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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, April 16, 2025: Missile Can Number One

Above we see the world’s first guided missile destroyer, USS Gyatt (DD-712), launching one of her precious 14 stern-carried Convair SAM-N-7 Terrier two-stage medium-range naval surface-to-air missiles to port, circa early 1957 during her trials. Gyatt, the only Gearing-class tin can to pick up this budget DDG conversion, blazed a path now well-traveled.

The Gearings

In July 1942, the U.S. Navy, fighting a U-boat horde in the Atlantic and the Combined Fleet in the Pacific, was losing ships faster than any admiral ever feared in his worst nightmare. With that in mind, the Navy needed a lot of destroyers. While the Fletcher and Allen M. Sumner classes were being built en masse, the go-ahead for some 156 new and improved Sumners— stretched some 14 feet to allow for more fuel and thus longer legs to get to those far-off battlegrounds– was given. This simple mod led to these ships originally being considered “long hull Sumners.”

These hardy 3,500-ton/390-foot-long tin cans, the Gearing class, were soon being laid down in nine different yards across the country.

Designed to carry three twin 5-inch/38 cal DP mounts, two dozen 40mm and 20mm AAA guns, depth charge racks and projectors for submarine work, and an impressive battery of 10 21-inch torpedo tubes (downgraded to just 5 tubes) capable of blowing the bottom out of a battleship provided they could get close enough, they were well-armed. Fast at over 36 knots, they could race into and away from danger when needed.

Meet Gyatt

Our subject is the only warship commissioned into the U.S. Navy in honor of Pvt. Edward Earl Gyatt, a 21-year-old Marine who earned a posthumous Silver Star with the 1st Marine Raider Battalion during the Guadalcanal campaign in 1942. The Navy remembered nearly two dozen Raiders in similar ways. The future USS Gyatt (DD-712) was laid down on 7 September 1944 by the Federal Shipbuilding & Drydock Co., Kearney, New Jersey. She was launched on 15 April 1945, sponsored by Mrs. Hilda Morrell, the mother of the late Private Gyatt. The festivities were muted due to FDR’s recent passing. Gyatt was commissioned on 2 July 1945 at the New York Navy Yard. The total time required to build the new destroyer was nine months, three weeks, and four days.

The cost in 1945 dollars was $8,947,809. USS Gyatt’s first skipper was CDR Albert David Kaplan (USNA ’32), the former XO and skipper of the destroyer USS Mayo (DD 422).

Her WWII history was brief, covering just an abbreviated page in the National Archives.

After a shakedown in the Caribbean and post-shakedown availability back in New York, Gyatt was visited by over 5,000 sightseers in Baltimore for Navy Day 1945 in October.

She then reported to Pensacola for plane guard duties and was then shifted to Norfolk as part of the peacetime Navy. She became part of DesRon 4, an outfit she would call home for the next 14 years alongside sisters USS Gearing, Greene, Bailey, Vogelsang, Steinaker, Ellison, and Ware.

As described by her Veterans’ association, she was a speedy girl.

It is understood that the Gyatt in late 1945 set a long-distance speed record for destroyers of its class. The Gyatt maintained, for an extended period, a speed of 31.8 knots per hour. In 1946, on a run from Norfolk to Boston, the Gyatt was the only ship in Destroyer Squadron Four (DesRon 4) to sustain a speed of 38 knots that had been reached by the Gearing (DD 710), Greene (DD 711), and Bailey (DD 713).

A three-month goodwill trip to Latin America in early 1947 saw her represent the U.S. at the inauguration of Uruguayan President Tomas Berreta at Montevideo and call on a variety of other ports.

She then began a series of five lengthy deployments with the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean and Europe at a time when the region was adrift in post-war intrigue as part of the general cool down into the Cold War.

This included spending New Years 1948 at Salonika among sunken ships sent to the bottom during the war, marking the 5th anniversary of the Normandy Landings off Omaha Beach in 1949, assisting the old USS Twiggs in the filming of the tin can movie Gift Horse at Plymouth (released in the U.S. as Glory at Sea) in 1951, escorting the carrier USS Wright (CVL-49) in the Med in 1952, and attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

Stateside, she participated in two-week naval reserve cruises and annual trips to the Caribbean for exercises and gunnery practice.

In October-November 1949, Gyatt escorted the super carrier USS Midway to the frigid waters of the Davis Strait for appropriately named Operation Frostbite, her crew earning Blue Noses in the process.

By this phase of her career, in a refit at Boston Navy Yard in the summer of 1950, she landed her 20mm guns and picked up Hedgehog ASW rockets in their place. She also had her single mast replaced with a tripod mast and her starboard motor whaleboat deleted.

