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USS Goldsborough (DDG 20)

USS GOLDSBOROUGH was the 20th ship in the CHARLES F. ADAMS - class of guided missile destroyers and the third ship in the Navy to bear the name.

USS GOLDSBOROUGH was last homeported in Pearl Harbor, Hi., and was the last ship in her class to be decommissioned. The ship was stricken from the navy list on April 29, 1993, and on September 17, 1993, the GOLDSBOROUGH was sold to Australia where she was cannibalized for spare parts. After all useable parts had been removed, the ship was sold to Indian shipbreakers. In late 1994, GOLDSBOROUGH was towed from Sydney to Goa, India, where she was finally scrapped.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USS GOLDSBOROUGH. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

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• Click here to see which USS GOLDSBOROUGH memorabilia are currently for sale on ebay.

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USS GOLDSBOROUGH Cruise Books:

• WestPac Cruise Book 1967-68
• WestPac Cruise Book 1977-78

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Accidents aboard USS GOLDSBOROUGH:

Date	Where	Events
November 24, 1965	Pearl Harbor Naval Station, Hawaii	While moored at Mike Two Pier at Pearl Harbor Naval Station, GOLDSBOROUGH mistakenly fired a live torpedo onto the pier. The torpedo broke into two pieces (one the warhead, the other the motor) but it did not detonate. Since torpedoes are not armed when a ship is in port, the detonating mechanism had not been activated. A Team from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit 1 at West Loch removed the torpedo from the pier. The incident happend at 8.45 a.m. local time. Nobody was injured. The pier was slightly damaged.
April 1971	8 nautical miles off Taiwan	Boiler room blast aboard the destroyer while operating off Taiwan. Two crewmen were killed and two were injured. The GOLDSBOROUGH was damaged.
December 19, 1972	off North Vietnam	GOLDSBOROUGH was hit by coastal artillery fire causing fires and a hole five feet wide through an upper deck. The ship was able to continue its combat mission, despite the damage and casualties. Two sailors were killed and six were injured. One of these six injured died later as a result of his wounds. Initial repairs were conducted at Da Nang which were later completed in Sasebo, Japan.
November 1982	Pearl Harbor Naval Station, Hawaii	As GOLDSBOROUGH left the harbor to ride out hurricane Iwa the ship was hit by a huge wave killing Seaman Jose Cantu. He was thrown across the deck and broke his neck. Another crewmember, Lieutenant Ray Beard was washed overboard by the wave. Despite suffering from a broken arm, he swam two miles to the reef runway at Honolulu International Airport

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About the Ship's Name:

Louis Malesherbes Goldsborough, born 18 February 1805 in Washington, D.C., was appointed Midshipman 28 June 1812, but did not serve until 13 February 1816 when he reported for duty at the Washington Navy Yard. He led a four-boat night expedition from PORPOISE in September 1827 to rescue British merchant brig COMET from Mediterranean pirates. In 1830 he was appointed first officer in charge of the newly created Depot of Charts and Instruments at Washington, the rude beginning of the United States Hydrographic Office. It was Goldsborough who suggested creation of the depot and initiated the collection and centralization of the instruments, books and charts that were scattered among several Navy yards. After 2 years he was relieved by Lt. Charles Wilkes.
Goldsborough led German emigrants to Wirt's Estates near Monticello, Fla., in 1833; then took leave from the Navy to command a steamboat expedition and later mounted volunteers in the Seminole War. After cruising the Pacific in frigate UNITED STATES, he participated in the bombardment of Vera Cruz in OHIO. He served consecutively as: commander of a detachment in the expedition against Tuxpan; senior officer of a commission which explored California and Oregon (1849-1850); Superintendent of the Naval Academy ( 1853-1857), and commander of the Brazil Squadron (1859-1861). During his command of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron October 1861 to September 1862, he led his fleet off North Carolina, where in cooperation with troops under General Burnside, he captured Roanoke Island and destroyed a small Confederate fleet. After special administrative duties in Washington, D.C., he took command of the European Squadron in the last year of the Civil War, returning to Washington in 1868 to serve as Commander of the Washington Navy Yard until his retirement in 1873. Rear Admiral Goldsborough died 20 February 1877.

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USS GOLDSBOROUGH's Commanding Officers:

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USS GOLDSBOROUGH History:

USS GOLDSBOROUGH joined the Pacific Fleet at the end of 1963, and almost immediately began the outward-looking rhythm that would define her career from Vietnam through the close of the Cold War. After commissioning on November 9, 1963, and shakedown out of Puget Sound, she arrived at her new home port, Pearl Harbor, on February 14, 1964. Qualification and acceptance trials were followed by a long south-west run on April 18, 1964, for the Coral Sea commemoration at Sydney, where she represented the newly introduced CHARLES F. ADAMS-class in a high-visibility Allied gathering before returning to Hawaii on June 1. On November 23, 1964, she departed for Yokosuka to begin her first Western Pacific deployment, entering a pattern of Seventh Fleet operations that would intensify as the war in Vietnam escalated: screening carriers at sea, exercising with allied navies, and cycling through forward bases in Japan and the Philippines for logistics and upkeep before returning to Pearl Harbor for antisubmarine and missile training. In June 1965, she fitted a capsule-recovery rig and served as a Pacific backup ship for the Gemini IV mission, a visible indication of how fleet units were woven into America's early space program. A brief embarrassment followed later that year at home: on November 24, 1965, while moored at Pearl Harbor, an antisubmarine torpedo was accidentally discharged and struck the pier without detonating. Ordnance specialists recovered the inert weapon and normal operations resumed.

