laststandonzombieisland

Some 70 years ago. With her 5″/38 hood ornament up front, the white-hulled 255-foot Oswego-class USCGC Klamath (WPG-66, later WHEC-66) is shown winning hearts and minds while on her inaugural Being Sea Patrol in the late summer of 1955.

Official period caption:

Anchored off Unalakleet, Alaska, under a late summer sky, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Klamath (WPG-66) prepares for the health mission phase of the 1955 Bering Sea Patrol. To the locals living here, she delivers the annually awaited medical and dental services, not readily had in this region. In serving here as a floating dispensary, the Klamath assisted the Territorial Department of Health and the Alaska Native Service in their health program for natives in isolated areas. Aboard the Klamath, Public Health Service officers attached to the Coast Guard, Thomas W. Dixon, surgeon, and Fred Abramson, dentist, dispensed treatments from modernly equipped medical and dental offices.

During her four months of work on the patrol, just recently completed, the Klamath stopped at villages in the Aleutian chain, Pribilof Island, Nunivak, St. Lawrence, and others along the main coastline as far as Wainwright near the top of Alaska. Lieut. Commander Gerhard K. Kels, USCG, commanded the 255-foot cutter and acted as roving commissioner. A crew of 14 officers and 115 enlisted men manned the ship for the patrol.

Arriving at her homeport in Seattle, before the Arctic sun began hibernating, the Klamath became one of many cutters that have been familiar and welcome sight to natives along the 26,000-mile coast of Alaska since its purchase in 1867. This was the Klamath’s first Bering Sea Patrol.

(The main U.S. Coast Guard functions performed by the Klamath on the annually conducted Bering Sea Patrol consisted of law enforcement duties. The cutter also furnished supplies, exchange services, equipment, medical and dental aid to Coast Guard men at installations along the way. In addition, the Klamath accommodated other government services in whatever way possible, such as assisting in the health program for Alaskan natives.)

Built during the tail-end of WWII at the Western Pipe & Steel Co., San Pedro, to replace cutters that had been given by FDR to the Royal Navy in 1940, Klamath was homeported at Seattle her entire career from 19 June 1946 to 1 May 1973, during which she frequently pulled Bering Sea Patrols.

She also got some trigger time in, spending 10.5 months deployed with CGRON Three off Vietnam from 14 May 1969 to 31 January 1970.

Klamath was decommissioned on 1 May 1973 and was sold for scrap on 18 November 1974.