Landings celebrations.    She holds multiple awards.

 The USS Gettysburg was commissioned in 1991.  She is another Ticonderoga Class guided missile cruiser.  She has participated in some of the anti-piracy operations.

 The USS Oscar Austin was named after another Medal of Honor recipient.  He was a Marine Private First Class.  He died while defending an observation post in Vietnam.  He saw that one of his fellow Marines was wounded, so he lept from his safe spot to try to rescue him.  As he was close, he saw a grenade landing, so he jumped between the grenade and his comrade.  He was mortally wounded by the grenade.

 This is the USS Arleigh Burke, which is the lead ship of the class.  She was commissioned in 1991 after her construction at the Bath Iron Works in Maine.  It was decided that there needed to be a destroyer version of the Aegis defense system.  Her hull has some stealth characteristics.  The Admiral graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1923 and would get a Masters Degree in Engineering from the University of Michigan.  He was known as 31 knot Burke which was reflective of his hard charging nature.  He was able to witness the launching of the ship named after him.  He died in 1994 and is buried at the Naval Academy.  His gravestone bears the epitaph of "Sailor".

 The Cape May is similar to other ships with similar names.

 The rear of the Oscar Austin.

 The US Coast Guard Cutter James was in Norfolk after some repairs.  She is named after Joshua James who was a part of the Lifesaving Service (one of the predecessors to the Coast Guard) and helped save 600 people.  She was commissioned last year.  The James is one of the Legend Class National Security Cutters.

 The USS Tortuga is one of the Whidbey Island Class Landing Ship Docks.

 Another angle of the Burke.

 Another angle of the James.

 The USNS William McClean is named after a physicist who helped develop the Sidewinder missile.  She serves as a dry cargo ship for the US Navy.

 More on the this ship later.

 Another shot of the McClean.

 I think this is another replenishment ship.

 The USS Cole is another Arleigh Burke Class Destroyer.  She is named after Marine Sergeant Darrell Cole who was a Machine gunner killed on Iwo Jima.  In October of 2000, she was the target of an Al Queda attack carried out by two suicide bombers who detonated their boat next to her hull.  Seventeen US sailors were killed in this attack.   She would go through extensive repairs and return to service in 2003.

The USS New Orleans is a San Antonio Class Amphibious Transport Dock.  She was commissioned in 2007.

 The USNS Lewis B Puller is the first Expeditionary Mobile Base.  She was delivered last year.

 The USS Bataan is a helicopter carrier.  She can carry a number of heavy helicopters and Harrier Jump Jets.  I believe she can also carry a number of amphibious assault ships.

 Another angle of her.  This was probably the highlight of the tour.

 More on this ship later.

 The USS George Washington is a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier.  If I could have gotten a better angle of her, this would have been the highlight of the tour for me.  She can carry 72 aircraft comfortably and more if she is just shuttling them.  She is one of 10 aircraft carriers servicing the United States currently and each one represents more of an air force than most countries have in total.

 Another tug.

 More on this ship.

 The USS Laboon is named after Father John Francis Labbon who was a US Navy Chaplain who served on the USS Peto during World War II.  He was awarded the Silver Star for rescuing a downed aviator in mine infested waters.  He was ordained a Priest after the war.

 It was pretty cool catching a ship as she was leaving.  It made for better pictures than docked ships (although I like the other shots).

 One more shot of her.

 The Surrie Moran.

 The USS Churchill is named after British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.  I believe she may be the only US Warship named after a non-US Citizen.

 Another shot of the Jason Dunham.

 And a head on shot.  I would certainly hate to be an enemy ship facing this side.

 Another of the Comfort.

 A tugboat.

And this is the boat that I took for the cruise.

Anyone who follows this blog for a long time knows that I love ships.  While I like the ships of the Great Lakes, I love the ships of the Navy.  Ever since I was little, I would read about the exploits of our Navy.  So it was pretty cool to see a bunch of Navy ships.

