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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 30, 2025: Pride of Puget Sound

Above we see the Baltimore-class heavy cruiser USS Bremerton (CA-130) all aglow in Sydney, in town to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the historic Battle of the Coral Sea in December 1959. While she didn’t get any licks during WWII, Bremerton was nonetheless a “war baby,” commissioned some 80 years ago this week. And she did manage to get some serious combat time during another conflict.

The Baltimores

When the early shitstorm of 1939 World War II broke out, the U.S. Navy, realized that in the likely coming involvement with Germany in said war– and that country’s huge new 18,000-ton, 8x8inch gunned, 4.1-inches of armor Hipper-class super cruisers– it was outclassed in the big assed heavy cruiser department. When you add to the fire the fact that the Japanese had left all of the Washington and London Naval treaties behind and were building giant Mogami-class vessels (15,000 tons, 3.9 inches of armor), the writing was on the wall. That’s where the Baltimore class came in.

These 24 envisioned ships of the class looked like an Iowa-class battleship in miniature with three triple turrets, twin stacks, a high central bridge, and two masts– and they were (almost) as powerful. Sheathed in a hefty 6 inches of armor belt (and 3 inches of deck armor), they could take a beating if they had to.

They were fast, capable of over 30 knots, which meant they could keep pace with the fast new battlewagons they looked so much like, as well as the new fleet carriers that were on the drawing board.

While they were more heavily armored than Hipper and Mogami, they also had an extra 8-inch tube, mounting nine new model 8-inch/55 caliber guns, whereas the German and Japanese only had 155mm guns (though the Mogamis later picked up 10×8-inchers). A larger suite of AAA guns that included a dozen 5-inch/38 caliber guns in twin mounts and 70+ 40mm and 20mm guns rounded this out.

In short, these ships were deadly to incoming aircraft, could close to the shore as long as there were at least 27 feet of seawater for them to float in and hammer coastal beaches and emplacements for amphibious landings, then take out any enemy surface combatant short of a modern battleship in a one-on-one fight.

They were tough nuts to crack, and of the 14 hulls that took to the sea, none were lost in combat.

Meet Bremerton

Our subject is the first warship named for the Washington city home to Puget Sound Navy Yard, which dates back to 1891. As explained by the Puget Sound Navy Museum, the Navy held a war bond competition in 1943 between the workers at Puget and those at California’s Mare Island NSY with the winner earning the naming rights to a new heavy cruiser whose keel had been laid on 1 February (as Yard No. 449) at New York Shipbuilding Corps. in Camden, New Jersey.

Puget won the competition– with the yard’s workers pledging an amazing 15 percent of their wages for six months– and earned the right to send a delegate to the East Coast to sponsor the vessel. The worker sent had been with the yard since 1917. As detailed by the museum:

Betty McGowan, representing the Rigger and Shipwright Shop, was chosen to christen the cruiser in New Jersey on July 2, 1944. She broke the ceremonial bottle of champagne across the ship’s bow with a single swing. In Bremerton, residents marked the occasion with a baseball game, a flag raising ceremony, and the sale of more than $11,000 in war bonds.

Bremerton was commissioned on 29 April 1945, with her first of 15 skippers being Capt. (later RADM) John Boyd Mallard (USNA 1920) of Savannah, Georgia. Mallard had seen the elephant previously as skipper of the oiler USS Rapidan (AO 18), dodging U-boats in the Atlantic, and earned the Legion of Merit as commander of a task group of LSTs during the assaults on Lae and Finschhafen in September 1943.

Bremerton’s WWII service was brief, with her Official War History encompassing a half-dozen short paragraphs. The new cruiser left Norfolk for her shakedown cruise in the waters off  Cuba on 29 May 1945.

Three weeks later, having wrapped up gunnery trials off Culebra Island, she sailed for Rio de Janeiro to serve as flagship for Admiral Jonas Ingram, Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, during his South American inspection tour. Bremerton returned to the States and engaged in early July, arriving at Boston Navy Yard on 18 July, then became part of TF 69 for experimental work at Casco Bay, Maine, until 2 October.