Cold War Missile Slinger

Gyatt entered the Boston Naval Shipyard on 26 September 1955 and was decommissioned on Halloween. The Navy had plans to make her the third operational U.S. warship– and the first destroyer– to carry guided missiles.

The Terrier program, an offshoot of Operation Bumblebee going back to 1948, was moving fast.

A big 27-foot 1.5-ton beam-riding SAM that could hit Mach 1.8 and engage targets as high as 80,000 feet, Terrier had been successfully fired from the converted seaplane tender USS Norton Sound (AV-11/AVM-1) in 1951, then the old battlewagon USS Mississippi in January 1953.

The missiles were first deployed on the converted cruisers USS Boston (CA-69/CAG-1) and Canberra (CA-70/CAG-2) in 1956. The cruisers used massive twin-arm Mark 4 GMLS missile launchers fed by bottom-loaded 72-round magazine houses, with the vertically loaded Terriers launched and guided by a pair of Mark 25 Mod 7 (later SPQ-5) radars. To make room, the after 8-inch turret (Turret III) was deleted on each.

For Gyatt, which had a compact 390-foot-long hull compared to the cruisers’ 673 feet oal, she would receive the one-off Mk 8 launcher, which used two rings that held seven missiles each, contained inside a small deckhouse just forward of the launcher. The system was only about a fifth the weight of the larger Mk 9 launchers that would go on to be used on the Providence-class cruisers.

This required the removal of Gyatt’s aft armament to allow for the addition of Terrier missiles, a move that coincided with the landing of most of her WWII-era AAA guns and ASW gear, replaced with more contemporary systems. This saw her billets reduced from 360 officers and men to just 272. As detailed by her Veterans’ association, spanning her 13-month conversion:

The weaponry aft of the number one stack was removed including all depth charges, the number three five-inch gun mount, three quad 40mm guns and the two twin 40 mm guns aft of the bridge and the torpedoes. The Terrier Missile Battery consisted of two missiles, each approximately 27 feet in length, 13.5 inches in diameter, and weighing 2,760 pounds. The magazine that stored fourteen additional missiles was located directly forward of the missile battery. The missiles had a speed in excess of Mach 2. and a range in the order of 20 miles. The missiles had an altitude sufficient enough to engage jet aircraft, and the warhead was of sufficient size that it could destroy other planes flying in the same formation. The missiles’ guidance system was called ‘Radar Beamrider.” Missile targets were tracked by a modified Mark 25 Model 8 gunfire-control radar located atop the original gun battery director forward; the Mark 72 weapons control system provided only a single fire-control channel for both the missile system and 5-inch gun mounts. The ship retained the two forward 5-inch twin gun mounts. Four 3-inch 50-caliber twin mounts replaced the 40 millimeter guns, and the five-tube torpedo spread was replaced by two stacked triple-tube groupings. The Mark 56 fire-control system was set up abaft the stacks for the 3-inch weapons. In addition, there were radar improvements to the SPS-6 air search and the SPS-10 surface search radars. The radar at high altitude had a range of 220 miles, and at low altitude the range was twenty miles. The AN/SPS-6C radar handled the location of aerial targets,; there was no height finding radar, and given the constant changes and alterations in the earlier Terrier system, only the most cooperative targets were in danger. Two Mark 2 Hedgehog Spigot Mortars and two Mark 2 Torpedo Launchers were available to deal with submarines. The ship was also the first warship in the Navy to have a stabilization system added to the hull. The Denny-Brown Stabilization System, pioneered in Great Britain, had been installed to eliminate much of the rolling that is characteristic of destroyers and other small ships. The system had two retractable fins, each with an area of approximately 45 square feet; the fins extended amidships and were well below the waterline. In addition to all this hi-tech equipment the Gyatt was one of the first Navy ships to use solar power when the after emergency diesel generator was replaced with a Solar Gas Turbine Generator, On many occasions, especially in rough weather, this stabilization allowed the Gyatt to stay on station during plane guard detail and refueling operations.

She emerged much different, recommissioned 3 December 1956 at Boston NSY, and reclassified as DDG-1, although she was spotted with her DD-712 hull number for a while. From her deck log:

She was widely celebrated, and the Old Man himself, ADM Arleigh “33 Knot” Burke, at the time the CNO, visited Gyatt in March 1959 to personally observe Terrier tests. Transferring to DesRon 6, Gyatt was then sent to Europe on a deployment with the 6th Fleet for a sixth time, 28 January 1960, and as such was the first guided missile destroyer to deploy overseas fleet. Returning to Charleston, her new home port, on 31 August 1960, she had “participated in fleet readiness and training operations throughout the Mediterranean.” It was during this deployment, while on the Riveria, that she hosted Prince Rainer and Princess Grace of Monaco, escorted by 6th Fleet commander, VADM GW Anderson, for a demonstration.

