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Military history, when superficially studied, will furnish arguments in support of any theory. -- Bronsart von Schellendorf |
USS Astoria, a 2789 gross ton cargo ship, was built in 1902 at Sunderland, England, as the commercial steamship Burbo Bank. Later sold to German interests and renamed Frieda Leonhardt, she took refuge at Jacksonville, Florida, after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 made the high seas dangerous for German shipping. The ship was seized when the United States entered the conflict in April 1917 and was turned over to the Navy a month later. Renamed Astoria and modified at the Charleston Navy Yard, South Carolina, she was placed in commission in November 1917.
Astoria's first Navy voyage took her to the Gulf Coast and back to Charleston in the last two months of 1917. In January and February 1918 she carried Army supplies across the Atlantic to Brest, France. Damaged in a collision there on 15 February, she was under repair for some weeks, and in May 1918 began carrying coal between Wales and France. This work lasted until February 1919, when Astoria left European waters to return to the United States. She then operated in the western Atlantic for the rest of the year, with time out for one more trip to France. In January 1920 Astoria transited the Panama Canal to begin several months of service in the eastern Pacific. During this time, in July 1920, she was given the hull number AK-8. Returning to the East Coast in November 1920, the ship was decommissioned at Boston, Massachusetts, in April 1921. USS Astoria was sold in December of that year. She subsequently had more than two decades of merchant service, under the names Astoria and Hartwelson. The old ship sank on 5 May 1943 after running aground off the coast of Maine. |
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This Day in History
1808:
Bayonne Decree by Napoleon I of France orders seizure of U.S. ships.
1864: General Grant bans the trading of prisoners. 1864: Confederate forces attack Plymouth, North Carolina, in an attempt to recapture ports lost to the Union two years before. 1941: The Yugoslav army, encircled in Bosnia, surrenders to Germany and signs a formal capitulation in Belgrade. 1945: U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash commandeers over half a ton of uranium at Strassfut, Germany. 1951: Operation DAUNTLESS continued to advance against weakened communist resistance in the 24th and 25th Infantry Division zones. 1961: The Bay of Pigs invasion begins when a CIA financed and trained group of Cuban refugees lands in Cuba and attempts to topple the communist government of Fidel Castro. 1975: Khmer Rouge forces capture the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. |