OPINION
 

USS Des Moines sails to her end
 

THE DES MOINES REGISTER
By JOHN CARLSON 
REGISTER COLUMNIST

August 23, 2006

It was a sad Monday at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

An old gray ship a couple of football fields long was strapped behind a tow to begin its last voyage. It will limp down the Delaware River, into the Atlantic Ocean, south along the coast, around the edge of Florida, into the Gulf of Mexico and, finally, to the tip of Texas.

Workers there will go at it with blowtorches and saws, turning the once-dignified USS Des Moines into a pile of scrap metal.

"It breaks my heart," said retired Navy Capt. Richard Caswell of Greendale, Wis. "I wish they'd torpedoed it and sent it to the bottom. At least it would have gone down with honor."

Caswell is one of the Wisconsin residents who have been trying for the past five years to get the 716-foot-long, 21,000-ton cruiser to the Milwaukee shore of Lake Michigan, where they hoped it would be berthed as a floating museum and educational center.

It never happened.

Too much opposition from local politicians, Caswell said. They dreamed up every excuse imaginable to keep the ship out of the city. Now it's headed for an ugly death.

Most Iowans have never laid eyes on the USS Des Moines, nicknamed the "Daisy Mae," the last and largest of the Navy's heavy cruisers. It was commissioned in November 1948 and sailed with 1,500 officers and enlisted men until it was removed from full-time service in July 1961.

Its giant guns never fired a shot in anger, but the old ship has a past worth talking about.

It carried Dwight Eisenhower from Athens to France during his last trip in Europe as president. Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh and King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece walked her decks. And it served as the flagship of the Navy's 6th Fleet in the North Atlantic, the Caribbean and Mediterranean.

It was, Caswell and his friends believed, perfect for the Milwaukee lakefront.

"We wanted it to be a veterans memorial, a naval museum, an educational facility for kids and a tourist attraction," said Caswell, 71, who sailed on the Des Moines as a midshipman in the summer of 1957.

"It wouldn't have cost the city or the county a dime," he said. "We were in a position to raise the money to bring it here. It would have brought $20 million in tourism income. It didn't matter. There's no vision here. It's the city's and county's loss."

The Milwaukee effort ended quietly about a year ago, and that's when David Henclewski, a Winter Garden, Fla., man who had toured the Des Moines during a visit to Philadelphia, tried to persuade people in the Cape Canaveral area that the ship should go there.

"I worked on it for a year after the Milwaukee thing fell through," Henclewski said. "Port Canaveral would have been a wonderful place for the ship. Millions of people visit the area every year, and it would have done very well. I came up with a couple of proposals, wrote a 150-page brief and sent it to the Navy and to politicians. I couldn't get much interest in it here. I contacted Jacksonville and Miami. It was the same there. It ended up not mattering. The Navy said there was no more time. It was done. The Des Moines was going to be scrapped."

It was never coming to Iowa, in case you're wondering. The ship needs at least 22 feet of water to float. It couldn't make it up the Mississippi, let alone the Des Moines River.

So it was pushed from the shipyard at 8:30 Monday morning. In its prime it traveled at 33 knots. The trip to Florida will be a crawl.

"There just wasn't anything anybody could do to save her," Caswell said.

"She's really beautiful, but she'll look like hell when they're done with her. It's no way for a Navy warship to die."
 

NavSource and DAFS data on USS DES MOINES (CA 134)
http://www.navsource.org/archives/04/04134.htm
 

Editor's Note:  USS SALEM (CA 139) her sister ship sits tied up to the pier in
Quincy, MA as a museum ship  http://www.uss-salem.org/
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Contributed,
YNCS Don Harribine, USN(ret)