It was cooler to look up the people behind the names of some of our ships.  This is a reminder that the hardware we have is nice but it still comes down to the people that man it.

I would like to take another trip to Norfolk at some point.  There is so much that I missed.

The Aircraft Carriers of the Great Lakes

I like to use my own picture for this blog but sometimes I run across a subject where it would be difficult to do so.  The Naval Institute's Naval History Magazine was once again the inspiration for this article.  Since it has something to do with my favorite topics - the Great Lakes, ships and planes, I had to do a posting.  And based on the name of one of the ships I just had to do a post.  All of the pictures used in this post come from the Naval Historical Center.

World War II was the coming of age for the Aircraft Carrier.  Part of that was out of necessity on the part of the United States since the Japanese did a pretty good job on the US Battleship Fleet at Pearl Harbor and part of that was because of the effectiveness of the airplane in modern warfare.

The US entered World War II with 7 Aircraft Carriers and by the end of the war would have several times that.  It's one thing to build ships, it's another thing to train the men that would eventually fly off those ships.  So the US built some ships which would serve that purpose and that's where we come in.

This is probably one of my favorite pictures from World War II is this picture.  This was taken near the end of the war and shows a handfull of aircraft carriers and was entitled "Murderer's Row" (named after the famed Yankees lineup of the 20's).  So a nation that started with 7 Carriers would have almost that many in one spot.

 The first of these training carriers would start out life as the Seeandbee and was built by the American Shipbuilding Company of Wyandotte, Michigan in 1913.  She was a steam powered side wheeled excursion ship of the Cleveland and Buffalo Transit Company (C & B get it).  It would go between Cleveland and Buffalo until 1939 when the Great Depression caused the liquidation of the company.

 In March of 1942, the Navy purchased the steamer and started to convert her into an aircraft carrier.  She was designated as IX-64.  IX is the designation used by the Navy for ships that aren't otherwise classified.  She was named the Wolverine because she would operate mostly in Lake Michigan and Michigan was known as the Wolverine State.  She was commissioned on August 12, 1942 (exactly several years before my birthday).

 She was fitted with a 550 foot long deck constructed with douglas fir and began her job as an advanced trainer in January of 1943.  She would operate out of Naval Air Station Glenview (in Illinois) and served to train carrier pilots and landing signal operators.  She and her sister (the Sable covered next) were not proper carriers by any stretch.  Neither had a hangar deck or flight elevators.  So if a plane crashed, training would end for the day.   Also, because of wind over deck (the speed of the wind over the deck) minimums for some of our advanced planes were higher than some of the prevailing winds on Lake Michigan, training would be halted for days at a time.  But they still got the job done.

 Once the war was over, so was her mission.  The Wolverine was decomissioned on November 7, 1945 and removed from the Naval Registry in November 28 of the same year.  Two years later she was scrapped.

 As I mentioned, the Wolverine had a sister ship.  She started out the war as the Greater Buffalo and was built by the American Shipbuilding Company at Lorain, Ohio in 1924.  Like the Wolverine, she was also a sidewheeled excursion steamer and she was part of the Detroit and Cleveland Company but she was used to move passengers from Detroit to Cleveland.  She served in this role from her construction until 1942.

 On August 7, 1942, she was acquired by the US Navy and renamed the USS Sable and designated as IX-81.  Unlike the Wolverine, she was built with a steel deck.  She began operations in May of 1943.  She is famous because it was on her decks that future President George H.W. Bush would learn to fly off carrier decks.

Together the Wolverine and Sable would train 17,820 pilots and there would be 116,000 landings on their decks.  The Sable was decomissioned and stricken from the Naval Register on the same days as the Wolverine.  She would be scrapped in 1948.

There were an estimated 135 to 500 aircraft lost during training.

Both ships represented one of many contributions that the Great Lakes Region made to the War Effort in World War II.  It's kind of a shame that they were scrapped after the war though.