USS Albany Poster

She came too late for the war she was built to fight — and then lived a remarkable second life as a pioneer of an entirely new age of naval warfare. USS Albany (CA-123) was an Oregon City-class heavy cruiser, armed with nine 8-inch guns, launched in the final months of the Second World War. By the time she was ready for service, the great surface battles had been fought and won, the enemy fleets sunk or surrendered, and the era of the big-gun cruiser was already beginning to fade into history. For her first years Albany served as a conventional heavy cruiser, showing the flag and operating with the fleet through the uneasy early days of the Cold War. She was a fine ship of a type that had dominated the world's oceans for half a century — but the world was changing fast around her. The rise of the guided missile and the jet aircraft threatened to make traditional gun cruisers obsolete almost overnight, relics of a vanished kind of war. Many such ships were simply scrapped or laid up. Albany was chosen instead to lead a transformation. In one of the most dramatic conversions in naval history, Albany was rebuilt almost from the main deck up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her old gun turrets were stripped away entirely and replaced with batteries of surface-to-air guided missiles, and her superstructure was reconstructed around towering "mack" structures — combined masts and funnels — bristling with radar. She emerged in 1962 utterly transformed: a sleek, futuristic guided-missile cruiser, the lead ship of a new Albany class, designed to shield aircraft carrier task forces from air attack with a defensive umbrella of missiles rather than a battery of guns. In her new form, Albany served as a flagship and a front-line missile cruiser through the height of the Cold War, deploying repeatedly to the Mediterranean with the Sixth Fleet and standing guard as part of America's projection of naval power around the world. The ship that had been born as a gun cruiser of the Second World War now stood watch in the age of the guided missile and the nuclear standoff — a single hull that bridged two completely different eras of warfare. When she was finally retired in 1980 and later scrapped, Albany had served as both a relic of one age and a herald of the next, a ship whose career carried the United States Navy across the great technological divide of the twentieth century — from the heavy gun to the guided missile, from the world of Jutland and the Pacific battles to the world of radar pickets and Cold War deterrence. To reconstruct USS Albany is to capture that transformation — a handsome WWII heavy cruiser reborn as a futuristic missile ship — and with it one of the most fascinating stories of adaptation in naval history. She is the ship that arrived too late for her first war and reinvented herself completely for the next confrontation, proof that even a warship can be given an entirely new life when the world changes around her.