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USS Dahlgren (DDG 43)

USS DAHLGREN was the 7^th ship in the FARRAGUT - class of guided missile destroyers and the third ship in the Navy to bear the name. Commissioned as DLG 12 (guided missile frigate), the DAHLGREN was reclassified a guided missile destroyer on July 1, 1975., getting the new hull number DDG 43.
Decommissioned on July 31, 1992 and stricken from the Navy list on November 20, 1992, the DAHLGREN was sold for scrapping on February 10, 1999.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USS DAHLGREN. 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 DAHLGREN memorabilia are currently for sale on ebay.

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USS DAHLGREN Cruise Books:

• Northern Europe Cruise Book 1962
• Mediterranean Cruise Book 1966

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Accidents aboard USS DAHLGREN:

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About the Ship's Name:

John Adolphus Dahlgren, born 13 November 1809 in Philadelphia, Pa., was appointed a midshipman 1 February 1826, and early became interested in the problems of ordnance. He developed the famous Dahlgren gun, perfected howitzers for use afloat and ashore, organized the Naval Gun Factory, and wrote several significant books on ordnance. From the outbreak of the Civil War until July 1862 he served as Commandant of the Washington Navy Yard where President Lincoln often conferred with him. He then became Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance and on 7 February 1863 was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral. In command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron (7 July 1863 - 17 June 1866), he participated in the bombardment of Fort Wagner and cooperated with Sherman in the capture of Savannah and Charleston. After a tour of duty in command of the South Pacific Squadron (1866 - 1868), he returned to Washington again as Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance. Rear Admiral Dahlgren resigned this job a year later to return to the comm and of the Navy Yard and Gun Factory. He died in Washington 12 July 1870.

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USS DAHLGREN History:

From the day she entered service on April 8, 1961, USS DAHLGREN (then DLG 12) took her place in the Atlantic Fleet as one of the U.S. Navy's early Terrier-equipped missile escorts built at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. After trials and shakedown, she quickly moved from systems testing to real contingency work. Between September 25 and October 27, 1961, the ship operated in waters off Cuba during a period of heightened tension that merited the Navy Expeditionary Medal - an early indication of the kinds of crisis-response tasks she would draw throughout her career.

In 1962, DAHLGREN ranged widely. A Northern Europe cruise took her through the Kiel Canal - there's a contemporaneous image of her passing under the Levensauer Bridge - before she pivoted to the Mediterranean and onward into the Indian Ocean. By late October, she had continued east to support the Quemoy-Matsu contingency in the Western Pacific (Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal credit dated October 27-November 11, 1962). The pattern - Atlantic training, a high-latitude European swing, and then east of Suez - underscored how the Navy was using its new missile escorts as long-legged generalists that could shift rapidly across theaters.

The ship returned to Sixth Fleet duty in 1963 and, after Caribbean refresher work in 1964, deployed again to the Mediterranean in early 1965 amid a churn of Cold War incidents from the eastern Med to North Africa. These rotations built the habits that later made her valuable as a flagship and screen commander: persistent air-defense picket stations, anti-submarine barrier work, and practiced logistics cycles at the standard Sixth Fleet ports.

From early 1966 into 1967, DAHLGREN shifted to the Pacific for Vietnam-era operations. WestPac tasking in the Gulf of Tonkin alternated between plane guard for carriers, sea-air rescue support, and radar/missile air-defense stations. The ship's Vietnam service is marked by two sets of officially credited combat-zone dates - April 10-May 17, 1967 and June 5-July 13, 1967 - reflected in two Vietnam campaign stars. A Navy photograph shows her off Oahu on August 28, 1967 between periods of line duty, a reminder of how quickly destroyer-leaders cycled through intense operations and abbreviated breathers.

After the Pacific tour the ship returned to the Atlantic for a Guantanamo Bay training period in 1968 and then embarked on a SOLANT-Middle East run from December 1968 through mid-1969. On that deployment, DAHLGREN served in succession as flagship for the South Atlantic force and then for Commander, Middle East Force - rounding the Cape of Good Hope, operating in the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf, and making the kinds of engagement calls and patrols that were standard MEF practice as regional tensions ebbed and flowed. The crew earned a Meritorious Unit Commendation covering operations from September 5, 1969 to June 30, 1970.

The Mediterranean again dominated the early 1970s. DAHLGREN was in the Sixth Fleet during the fraught autumn of 1970 as the Jordanian civil war ("Black September") drove a major U.S. naval posture eastward. Her unit commendation includes October 5-18, 1970 at the peak of the crisis. In 1971, she spent months in the North Atlantic, at one point serving as flagship for NATO's nascent Standing Naval Force Atlantic (STANAVFORLANT), a multinational squadron that knit together allied tactics and procedures in cold-water conditions. Sailors from the period recall the tempo of cross-decking and combined exercises as intense but formative.

