The USS North Carolina (BB-55) My all-time favorite warship. As an elementary school student in North Carolina, I donated nickels and dimes to save this ship back in the early sixties.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

The USS Reid (DD-369)

From Wikipedia.

The last blog entry wrote about the death of Sam Maynor, Jr, at age 92, who had been at Pearl Harbor aboard the destroyer USS Reid.  The ship was named for Samuel Chester Reid, a War of 1812 officer who also took part in the design of the US flag.  (I'll be writing about him in my War of 1812 blog.)

The USS Reid was a Mahan-class destroyer commissioned in 1936 and sunk by kamikazes in 1944.  It weighed 1500 tons, was 341 feet long and mounted five 5-inch guns and had twelve torpedo tubes.

From 1937 to 1941, it served in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and was at Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941, where it shot down one plane.  After that, it patrolled the Hawaiian Islands for a couple of months before doing convoy duty.  It participated in the Aleutian Islands Campaign and then in most of the operations in the Pacific Theater.

On December 11, 1944, it shot down three kamikaze planes before being hit by three others, blowing apart and sinking in 600 fathoms within a minute, taking down 103 crew members.  One hundred and fifty survived the sinking and strafing.

The Story of a Ship.  --GreGen

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