USS Forster (DE-334)

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USS Forster
USS Forster
Overview
Keel laying August 31, 1943
Launch November 13, 1943
Namesake EW Forster
1. Period of service flag
period of service

1944–1946 as DE-334
1951–1954 as WDE-434
1956–1971 as DER-334

Commissioning January 25, 1944
Removed from ship register September 25, 1971
Whereabouts handed over to South Vietnam
2. Period of service flag
period of service 1971-1975
Whereabouts captured from North Vietnam
Technical specifications
displacement

1200 tons light,
1590 tons fully loaded

length

93.27 m

width

11.15 m

Draft

2.6 m light,
3.6 m fully loaded

crew

186-209

drive

4 Fairbanks-Morse - diesel engines ,
four diesel generators,
6,000  shp , 2 screws

speed

21  knots

Range

9100  nm at 12 knots

Armament
  • 3 × 7.62 cm cannons in single mounts
  • 2 × 40 mm anti-aircraft guns (1x2)
  • 8 × 20 mm Fla- MK (8x1)
  • 3 × 53.3 cm torpedo tubes in a triplet set
  • 2 × depth charges at the stern
  • 8 × depth charges, 4 on each side
  • 1 × hedgehog
Callsign

N - T - E - H

Tactical designation

Circle Drive

The USS Forster (DE-334) (later WDE-434 , DER-334 and FFR-334 ) was a destroyer escort of Edsall class of the United States Navy . The ship, which was built in 1943, was used as convoy protection during World War II , was later temporarily loaned to the Coast Guard in the 1950s and used as a radar monitoring station in the 1960s , before it was finally handed over to the South Vietnamese Navy in 1971 and moved to Trần Khánh Dư ( HQ-04) has been renamed. In 1975 it was captured by the North Vietnamese , victorious in the Vietnam War , and used by the Vietnamese People's Navy under the name Đài Kỳ (HQ-03) until well into the 1990s.

history

In the service of the USA

The keel laying of the ship in the Consolidated Steel Corp. shipyard in Orange, Texas began on August 31, 1943, and the ship was christened and launched in November . The Forster was one of a total of 85 escort destroyers of the Edsall class and belonged to the third building block. It was named after the marine engineer Edward William Forster (1884–1942), who was killed on board the USS Vincennes (CA-44) in the battle of Savo Island and whose widow had financially supported the construction.

In January 1944, the Forster was put into service under Lieutenant Commander I. E. Davis , USNR , and was initially used as convoy protection in the North Atlantic . As of March 23, she accompanied a convoy from Norfolk, Virginia to Bizerte , French Tunisia . On the way, the convoy was attacked by German bombers north of the African coast on April 11, whereby the USS Holder (DE-401) was badly damaged by a torpedo ; However, the Forster was able to defend itself successfully. She returned to New York City on May 11th . In the course of a year, she escorted convoys to Bizerte, Great Britain and France on six transatlantic voyages. In between, she served as a training ship for new crews and was used for smaller escorts along the US east coast and to Bermuda .

On June 20, 1945, after the war in Europe , the ship sailed from New York via Chesapeake and Guantanamo Bay , where training maneuvers were carried out, and San Diego to Pearl Harbor , Hawaii , where they arrived on July 25. On August 30, the Forster left Hawaii to conduct operations in the Western Pacific, mainly convoy protection between the Marianas and Japan. In early 1946 she returned to the United States via Guam and reached Philadelphia on February 12, where she was decommissioned shortly thereafter and assigned to the reserve fleet in Green Cove Springs , Florida . She received a Battle Star for her achievements in World War II .

In 1951, as an indirect consequence of the Korean War , the ship was reactivated and given to the United States Coast Guard, where it was given the new designation USCGC Forster (WDE-434) . The Coast Guard used the Forster as a weather station near Honolulu and for a trip to Japan. In May 1954, the Forster returned to the Navy reserve fleet.

In October 1955, the ship was reclassified as Destroyer Escort Radar ( DER ); put back into service a year later in Long Beach and assigned to Escort Squadron 5 with home port Seattle . It now served as a radar monitoring station ( radar picket ) as part of the continental air surveillance system. In June 1958, the Forster was moved to Pearl Harbor and used as a patrol ship between Hawaii and Alaska as part of the Pacific Barrier , the western radar early warning line.

At the end of 1960 she was temporarily relieved of her patrol service, assigned to the WestPac task force and equipped with additional depth charges. Between 9 ° north and the east coast of Japan, she threw them off at regular intervals in order to simulate Soviet weapons tests and thus test the American sonar buoys. After reaching Japan, she was assigned to the Formosa Patrol and stationed in Hong Kong for six weeks before visiting the Philippines and returning to Hawaii in the summer of 1961.

In 1966 the Forster was on the move between the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. In September 1971 she was retired, deleted from the Naval Vessel Register and given over to the South Vietnamese Navy together with many other ships as part of the Vietnamization .

Vietnam

In South Vietnam, the Forster was given the new name Trần Khánh Dư (HQ-04) (named after a general of the 13th / 14th century ) and was classified as a frigate . She and her sister ship, the Trần Hưng Đạo (ex USS Camp) , were the largest ships in the country , along with seven ex- seaplane tenders of the Barnegat / Casco class .

Mainly the Trần Khánh Dư was responsible for the surveillance of the Vietnamese sea border and the interception of North Vietnamese supply ships in the following years. During the Easter offensive in 1972, she sank the enemy ammunition freighter SL-6 in the Gulf of Thailand near the Cambodian coast .

In January 1974, the ship was involved in the battle near the Paracel Islands , in which South Vietnam was defeated by the Chinese Navy and the Nhật Tảo (HQ-10) was sunk. The Trần Khánh Dư, however, was only slightly damaged and was able to damage an enemy ship badly before escorting the severely damaged Lý Thường Kiệt (HQ-16) to Đà Nẵng .

After the collapse of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975, she was one of the few South Vietnamese warships that failed to escape; as it was currently being overhauled in the shipyard, it was captured by North Vietnamese troops like the Phạm Ngũ Lão (HQ-15) and the Hà Hồi (HQ-13) . Due to the initially unclear whereabouts, the US Navy initially assumed a successful escape and, like the other former South Vietnamese, now homeless ships, formally took the ship back into its own administration. As part of the fleet reclassification on June 30, 1975, the ship was de jure given the new identification FFR-334 . After the loss was confirmed, the ship was written off with the comment "Transferred to Vietnam, April 30, 1975" .

In fact, the Forster remained in Vietnam, was renamed Đài K H (HQ-03) , equipped with 9K32 Strela-2MF rocket launchers and integrated into the new Vietnamese People's Navy . Since 1993 she has only been used as a training ship, then dismantled to the hull around 1998, but still used for training purposes.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andrew Crenshaw: Republic of Viet-Nam Navy (VNN) - List of Ships and Crafts (www.imnahastamps.com) ( Memento from July 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (last accessed in December 2011, currently not available)
  2. ↑ ES Mittler: Marine-Rundschau: Zeitschrift für Seewesen, Volume 72, p. 570, 1975 (Here a successful escape is assumed)
  3. ↑ Eric Wertheim: Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World, p. 1026 ( digitized from Google books )