USS Edson: From Bath to Brooklyn to Bay City

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On a quiet stretch of the Saginaw River just outside Bay City, Michigan, the USS Edson sits as a tribute to America’s Cold War destroyer fleet. Built at Maine’s Bath Iron Works in 1958, the Forrest Sherman-class ship was an all-gun destroyer (hull numbers DD), soon to be replaced by guided missile-armed ships (DDG). By the time Edson was retired after 30 years of service, it was the last of the old guard, sporting three 5-inch guns instead of Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles like its modern counterparts.

Today, a 5-inch gun is the largest you will find on any US Navy ship – the battleships and their 16-inchers are long gone – and you will not find a ship with more than one. That is why Edson’s battery earned it an unofficial motto: “Three guns, no waiting.”>> Continue reading

USNS Pathfinder, Submarine Hunter

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At the Brooklyn Navy Yard‘s shipyard, operated by GMD, they repair mostly commercial ships, but they also get a fair number of federal government contracts. The shipyard does not repair US Navy combat ships, but we are currently hosting nearly every other federal agency that operates ships, with vessels from the US Coast Guard, Maritime Administration, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and Military Sealift Command. Right now, a unique MSC ship from the US Navy Oceanographic Office is in dry dock, USNS Pathfinder.>> Continue reading

Highlights of the Harbor: Shipyards

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For more than 150 years, shipbuilding was a pre-eminent industry in New York City. Shipyards building clipper ships, steamboats, and naval frigates once engulfed the shoreline of Lower Manhattan in the early 19th century, bearing names like Brown, Bergh, Westervelt, and Webb, eventually spilling onto the Brooklyn side to form a massive shipbuilding complex on the East River. As the industry – and the city – grew, major shipyards could be found in all five boroughs and across the Hudson in New Jersey.
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“We Need Your Skills”: Pearl Harbor and the Brooklyn Navy Yard

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The Brooklyn Navy Yard is 5,000 miles from Pearl Harbor, and though the reverberations of the events there on December 7, 1941 were felt across the globe, they hit especially hard on this small stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront.

Already 140 years old at the time, the Brooklyn Navy Yard had established itself as one of the most venerable shipbuilding and ship repair facilities in the Navy, and the Yard would be pushed to the limit during World War II, building, repairing, and servicing more than 5,000 vessels in just four years. Not only would ships be brought from across the world to be patched up and pushed back into the service at the Yard, but the Yard’s skilled craftsmen would be dispatched to other shipyards to help keep the fleet in fighting order.>> Continue reading