Spending the next five weeks in post-shakedown overhauls at Philadelphia, she cleared that port on 7 November for Guantanamo and, after passing inspection, sailed through the Panama Canal to join the Pacific Fleet on 29 November 1945 with orders to report to Shanghai via Pearl Harbor under the 7th Fleet for occupation duties.

Arriving at Inchon, Korea on 4 January 1946, she would spend the next 11 months in the Far East– earning an Occupation Medal and China Service Medal– before making for San Pedro, California.

Homeported there, Bremerton managed to get in a training cruise along the West Coast in 1947 before her discharge papers hit.

Bremerton was placed out of commission, in reserve, at San Francisco on 9 April 1948, capping just under three years of service.

No less than nine of 14 Baltimore-class heavy cruisers were mothballed after WWII as the Navy’s budget nosedived. With each needing a 1,100+ member crew (not counting the Marine det), they had an almost prohibitive cost to keep them in service even if they were pierside. A deployment, requiring 2,250 tons of fuel oil and a trainload of provisions just to get started, could be better spent on a half-squadron of 3-4 destroyers that could make triple the port calls– and in more diverse locations.

The Baltimores were seen as quaint in the new Atomic Age, and, with a couple of battlewagons and newer heavy cruisers (of the Oregon City and Des Moines class) on tap for fire support missions should they ever be needed (and nobody thought they would), the six remaining class members on active service were mostly used as flagships and high-profile training vessels for midshipmen’s and reservist cruises.

War!

With the Soviet-backed North Korean Army rushing over the 38th Parallel to invade their neighbors to the south on 25 June 1950, the Navy rushed units from Japan to the embattled peninsula and things soon got very old school in a conflict heavy with minefields, amphibious landings and raids, and an active naval gunline just off shore.

This, naturally, led to a call for more naval fire support. Ultimately, 10 of 14 Baltimores (all except USS Boston, Canberra, Chicago, and Fall River) were in commission or reactivated for the Korean War.

Bremerton was pulled from mothballs at San Francisco and, after a short overhaul at Hunters Point and giving her crew some refresher training, she was bound for the gunline, arriving in theatre under 7th Fleet command on 7 May 1952.

Her first tour off Korea, which wrapped up in September 1952, and she let her 8-inchers sing at Wonsan, Kojo, Chongjin, and Changjon Hang.

After an overhaul, she returned to Korea in April 1953, remaining through November.

On this second tour, she repeatedly dueled with Nork/ChiCom coastal artillery batteries.

From Korean War: Chronology of U.S. Pacific Fleet Operations: 

• 5 May 1953: During a heavy gun strike in the Wonsan Harbor area, USS Bremerton (CA 130) was fired upon by 18 rounds of 76 to 105 mm shells. One near miss caused two minor personnel casualties and superficial top-side damage.
• 24 May 1953: During a heavy gun strike in Wonsan Harbor, USS Bremerton (CA 130) received 10 rounds of well-directed enemy artillery fire. Although all shells landed close aboard, Bremerton escaped unscathed.
• 14 June 1953: USS Bremerton (CA 130) received four rounds of 90 mm counterbattery fire while blasting the enemy shore gun positions on the Wonsan perimeter. The enemy fire was ineffective.
• 19 June 1953: In Wonsan Harbor, USS Bremerton (CA 130) was the target for four rounds of 90 mm shore fire but was not hit.

Besides Bremerton, the Navy deployed no less than six Baltimores for escort missions and coastal bombardment in Korea.

While I cannot find how many shells our girl let fly off Korea, all told, the Navy expended over 414,000 rounds and 24,000 missions against shore targets between just May 1951 and March 1952. While most of those rounds (381,750) were from 5-inch guns, at least 22,538 came from 8-inch pipes on heavy cruisers, so distill from that what you will.