The next Western Pacific deployment began on February 9, 1966, with a direct focus on Vietnam. In April she delivered hundreds of five-inch rounds during Operation Binh Phu I against Viet Cong positions ashore, then shifted to YANKEE Station to screen carriers launching strikes. May brought SEATO exercises that underlined the region's alliance architecture, and in June she served as station ship at Hong Kong, a traditional Navy liberty and logistics port whose status as a British colony made it a familiar way-station for U.S. ships rotating to and from the Gulf of Tonkin. After picket duty off Vietnam on June 26, she returned to Hawaii on July 23 and entered Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in August 1966 for overhaul and combat-system modifications shaped by the latest lessons from coastal warfare in Southeast Asia.

The refitted destroyer went back to war in 1967. Assigned to the northern coastal interdiction effort known as Operation SEA DRAGON and to naval gunfire support along the Demilitarized Zone, she spent months ranging the North Vietnamese littoral, often under the eye of coastal batteries. In the high-tempo fall and winter of 1967-1968, she fired nearly 10,000 rounds in support of allied forces, took evasive action against hundreds of incoming enemy shells without sustaining damage, and returned to Pearl Harbor in February 1968, with a Navy Unit Commendation noting the period August 29, 1967, to February 17, 1968. She deployed again in November 1968, for her fourth WESTPAC in five years, conducting eighty-eight scheduled gunfire missions for U.S., South Vietnamese, and Republic of Korea ground units before returning to Hawaii. In the summer of 1969 her mission set briefly shifted from combat to recovery support: as part of the Apollo 11 contingency force she covered the Pacific splashdown corridor while the carrier HORNET (CVS 12) executed the primary recovery on July 24, a reminder of the fleet's global utility beyond fighting wars.

After a 1970 yard period, GOLDSBOROUGH departed in August for another Vietnam tour, returning in February 1971, after alternating between the gunline and carrier-escort duties in the Gulf of Tonkin. Later that spring she made a public call at Portland, Oregon, for the 1971 Rose Festival before deploying again on a Sixth WESTPAC that September. The final, most intense combat cruise of her Vietnam career began on October 13, 1972. Early in the period she was detailed to the Pacific recovery task force for Apollo 16. By December she was back on the gunline as the LINEBACKER II air campaign pushed North Vietnamese defenses to their limits. On the night of December 19, 1972, while operating as part of Task Unit 77.1.1 with HOEL (DDG 13) and FLOYD B. PARKS (DD 884), she was hit by accurate coastal-artillery fire near Haiphong. The shelling tore a five-foot hole through an upper deck and ignited fires. Three sailors were killed and others wounded. Emergency repairs alongside continued operations long enough for her to break away for Japan. After a brief stop in Da Nang for materials, she arrived at Sasebo on December 28 for repairs through the New Year. In recognition of the deployment from October 1972 through February 1973, her crew received a Meritorious Unit Commendation. She returned to Pearl Harbor in May 1973 as U.S. combat operations in Vietnam ended.

The middle 1970s shifted GOLDSBOROUGH toward presence and exercise duty across the broader Indo-Pacific. After routine training and upkeep, she transited from Southeast Asia into the Indian Ocean in mid-1976 with a RANGER (CV 61)-centered task group during a period of heightened regional attention following the Entebbe hijacking-rescue and political tremors around the Horn of Africa. She spent roughly a month on station before resuming Pacific Fleet routines. The destroyer's local waters would turn deadly in peacetime in 1982, when Hurricane Iwa struck Hawaii in late November: as GOLDSBOROUGH put to sea with other ships to ride out the storm, heavy seas killed one seaman and swept a junior officer overboard - he survived by swimming to the reef runway off Honolulu Internation Airport despite a broken arm - underscoring the hazards of seamanship even outside combat.

By the mid- and late-1980s, as the Iran-Iraq War's "Tanker War" strained maritime security, GOLDSBOROUGH's deployments increasingly reached the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. Photographs and unit records place her at anchor in Bahrain in December 1986 and operating off the United Arab Emirates in early 1987, part of the steadying U.S. Middle East presence that preceded the reflagging and escort operations of 1987-1988. In 1988, she joined the CARL VINSON (CVN 70) battle group for a Western Pacific and Indian Ocean cruise that included support to Operation EARNEST WILL, escorting traffic and conducting air and surface surveillance in and around the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. forces worked to deter attacks on shipping and manage risk in narrow seas. That deployment ended with port calls typical of the era - Pattaya Beach, Hong Kong, and Subic Bay - and a return to Hawaii after weathering Typhoon Roy en route.

GOLDSBOROUGH closed her Navy service in the early post-Cold War drawdown. She was decommissioned and stricken on April 29, 1993, the last U.S. CHARLES F. ADAMS-class destroyer to leave commission. Sold to Australia later that year to serve as a source of spares and as a systems-training asset for the PERTH-class, she was towed from Pearl Harbor in late December 1993 and arrived at Sydney in February 1994. After useful equipment had been removed for the Royal Australian Navy, the hull was sold for scrap and towed to India late in 1994, for final breaking, closing a thirty-year career that began with early missile-destroyer experimentation and matured through hard Vietnam duty, long years of Allied exercises and port diplomacy, and a final phase of convoy-escort and deterrence work in the Gulf.

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Homeports of USS GOLDSBOROUGH:

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USS GOLDSBOROUGH Image Gallery:

The photo below was taken by William Chiu while the GOLDSBOROUGH was moored alongside the USS JOUETT (CG 29) in Hong Kong on November 16, 1990.

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