After a major availability and modernization interval, DAHLGREN was temporarily decommissioned on February 24, 1972, then recommissioned on March 17, 1973, emerging with updated combat systems and renewed machinery life. She resumed Mediterranean duties in 1973 and into 1974, a year of particular turbulence that included the Cyprus crisis. One Sixth Fleet narrative lists DAHLGREN among escorts that year working with the carrier FORRESTAL (CVA 59) as the U.S. presence flexed to cover evacuations and stabilize lines of communication across the central and eastern Med.

In 1975, the Navy reclassified its "frigates" (DLG) as guided-missile destroyers; on July 1, 1975 DAHLGREN became DDG 43. That summer, during transit operations at the approaches to the Panama Canal for inter-American exercises, she collided with the Panamanian freighter SS EURYBATES near Colon on August 7, 1975 - a case later memorialized in federal court records. The incident did not end her career, but it sent her into repair, inspection, and lessons-learned cycles that influenced subsequent canal and convoy procedures.

By 1976, she was back on station in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, the routine of allied port visits and combined gunnery/missile shoots occasionally punctuated by real-world tasking. On March 22, 1976, for example, the Navy's humanitarian operations summary notes DAHLGREN assisting a Saudi craft at sea - one of the small, frequently unheralded rescues that surface combatants performed as a matter of course in crowded waters.

A North Atlantic/Baltic deployment followed in 1977, with operating periods off Norway and in the Baltic funnels and liberty calls in Lisbon, Stockholm, and Bremen that reflected NATO's focus on northern sea lanes. In 1979, the ship entered a 15-month Philadelphia overhaul that added HARPOON anti-ship missiles, upgraded countermeasures, and refreshed sensors and habitability - work that allowed an early-1960s hull to remain tactically credible in the missile-rich 1980s.

From March to August 1980, DAHLGREN deployed to the Mediterranean as flagship for Destroyer Squadron 26, screening carriers, leading air-defense exercises, and conducting diplomacy by presence from the western basin to the Aegean. In 1981, she sailed as the flagship for UNITAS XXII alongside South American partners, exercising on both coasts of the continent. A Fleet Composite Squadron 6 report from December 1981 even notes a DAHLGREN-fired Terrier missile in a live missile event during the cruise.

A global-range cruise in 1983 took the ship through the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, and the Caribbean, serving in Second, Sixth, and Seventh Fleet areas and again acting as a destroyer squadron flagship. After a year-long overhaul in 1984 she returned to the Med in 1986-87. Documentation compiled in connection with 1988 Danish port-visit debates lists DAHLGREN's 1980s calls at Rota, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Benidorm, Toulon, Cannes, Naples, Gaeta, Augusta Bay, Tangier, Alexandria, and Port Louis - useful waypoints for reconstructing her Sixth and Seventh Fleet tracks in those years.

In 1988, DAHLGREN was again east of Suez. She earned Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal credit for Persian Gulf operations from May 20 to July 30, 1988, during the endgame of the Iran-Iraq War, a period that overlapped with Operation Earnest Will's convoy and escort regime and its sequels after the 1988 ceasefire. Tasks for Atlantic Fleet escorts in that phase included radar pickets, maritime interception support, and escort legs into and out of the Strait of Hormuz as the U.S. presence sought to preserve freedom of navigation.

The destroyer's logbook for 1989 included a humanitarian chapter: in September, after Hurricane Hugo devastated the northeastern Caribbean, DAHLGREN anchored off Saint Croix for Operation Hawkeye relief, ferrying supplies and providing offshore support while civil authorities restored order ashore.

She returned to the Persian Gulf in the months immediately preceding Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, with Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal credit for March 1-August 3, 1990. Those months saw increasingly assertive maritime interception operations and forward presence patrols as Iraq massed forces against Kuwait and the United States organized what would become Operation Desert Shield. DAHLGREN's role fit her design brief: a missile destroyer providing long-range air defense and command-and-control connectivity to knit together dispersed small formations.

In 1991, DAHLGREN headed south for UNITAS XXXII, a multinational circumnavigation of South America that emphasizes antisubmarine warfare, coastal convoying, and intricate navigation. Photographs and captions from that year show her in the Strait of Magellan alongside USS O'BANNON (DD 987), one of many legs that brought U.S. units together with regional partners from the southern Atlantic to the Pacific.

The ship's last year in commission was marred by tragedy. On February 22, 1992, a main-space fire killed two sailors and injured four - an event later summarized in the Naval History and Heritage Command's compendium of post-World War II shipboard accidents. Damage was contained and the ship made it home, but the incident accelerated the end of a long career. DAHLGREN decommissioned on July 31, 1992, was stricken on November 20, 1992, and transferred to the James River Reserve Fleet on July 1, 1993. What followed was a protracted, halting scrapping saga - three separate sale attempts over a decade, two repossessions by the Navy - until dismantling finally concluded in 2006.

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USS DAHLGREN Patch Gallery:

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USS DAHLGREN Image Gallery:

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