USS Gandy (DE-764)
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The USS Gandy (DE 764) was a destroyer escort of the Cannon-class destroyer escort of the US Navy in World War II . The ship was handed over to the Italian Navy in 1951 and then served under the name Altair until 1971.
The Gandy was named after the sailor Andrew Jackson Gandy, who was on the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco on 12/13. November 1942 lost his life in the fighting for Guadalcanal .
Construction and technical data
The ship was on March 1, 1943 at the Tampa Shipbuilding Company in Tampa Bay ( Florida ) laid down on and ran on 12 December 1943 by the stack . It was 93 m long (91 m in the waterline ) and 11.23 m wide and had a draft of 3.56 m . The water displacement was 1260 tons (standard) and 1646 tons (maximum). The machinery consisted of four diesel engines from General Motors of type 16 to 278 with 6000 hp (4474 kW) and two screws that allowed a top speed of 21 knots. The range of action was 10,800 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 12 knots. The ship was armed with three 7.6 cm Mark 22 single guns, one 40 mm Bofors Flak twin Mark 1 , eight 20 mm Oerlikon Flak Mark 4 and three 53.3 cm torpedo tubes . To combat submarines, it had a Hedgehog Mark 10 , eight depth charge launchers Mark 6 and two depth charge discharge racks Mark 9. The crew consisted of 15 officers and 201 men.
history
The Gandy entered service on February 7, 1944. The commander was LCdr WA Sessions. The ship was used in both the Atlantic and the Pacific to secure convoys and naval formations against aircraft and submarine attacks.
The Gandy was assigned to the Escort Division 22 stationed in New York and secured a total of ten convoys from New York to Northern Ireland and England in the period from April 1944 to May 1945. Already on the first Atlantic crossing, as escort for the fast tanker convoy CU-21, there was enemy contact. On April 16, 1944, the German submarine U 550 torpedoed and sank the tanker Pan-Pennsylvania . While the three destroyer escorts Gandy , Joyce (DE 317) and Peterson (DE 152) picked up the survivors of the sinking ship, the Gandy located the submarine with her sonar and threw depth charges. The submarine then appeared about 550 m to starboard of the Gandy . The destroyer opened artillery fire and rammed the submarine about 9 m from its stern. Some of its crew jumped overboard and the boat sank after an explosion. The Gandy recovered 12 survivors; 44 men were killed. Despite damage to the bow , the Gandy was able to run with the convoy to Lisahally ( Londonderry ) in Northern Ireland.
On May 24, 1945, the Gandy returned from her tenth and final Atlantic crossing to New York. After repairs in the Brooklyn Naval Yard , she moved on June 8th via the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor and from there on August 6th to the Philippines . On August 24, she accompanied a convoy with occupation troops from Leyte to Tokyo , where she arrived on September 1. The Gandy escorted a convoy from Okinawa to Yokohama on September 3, the day after the formal signing of Japan's surrender , and then returned to the Philippines on November 16, where she provided weather observation with the Philippine Sea Frontier .
On February 1, 1946, the Gandy left the Philippines to sail over the Panama Canal to Norfolk , Virginia . She arrived there on March 26th. On June 17, 1946, she was decommissioned in Green Cove Springs, Florida and transferred to the reserve fleet .
Service in the Marina Militare
On January 10, 1951, the ship was transferred to the Italian Navy as part of the Military Assistance Program . The official deletion from the US Navy ship list took place on March 26, 1951.
The Italian Navy put the ship into service under the name Altair (F591). The two former destroyer escorts USS Wesson and USS Thornhill , both surrendered at the same time, entered service under the names Andromeda (F592) and Aldebaran (F590), and the three ships were subsequently designated as the Aldebaran- class. The armament now consisted of three 3-inch guns, six 40-mm flak, 18 20-mm flak and three 53.3-cm torpedo tubes, a Hedgehog, eight depth charges and a depth charge drainage frame. The crew consisted of 189 men.
The ships were mainly used to monitor the Italian sea area and the fishing in Sicily and Sardinia as well as the Italian fishing vessels in the Gulf of Hammamet . They were initially classified as escort Avisos ( Avviso Scorta ), then from 1957 as frigates . From 1962 until their retirement they were finally referred to as corvettes .
The Altair was retired in 1971 and sunk as a target ship.
Web links
- Gandy , in the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships
- Gandy photo gallery
- Photos of the Altair , 1951
- The ship on the website of the Marina Militare (Italian) accessed on October 18, 2011