The Crews · 1949–1975

Twenty-six years of commissions

A warship is never the same ship twice. Her design complement was 1,667 officers and men, and over twenty-six years thousands of sailors rotated through her decks — a new crew for each commission, each one inheriting her from the last.

The plankowners

The first crew took her on 29 January 1949 at Newport News, with Captain Roland N. Smoot in command — the commissioning crew Navy tradition calls plankowners. They carried aboard the example of her sponsor, Mrs. Homer L. Ferguson, who had christened her at launch the previous March. From that first watch she was a working ship of the Atlantic Fleet, homeported at Norfolk.

The Sixth Fleet years

From 1950 to 1961 she deployed annually to the Mediterranean for duty with the Sixth Fleet, and between deployments she worked the Caribbean and the Western Atlantic — major fleet exercises, and midshipman training cruises that made her, in effect, a school for a generation of naval officers. In early September 1957 she stood on station in the Eastern Mediterranean through the Syrian crisis; in June 1961 she put to sea on short notice when the assassination of General Rafael Trujillo unsettled the Dominican Republic, holding station in international waters until the crisis passed.

Agadir — the dash that was a crew story

In March 1960, steaming 75 miles northeast of Sicily, she was ordered to Agadir, Morocco, where an earthquake had shattered the city. She covered 1,225 miles in 40.5 hours, averaging 31 knots — essentially flat out for nearly two days — and arrived on 3 March to provide medical and material aid. For the engine rooms and black gangs below, it was forty hours of holding a 20,980-ton cruiser at the edge of her designed 31.5 knots; for her deck and medical departments, it was turning a gun cruiser into a relief ship on arrival. It remains the passage her veterans remember first.

The flagship

In the winter of 1962 her berthing and communications were rebuilt to carry Commander, Second Fleet, and his staff — she became a fleet flagship. That August she steamed in NATO Exercise RIPTIDE III, then made a month's tour of northern European ports as flagship of Commander Striking Fleet Atlantic. Within weeks of returning to Norfolk she was underway again on 22 October with the Atlantic Fleet for the Cuban Quarantine: for the next month, flagship for ComSecondFlt on station northeast of Cuba, she watched the Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles being dismantled and assisted in the missile count. She came home to Norfolk the day before Thanksgiving.

In April 1965 she sortied again for Santo Domingo, serving as flagship of Commander, Joint Task Force 122 off the Dominican Republic until the task force was dissolved on 7 May; she returned to Norfolk for June alterations.

The gun line

On 1 September 1967 the Second Fleet flag shifted to Springfield, and on 5 September Newport News left Norfolk for Southeast Asia. She reached Da Nang on the morning of 9 October as flagship of Commander Cruiser-Destroyer Flotilla 3 — and that night, at 2300, in DANFS's own words, she fired her eight inch rifles for the first time in anger, against shore targets in North Vietnam as part of Operation Sea Dragon. In the months that followed her guns worked both sides of the DMZ: interdiction fire to the north, naval gunfire support for American and allied troops to the south. She came home via the Panama Canal on 13 May 1968, and would return to Southeast Asia on further tours.

By 1972 she was the last heavy cruiser left in the Navy — her nine 8-inch rifles the heaviest naval guns afloat, throwing 260-pound projectiles nearly eighteen miles. She went back on the gun line on 11 May 1972, on station off Quang Tri City. She was still there four and a half months later, in the first hour of 1 October, when a defective auxiliary detonating fuze set off a projectile inside the center barrel of Turret No. 2.

What that night cost her crew is told on The Twenty — deliberately, on its own page. The ship herself survived: the ruined gun was landed at the Cubi Point Naval Station in the Philippines, its port plated over, the turret locked in train — and she returned to firing missions on 21 October, working two more gunline periods before reaching Norfolk on Christmas Eve, 1972.

Stood down

In January 1975 the last Second Fleet flag came down — she had carried eleven vice admirals since 1962 — and the ship herself followed months later. Her last three captains took her down together, in sequence: Walter F. Zartman commanded her from March 1971 to May 1973 — longer than any of her twenty-four skippers — and Ronald T. Kelly relieved him, receiving the ship's second Navy Unit Commendation from Vice Admiral Finneran on 13 July 1973. Kelly had been, in her first captain's words, "the last CO to take her to sea"; her executive officer of two years, Captain Robert R. Briner, commanded her through the six months of inactivation. The Fifth Naval District announced the ceremony for 11 a.m. on Friday, 27 June 1975, at the St. Helena Annex in Norfolk.

Preparing for the day, the ship wrote to every living former commanding officer. All twenty-two answered — and every reply, Briner recorded, carried the same sentence: command of Newport News was the highlight of my career. Six came back to stand on her deck for the end. The principal speaker was Captain Walter F. Zartman, the 22nd of her twenty-four skippers, the one who had commanded her longest and taken her through the 1972 gun line.

What the day asked of the last crew, her last captain wrote down: "I have never seen men work under a tougher industrial environment than it took to preserve 950 spaces" — closet-size to basketball court-size — "they inactivated three triple 8-inch gun turrets, six twin 5-inch mounts, boilers and main engines which had produced 130,000 s.h.p., and seemingly endless amounts of electronic equipment." Briner called it "the thankless and outstanding job her decommissioning crew had done." A photograph taken that May, weeks before the ceremony, shows her at a little-used annex of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard — masts scaffolded, hull splotched with red lead — captioned in the archive: "the few remaining crew members prepare her for a trip to the mothball fleet." One of those last hands, Fireman Flor Buncab of M Division, recorded it in his own words in the ship's crew list: "I was a member of the decom crew in 1975."

A witness kept the scene: Paul Stillwell of the Naval Institute was at Norfolk that bright day — the crew in crisp whites, the ship in haze gray and bunting — and felt, he wrote, "shivers of emotion, as if this creature of steel were animated by some sort of soul." Eighteen years later he wrote of watching "the old dowager waste away at her mothball-fleet berth" in Philadelphia: the hull number painted out, the name on her stern painted over — the name Newport News bestowed on a new submarine — and "the final indignity as the barrels of those 8-inch guns were lopped off at the breech ends."