In all, Bremerton was authorized two (of a possible 10) Korean Service Medals (battle stars), with the breaks in dates often due to leaving the gun line to get more shells:

• K8 – Korean Defense Summer-Fall 1952: 12-28 May 52, 11-26 Jun 52, 9 Jul-6 Aug 52, and 20 Aug-6 Sep 52.
• K10 – Korea, Summer-Fall 1953: 1-30 May 53, 13 Jun-8 Jul 53, 23-27 Jul 53.

She also served in Korean waters post-cease fire on two stints, 26 Sep-8 Nov 53 and 8 Jun-27 Jul 54, the latter on a May-October West Pac cruise. On top of her two battle stars, she also earned a Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation, the United Nations Korea Service Medal, and the Republic of Korea War Service Medal.

Cold War swan song

She would spend the first half of 1955 at Mare Island undergoing an overhaul and modernization. Her armament and fire control were updated. Importantly, she shipped her 40mm guns ashore for 10 twin 3″/50 (7.62 cm) Mark 33 Mounts and new Mk 56 FC radar fits.

Then came a second post-Korea West Pac cruise, from July 1955 to February 1956, during which she earned a second China Service Medal for operations off Chinese-threatened Formosa/Taiwan.

Her third post-Korea West Pac deployment, from November 1956 to May 1957, saw her make port calls from Vancouver to Yokosuka to Manila, Hong Kong, and Melbourne, where her crew was on hand to support the XVI Olympiad.

Around this time, the Navy decided to reconstruct Bremerton into an Albany-class guided missile cruiser.

This extensive (three-to-four year) SCB 172 conversion involved removing almost everything topside including all armament and superstructure, then installing a huge SPS-48 3D air search radar, a twin Mk 12 Talos launcher (with its magazine, Mk 77 missile fire-control system, and SPG-49 fire control radars), a twin Mk 11 Tartar launcher (along with its magazine, Mk 74 missile fire-control system, and SPG-51 fire control radars), a huge CIC and tall navigation bridge, a bow mounted sonar, a helicopter deck, etc. et. al.

Only three CAs (USS Albany, Chicago, and Columbus) completed the conversion, and it left them unrecognizable from their original form.

However, as the Albany class conversion still required a massive nearly 1,300 man crew to run the 17,000 ton CG with 180 assorted missiles aboard, and the bean counters realized the new 8,000-ton Leahy-class DLGs (later re-rated as cruisers in 1975) could carry 80 missiles on a hull optimized to run with a 400-man crew, the choice was clear.

With that, Bremerton never did get that conversion, instead being used increasingly to hold the line in the Far East for the next couple of years.

She started 1958 at anchor in Long Beach, preparing for yet another Westpac deployment (from March to August) under TF 77 orders that would take her to the Philippines, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and the like.

From her log:

She repeated another Westpac cruise from January to May 1959 and yet another abbreviated sortie from November 1959 to February 1960. It was on New Year’s Day 1960, while deployed, that her mournful log entry told her looming fate– that of an early (second) decommissioning at the ripe old age of 15, bound once again for mothballs.

Assigned to the Pacific Reserve Fleet, while moored at Naval Station Long Beach’s Pier 15, at 0900 on 29 July 1960, USS Bremerton was decommissioned and then towed to the reserve basin first at Mare Island and then, fittingly, at Puget Sound.

Bremerton languished for 13 years in mothballs, and, once the war in Vietnam had drawn down, was stricken from the Naval List on 1 October 1973. She was subsequently sold for scrap to the Zidell Explorations Corporation of Portland, Oregon, and broken up.

Epilogue

Several relics of the cruiser remain in the Kitsap area.

The Navy recycled the name for an early Los Angeles-class hunter-killer, SSN-698, which was in commission from 1981 to 2021.

A veterans’ group for the latter Bremerton, which also keeps CA-130’s memory alive, is active. 

x

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

 

Ships are more than steel

and wood

And heart of burning coal,

For those who sail upon

them know

That some ships have a

soul.

 

***

 

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