Friday, January 21, 2022

USS Newport News (CA-148)-- Part 2: Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam

From 1950 to 1961, the ship had annual deployments to the Mediterranean as well as training cruises in the Caribbean and western Atlantic.  She served as the flagship of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962  with the USS Leary as destroyer escort.

The two ships stopped the Soviet ship Labinsk and ordered her away from Cuban waters and assisted in counting Soviet missiles as they were being dismantled and removed from Cuba.  

When the Dominican Republic Crisis of 1965 developed, she was the flagship of the task force and in 1967 the Newport News shifted to a six-month deployment to Southeast Asia arriving off Vietnam 9 October where she fired her 8-inch guns in anger for the first time at positions in North Vietnam as part of Operation Sea Dragon.

--Cooter


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