Christmas Eve 1944 off Sandy Hook
80 years ago today, the Cannon-class destroyer escort USS Straub (DE 181), was captured from an altitude of 300 feet, on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1944. She is clad in Measure 32, Design 3D, camouflage, as modified for Atlantic DEs.
U.S. Navy Photograph, 80-G-298101, now in the collections of the National Archives.
According to her War Diary, Straub spent the morning underway of Christmas Eve 1944 off Sandy Hook Bay, NJ, steaming to calibrate her DAQ and magnetic compass, tying up at Earle later that afternoon to load ammo before ending the day at Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The only ship named for LT (jg.) Walter Morris Straub, killed at Guadalcanal aboard the cruiser USS Atlanta (CL-51), DE-181 was built at the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., at Newark, launched by the widow of the escort’s namesake on 19 September 1943, and commissioned just five weeks later.
Straub spent her war in and around the Atlantic primarily as a screen for sub-hunting escort carriers including USS Mission Bay (CVE-59), Solomons (CVE-67), Tripoli (CVE-64), and Wake Island (CVE-65).
WWII ended as she was crossing through the Panama Canal to help finish off the Empire of Japan.
Decommissioned on 17 October 1947, she spent 26 years in mothballs before she was stricken from the NVR and later sold for scrapping in 1974. The government made $84,666.66 from her sale to the Boston Metals Co. of Baltimore, Maryland.
However, she went on to live forever, to a degree, as stock footage of her was used extensively in the 1960s and she made cameos in episodes of Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, and 12 O’Clock High.