How about this great shot some 80 years ago this week showing the stern of the destroyer USS Claxton (DD-571), at left, a bow-on view of the heavy cruiser USS Canberra (CA-70), center, and another tin can stern, of USS Killen (DD-593), right, undergoing battle damage repairs in the forward deployed 927-foot floating drydock ABSD-2 at Seeadler Harbor, Manus, Admiralty Islands, 2 December 1944.
Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-304088
All of the above would go on to have a rich, long life.
The famous “Kan-do-Kangaroo,” Canberra, earned seven battle stars for her WWII service, became the country’s second guided-missile cruiser (CAG-2) in the 1950s, carried the Unknown Serviceman of World War II home, walked the line during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and blistered her guns off Vietnam and only fading to the scrappers in 1978.
Killen, a Fletcher-class destroyer commissioned in May 1944, got in a torpedo against the Japanese battleship Yamashiro at Surigao Strait, and, despite being mothballed in 1946, would serve, unmanned, as a ghost ship for atom bomb and high explosive tests for another 15 years. She was expended as a target off Vieques in 1963.
ABSD-2, consisting of ten sections, continues to have at least three of them in use at Pearl Harbor, one of WWII’s forgotten yeoman vessels.
As for the hard-fighting Claxton, a sister of Killen, she earned a Presidential Unit Citation with DESRON 23 at Rendova, fought in tough surface engagements at Augusta Bay, Cape St. George, and the Surigao Strait; bombarded Japanese positions just yards off the beach in the Philippines, and fought off a dozen-strong kamikaze swarm while performing hazardous radar picket duty off Okinawa. Ending the war with eight battle stars along with her PUC, in 1959, she was transferred to the West German Navy with whom she served as Zerstörer 4 (D 178).
Claxton as Zerstörer Z-4. Ironically, in March 1943 while on her shakedowns, the Texas-built Claxton patrolled briefly in Casco Bay, Maine, awaiting the possible sortie of German battleship Tirpitz from Norwegian waters.
Claxton served with the Germans until 1981, then was passed on to the Greek (Hellenic) Navy for use as a spares ship for that country’s fleet of seven second-hand Fletchers.
Components of Claxton are no doubt aboard ex-USS Charrette (DD-581)/Velos (D16) which, still ceremonially active, has been preserved as a museum in Thessaloniki.