USS Gatling DD-671

The USS Gatling (DD-671) was a Fletcher-class destroyer built at the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Kearney, New Jersey, in 1943. Upon her commission in August of that year, Lt. Cmdr. Alvin H. Richardson took command as the ship's first captain.

Early Career

The Gatling's shakedown was relatively brief, although she did undergo some upgrades in New York immediately following in early November. She left for the western Pacific via San Francisco and Pearl Harbor on 3 December 1943 following a few weeks of training destroyer crews off the east coast.

Gatling reported to the Fast Carrier Task Force, a group that spearheaded major combat operations in the Pacific. After supporting the invasion of the Marshall Islands, she accompanied the carrier force across the region all the way to the Philippines, where Allied forces broke the back of the Imperial Japanese Navy in July of 1944.

Gatling continued to remain in the thick of the action, providing support fire and carrying out rescue missions; between October and December 1944, the Gatling's crewmen are credited with saving over 400 lives, a quarter of them survivors of "Halsey's Typhoon," in which three destroyers were capsized.

The first three months of 1945 were spent hammering the Japanese home islands, after which the Gatling returned to San Francisco for overdue repairs and maintenance in addition to a well-earned rest for her crew. By the time she got back to Guam on 9 August, the war was all but over; Japan surrendered shortly thereafter. Amazingly, the Gatling had not lost a single crewmen over two years and more than 175,000 nautical miles of intensive action.

Post War Years and Korea

For the next several months, Gatling served with the occupation force before she was ordered to Charleston, South Carolina, to stand down in the summer of 1946.

The Korean conflict had been going for a year when the Navy pulled Gatling out of retirement in June 1951. She spent a year patrolling the Atlantic before going into the Philadelphia Navy Yard for upgrades. Between 1952 and 1960, she participated in numerous NATO battle exercises and operations in the Atlantic and Caribbean in addition to a tour of duty in Korea in 1953 followed by a circumnavigation of the globe.

The USS Gatling was decommissioned in May 1960 and put into the mothball fleet for the next 14 years. Ultimately, she was sold for scrap in February 1977.

Asbestos Risks

Aboard each Navy ship until the '80s, asbestos, a fibrous mineral, was widely employed for insulating pipes and as fire control. While practically all sections of the Gatling posed a significant level of asbestos exposure, a ship's engine room and engineering spaces were generally the spaces where a seaman or dockworker was prone to be endangered by strands of asbestos. Further risk of experiencing extensive asbestos contact occurred when the vessel took damage, in combat or accidentally, since such events often exposed asbestos-laden compartments to the open air or subjected them to fire or flooding.

When dealing with asbestos, the highest level of danger to human health happens in situations where items containing the mineral deteriorate and become easily broken (or "friable"), because if minute asbestos strands escape into the surrounding air, the material may then be breathed in by workers near the hazard. Scientifically, asbestos inhalation is conclusively linked to pleural mesothelioma, asbestosis, lung cancer and other grave health conditions.

As most asbestos-related conditions are tricky to diagnose because the symptoms can be mistaken for those of other illnesses, U.S. Navy personnel with a history of contact with asbestos should inform their health care provider of the details about this history. To learn more about the diagnostic process, available treatment options and financial assistance to help pay for medical costs, please fill out this form to receive a comprehensive packet in the mail.

Like people on other craft of this type, servicemen who fought aboard the USS Gatling were all too often in danger of asbestos fiber exposure even though the Gatling saw minimal combat damage and went through mostly routine renovations and repairs. Despite the lack of serious damage and redesign work, the troops who served on the Gatling were still in danger of inhaling asbestos fibers in the normal course of their duty. This was particularly true for repair personnel such as welders and carpenters who worked on the vessel when the USS Gatling was in port.

In light of our increased understanding of the result of prolonged contact with asbestos, the sailors who sailed or labored aboard this destroyer at any point in their career, and those assigned to other Navy ships, need to learn more about the hazards raised by wartime exposure to asbestos fibers.

Sources:

Destroyers Index