USS Dale (DLG-19)
|
|
| |
| Career | 
|
|---|---|
| Ordered: | |
| Laid down: | |
| Launched: | |
| Commissioned: | |
| Decommissioned: | |
| Fate: | |
| Struck: | |
| General Characteristics | |
| Displacement: | |
| Length: | |
| Beam: | |
| Draught: | |
| Propulsion: | |
| Speed: | |
| Range: | |
| Complement: | |
| Armament: | |
| Aircraft: | |
| Motto: | |
USS Dale (CG-19, ex DLG-19), a United States Navy 5670-ton Leahy-class guided-missile frigate built at Camden, New Jersey, was commissioned in November 1963. Assigned to the Pacific Fleet, she made five deployments to the Western Pacific over the next seven years. Between 1965 and 1970, Dale's Seventh Fleet tours included participation in Vietnam War operations, during which she rescued several American aviators in the Gulf of Tonkin.
In November 1970 Dale began modernization at Bath, Maine. This work fitted her with the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) and other improvements that enhanced her anti-air and anti-submarine warfare capabilities. When recommissioned in December 1971, Dale joined the Atlantic Fleet. While on the first of her many Sixth Fleet cruises, she operated in the eastern Mediterranean Sea during the tense period of U.S.-Soviet relations that accompanied the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Dale was reclassified as a guided-missile cruiser (CG-19) at the beginning of July 1975. A year later, in July 1976, she helped represent the U.S. Navy during the Bicentennial Naval Review in New York Harbor. During another Mediterranean deployment, in mid-1980, she entered the Black Sea to visit Romania.
As an important unit of the U.S. surface fleet, Dale was regularly updated, receiving "Harpoon" surface-to-surface guided missiles and the "Phalanx" gun system in 1981 and the New Threat Upgrade combat systems enhancement later in that decade. During the 1980s her Mediterranean tours were sometimes extended to take her into the increasingly important Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf regions. In 1986 she took part in the confrontation with Libia's hostile regime.
Dale spent much of her final years of service on counter-narcotics patrols in the Caribbean area as well as on regular cruises with the Sixth Fleet. During 1991 she went to the Red Sea to help enforce sanctions against Iraq after that nation's defeat in the war over Kuwait. She had similar duties in 1993-94, in support of United Nations' Resolutions concerning Bosnia and Yugoslavia. USS Dale was decommissioned in September 1994 at NAVSTA Mayport, Florida. She was sunk as a target in January 2000.
USS Dale was named in honor of Commodore Richard Dale (1756-1826), who served in the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War and in the United States Navy in the late 1790s and early 1800s.
External Links
- USS Dale webpage (http://www.navysite.de/cg/cg19.htm)