To the Frontiers of the World!
With today being today, you knew this was coming.
I give you the Baltimore-class heavy cruiser USS Columbus (CA-74) at New York Harbor for Columbus Day 1945.
At first, you could almost mistake her for a slimmed-down Iowa-class battleship. That was easy to do with a ship that had a full-load displacement of some 17,000 tons, ran nearly 700 feet long, had a very similar 3+3+3 main gun layout, two funnels, and up to eight inches of armor. Note her abeam name stencil, applied for the event. NH 105562
Same date/location as above. NH 81121
Too late to see combat in WWII, Columbus was still a “war baby,” commissioned on 8 June 1945.
Joining the Pacific Fleet five months after VJ Day, she reached the old German China colony of Tsingtao on 13 January 1946 for occupation duty, serving off and on as the cruiser flagship in Chinese waters through June 1947.
After transferring to the Atlantic Fleet in 1948, she often served as the 6th Fleet’s flagship, as noted above. I mean, why wouldn’t she? She was a beautiful ship worthy of an admiral’s flag.
The Navy still had 12 of her class around in the 1960s.
As detailed by the 1960-61 Janes:
After another spin in the Pacific from 1955-1959, Columbus began a three-year reconstruction conversion from an all-gun cruiser to a huge guided missile cruiser, recommissioning as CG-12 in December 1962 to serve for another 14 years as a Cold War sentinel in the Atlantic and Med.
She had a completely different profile for the final stage of her career.
USS Columbus (CG-12) Steaming off San Diego, California, 19 February 1965. NH 82722-KN
She was decommissioned on 31 January 1975, capping just under 30 years of faithful service, but never fired a shot in anger beyond her role in the Road’s End scuttling of 24 captured ex-IJN submarines on April Fool’s Day 1946 off Goto-Retto.
Sometimes all you have to do is look mean to get the word across.
Her motto, as befits the explorer whose namesake city it was, was Ad Frontes Mundi, To the Frontiers of the World.