Official caption, 65 years ago this month: “U.S. Navy s First Helicopter Destroyer Conducts Exercises. USS Hazelwood is the Navy’s first anti-submarine helicopter destroyer, steams off the Atlantic coast near Newport, Rhode Island.”
Photograph released on 1 September 1959. 428-GX-USN 710543
Attached to Destroyer Development Group Two, Hazelwood is undergoing extensive training exercises to acquaint her crew with air operations. Her flight deck is designed to accommodate the DSN-1 Drone Helicopter (OH-50) scheduled for delivery from Gyrodnye Company of America, Inc. Soon, an HTK Drone Helicopter with a safety pilot, developed by the Kaman Aircraft Company, is being used for training exercises until the DSN-1 Drone becomes available. Through the use of a drone helicopter and homing torpedo, Hazelwood will possess an anti-submarine warfare kill potential at a much greater range than conventional destroyers.
A hard-charging Fletcher-class tin can, USS Hazelwood (DD-531) was built at Bethlehem’s San Francisco yard and joined the Pacific fleet in WWII.
Hazelwood in WWII, wearing Measure 32, Design 6d.
As part of her wartime service that saw her earn 10 battle stars, she caught a kamikaze off Okinawa in April 1945.
USS Hazelwood (DD-531) after being hit by a kamikaze off Okinawa, 29 April 1945. 80-G-187592
Hazelwood, all guns blazing, maneuvered to avoid two of the Zeros. A third screamed out of the clouds from astern. Although hit by Hazelwood’s fire, the enemy plane careened past the superstructure. It hit #2 stack on the port side, smashed into the bridge, and exploded. Flaming gasoline spilled over the decks and bulkheads as the mast toppled and the forward guns were put out of action. Ten officers and 67 men were killed, including the Commanding Officer, Comdr. V. P. Douw, and 35 were missing. Hazelwood’s engineering officer, Lt. (j.g.) C. M. Locke, took command and directed her crew in fighting the flames and aiding the wounded.
Suffering terrible damage, she was patched up enough at Ulithi to return to San Francisco under her own steam, albeit in an almost unrecognizable condition.
These photos by LIFE’s Thomas McAvoy as she steamed under the Golden Gate in June 1945, headed to Mare Island NSY for a rebuild:
After reconstruction and a spell in mothballs, Hazelwood served in the Med during the Suez Crisis, and, between 1958 and 1965, following another rebuild, would serve as a trials ship for DASH and the Shipboard Landing Assist Device (SLAD).
USS Hazelwood (DD 531) off Patiuxent, November 1960. She is shown with the prototype DASH hangar, landing area, and refueling system
In August 1963, Hazelwood logged more than 1,000 DASH landings on her deck. That’s almost carrier-level numbers.
“DASH” (Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter) the U.S. Navy’s new long-range anti-submarine weapon system, “DASH”, hovers in free flight over the flight deck of the USS HAZELWOOD (DD-531). Suspended under the drone’s body is a homing torpedo, the mainstay of the DASH system. The drone produced by Gyrodyne Co. of America, Inc., of Long Island, New York, is designated model DSN-1. It made the world’s first free flight of a completely unmanned drone heli. At the Naval Air Test Center, Patuxent River, MA. In August, 1960. March 22, 1961. KN-1814
As detailed by a 1970s Navy report:
(U) While initial feasibility tests of the helicopter-destroyer concept were successfully conducted aboard Manley (DD 940) with a drone version of the HTK-1 helicopter in February 1959, Hazelwood (DD 531) was the first destroyer to be completed with the installation of a drone helicopter facility (hangar, flight deck, and aviation fuel system). Initially, COMOPDEVFOR was scheduled to begin evaluation of the Hazelwood installation in July 1959.*
Delays in the development of the final drone helicopter, however, meant that initial tests of the DSN-1** would not begin before March 1960. This program, one of the Navy’s largest commitments, certainly in terms of numbers of ships, to an unproven concept was eventually to prove less than completely successful and, in fact, delayed the introduction of the manned helicopter into the Navy’s destroyer-sized vessels for nearly ten years. Nevertheless, it represented the beginning of the destroyer-helicopter team concept which was to receive growing emphasis throughout the sixties and seventies.
* In the Pacific one prototype FRAM started conversion at the same time, Thomason (DD 760).
** Single Boeing jet engine, gross weight 2,200 pounds, rotor diameter twenty feet.
Hazelwood decommissioned 19 March 1965, entered mothballs with the Atlantic Reserve Fleet for a decade, then was stricken and sold for scrap in 1976.
As for the QH-50, some 755 were produced in the 1960s and it was fielded through the 1970s on over a hundred U.S. destroyers, destroyer escorts, destroyer tenders, cruisers, and at least one battleship (New Jersey off Vietnam) as well as seven Japanese ships during the Cold War. While it didn’t live up to its potential, had there been no DASH program, there wouldn’t be the vibrant UAV fleet that is currently fielded.