(12-01-2021 07:26 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(12-01-2021 01:12 AM)ODU BBALL Wrote:  Newport class by chance?

Yes.

Quote:Many classes of ships, such as the LST weren't designed to be competition one-on-one in a fight against a destroyer. Hopefully you had some more capable ships accompanying yours there in the Med at the time.

We didn't.

Obviously, as you note, we weren't designed or intended to fight a destroyer. But our destroyers in that era didn't have ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore missiles either. We simply did not have the missiles. We were totally dependent on air cover, and the carriers were off somewhere else doing their thing. They would have gotten some aircraft over to us eventually, and those aircraft would have sunk the Russians, but not before the Russians sunk us.

Our destroyers did have torpedo tubes if the ships were within range. I worked on those as well. In the mid/late 70's I did Harpoon Missile System installations (most of them were canister launch) on several destroyers.