USS Rochester Poster

If her sister Oregon City barely served, and her sister Albany was reborn as a missile cruiser, USS Rochester found her purpose in a different war altogether — and earned the evocative nickname "the Grey Ghost of the Korean coast." She was an Oregon City-class heavy cruiser, armed with nine 8-inch guns, and like her sisters she was completed just as the Second World War ended, seemingly born too late for the conflict she was designed to fight. But unlike Oregon City, Rochester found plenty of fighting still to do. When the Korean War erupted in 1950, the old big-gun heavy cruisers suddenly had a vital job once more: providing heavy gunfire support, pounding enemy positions ashore with their 8-inch guns in support of the hard-pressed troops fighting on the peninsula. In an age increasingly dominated by jets and the first guided missiles, the cruiser's heavy artillery proved to be exactly what was needed for the brutal, close work of supporting the land battle. Rochester sailed to the Far East and threw herself into the task. She was there for the dramatic Inchon landing in September 1950 — General MacArthur's bold and risky amphibious masterstroke that landed troops far behind enemy lines and turned the course of the war — providing gunfire support as the assault waves stormed ashore. She bombarded Wonsan, Inchon and strongpoints up and down the Korean coast, her shells smashing bridges, bunkers, supply dumps and enemy concentrations. During one action she came under fire herself and survived a bomb attack, fighting on through the danger to continue her mission of supporting the men ashore. For her service in Korea, Rochester earned a string of battle stars, proving that the heavy gun cruiser still had a deadly and valuable role to play even as the missile age dawned. She remained in service into the early 1960s, a reliable workhorse of the Cold War fleet, before finally being decommissioned and, in time, scrapped. Rochester's story is one of an apparently unwanted weapon that found its war — a ship built too late for one great conflict who became a stalwart of the next. While ships of her type were being retired or transformed beyond recognition, she spent years haunting the Korean coast, her guns a constant menace to the enemy ashore, the "Grey Ghost" whose bombardments supported countless soldiers and Marines. To reconstruct USS Rochester is to capture that second life — the heavy cruiser who missed the Second World War but earned her honours in Korea, the "Grey Ghost of the Korean coast" whose big guns proved that the gun cruiser still had hard, important work to do. Where her sister Oregon City was the ship that never got her war, Rochester was the ship that found one, and made the most of it.