Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size
Login

Military Photos



USS Bering Strait (AVP-34), 1944-1948

(157 total words in this text)
(1926 Reads)  Printer-friendly page
USS Bering Strait, a 1,766-ton Barnegat class small seaplane tender, was built at Houghton, Washington, and was commissioned in July 1944. Following shakedown off the west coast and further training in Hawaiian waters, she proceeded to the Marianas where she served as a tender to a squadron of air-sea rescue aircraft in March 1945. She then moved with her squadron to Okinawa, where she remained until the end of December 1945. Returning to the U. S., she was decommissioned at Alameda, California, in June 1946.

In September 1948 Bering Strait was loaned to the Coast Guard as the cutter Bering Strait (WAVP-382, later WHEC-382). She served out of Seattle, Washington and San Francisco, California, primarily on weather station duty, for most of her Coast Guard career. She was transferred to South Vietnam as Tran Quan Kha in January 1971. She became the Philippine Diego Silang in April 1976 and was decommissioned in June 1985.

Military History
Forum Posts

Military Polls

Does your local VA hospital provide adequate care?

[ Results | Polls ]

Votes: 46

This Day in History
1738: English parliament declares war on Spain.

1800: The USS Essex becomes first U.S. Navy vessel to pass the Cape of Good Hope.

1814: The HMS Phoebe and Cherub capture the USS Essex off Valparaiso, Chile.

1854: Britain and France declare war on Russia.

1862: Union forces stop the Confederate invasion of New Mexico territory when they turn the Rebels back at Glorieta Pass.

1864: A group of Copperheads attack Federal soldiers in Charleston, Illinois. Five are killed and twenty wounded.

1917: The Womens Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) is founded, Great Britains first official service women.

1939: The Spanish Civil War ends as Madrid falls to Francisco Franco.

1941: Andrew Browne Cunningham, Admiral of the British Fleet, commands the British Royal Navys destruction of three major Italian battleships and two destroyers in the Battle of Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean.

1942: A British ship, the HMS Capbeltown, a Lend-Lease American destroyer, which was specifically rammed into a German occupied dry-dock in France, explodes, knocking the area out of action for the German battleship Tirpitz.