In 1960, the rest of the world rushed their DDGs into service, with the Soviets building the Kanin-class (Project 57A), the British ordering the County class, and the French moving forward with the Suffren class. The fix was in.

On stateside operations, Gyatt was on loan to NASA for Mercury Program unmanned nosecone recovery details off the East Coast on at least two occasions (5-10 November 1960 for Mercury-Redstone 1 and 24-26 April 1961 for Mercury Atlas-3).

She would return to the Med for a seventh deployment from 3 August 1961 to  3 March 1962, spanning 213 days and 39,197 miles.

When she came back home, she was already obsolete.

While the possible Gyatt-style conversion was wishful thinking to turn still-young all-gun Gearings into DDGs– and one that freed up funds for more Big Navy ideas like nuclear-powered submarines and giant aircraft carriers– tests with our subject’s Mk 8 launcher proved less than ideal, and it was decided in 1957, only a year after Gyatt recommissioned, to order a purpose-built class of 16 (eventually 29) new Adams class DDGs, which were 47 feet longer, seven feet wider, and 1,100 tons heavier. Adams (DDG-2) would carry a pair of Mk 11 twin-armed launchers for the new General Dynamics RIM-24 Tartar, which, although it was only 15.5 feet long and weighed half as much as Terrier, offered arguably better performance than the early models of that missile.

Technologically arcane, just six years after she had been the tip of the spear, Gyatt entered the Charleston Naval Shipyard on 29 June 1962 for an overhaul that removed her short-lived missile system. Installed in its place was equipment for “specialized service” with the Operational Test and Evaluation Force (OPTEVOR). As such, her hull number reverted to DD-712.

She would spend the next three years in a series of tests and training evolutions between the Caribbean and Maine, typically running evaluations on prototype radio and radar-jamming and anti-jamming (ECM/EW) equipment.

Although she was included on regular refresher training each year and even scheduled to go to the gun line off Vietnam in 1968, her primary job was to set out with a dozen or so subject matter experts from Westinghouse, the NRF, the NSRDC, or the NRL aboard to see how some new gee-whiz black box worked while underway.

At one point, an elaborate water wash-down system was installed topside to experiment with heat-seeking missiles and diversionary flares, a forerunner of SRBOC.

Keeping the memory of her namesake alive, the ship’s sponsor, the mother of the late Pvt Gyatt, visited our destroyer while on a port call to New York City in September 1965.

Worse, surveys had found that Gyatt’s hull began to crack from stress caused by the missile launches.

In October 1968, her work with OPTEVOR finished, she was sent to Key West and then the Washington Navy Yard, relegated to the Select Reserve with her crew reduced to just 120, tasked with training 20-40 USNR personnel, two weeks at a time.

In September 1969, following a material inspection and survey, it was recommended that Gyatt be decommissioned and disposed of as the cost to modernize her was estimated to be $9.8 million, and even a less extensive repair and refit for further service was estimated to run $3.7 million.

On 22 October 1969, she was decommissioned for the second and final time, with the Navy estimating her scrap value to be just $105,000.

From her log that day: 

Stricken shortly after, all useable equipment was removed, and she was expended as a target ship off Virginia on 11 June 1970, capping a 25-year career.

The end page, from her Veterans’ group:

On the 11th day of June, the ex-Gyatt, as the decommissioned hull was referred, was towed to her final resting-place in the Virginia Capes Operating Area. The ship rendezvoused with surface units under the command of Commander Naval Reserve Destroyer Division Third Naval District, who was embarked in the USS John R. Pierce (DD-753). The ex-Gyatt was the designated target ship for surface gunnery exercises for the division, consisting of the Pierce and three other destroyers. After several hours of five-inch salvos, the Gyatt was listing badly, but still afloat. Air units from the Oceana Naval Air Station joined the exercise with air-to-surface missiles, and shortly thereafter, the Gyatt slid beneath the surface to her final resting place at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The coordinates of the USS Gyatt’s final resting-place are as follows: Latitude. 37 Degrees 20 Minutes North and Longitude, 73 Degrees 52 Minutes West.

Epilogue

Little remains of Gyatt that I can find.

Her logs and some footage are in the National Archives.

Some additional Terrier footage is in the University of South Carolina archives.

Her Veterans organization doesn’t seem to have been updated online since about 2015, and most of its content has slipped away. However, a good bit of history is archived. 

She has a memorial at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Texas. 

As far as legacy is concerned, missile-armed destroyers are the backbone of the fleet these days, with no less than 73 active Arleigh Burke-class DDGs in the Navy.

The future USS Harvey C. Barnum Jr. (DDG-124), named after Medal of Honor recipient Col. Harvey C. Barnum Jr., USMC Ret., is set to commission in the coming months, bringing that number to 74. Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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