USS Fall River (CA-131)

History of USS Fall River (CA-131)

Since the age of seafaring, navies around the world have needed a sort of battleship that is somewhere between a battleship and a destroyera ship that will be built to be smaller than the former, but larger than the latter. During World War II, aircraft carriers rose to become the main battleships of the most powerful navy, replacing battleships in this role. It was then that the "cruisers" appeared, providing full protection for the redesigned fleet. Heavy cruisers began to fill the vacancies, inherently discounted, and the concept of almighty battleships as capital ships gradually faded.

Today, cruisers have grown to be the largest and most powerful surface combatants of all available classes, and have essentially become the "modern" warships of today's naval fleet.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy continued to build Baltimore-class heavy cruisers. The USS Fall River (CA-131) is one such ship, built by the New York Shipbuilding Company at the shipyard in Camden, NJ.

She entered service on 1 July 1945 and proved to be a formidable ship, but it was too late for combat duty in Europe or the Pacific. Instead, the Navy used them to develop cruiser tactics against the Soviet Union during postwar "peacetime" and during the Cold War.

Fall River employs a powerful weapon in the form of three movable turrets, each carrying a 3 x 8" .55 caliber gun and a secondary 12 x 5" cannon. For close-range AA protection, there are 48 x 40mm Bofors guns spread over 12 quad mounts, while 24 x 20mm Oerlikon guns are mounted on single mounts. 150 mm (6 in) belt armor protected her from torpedoes.

Her main turret has 200 mm (8 in) armor to counteract shrapnel, and her deck has 2.5 in (64 mm) armor to repel small falling projectiles. Her best defense against a battleship is to escape using her 120,000 shaft horsepower, which allows the ship to travel at 33 knots (61 km/h/38 mph). For over-the-horizon (OTH) contacts, she gets 4 x Vought OS2U Kingfisher Seaplane Scouts. These aircraft are particularly suitable for sailing, with wings that fold into a tailstock for easy storage and excellent range and dwell time.

Two catapults are used to launch the aircraft, while a powered crane is used to recover the aircraft.

CA-131 was assigned to JTF 1 operating during Operation Crossroads. This unit is assigned to serve in the navy, which oversees nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands. If needed, Fall River sails to San Pedro, California for modifications to be the flagship of the upcoming operation. The conversion was completed on March 6, 1946, after which she sailed to Pearl Harbor to accommodate a larger crew, including Rear Admiral F. G. Fahrion - the target fleet commander for the upcoming test.

Pearl Harbor has long served as the gateway to the Western Pacific, and it proved extremely important to U.S. Navy operations in the Pacific throughout World War II. Fall River departed from Pearl and then arrived in the Marshall Islands on June 14.

Over three weeks, a support fleet of more than 150 ships arrived and provided the 37,000 Navy personnel and 5,000 observers and scientists involved in the nuclear program with the dormitories, nuclear workstations and workshops they needed.

Operation Crossroads was planned at Bikini Atoll in 1946 to designate personnel on the Farr River and support U.S. Navy ships to study the effects of nuclear weapons on Navy ships. The series includes two explosions, each with a yield of 23 kilotons.

The "Able" was blown up on July 1, 1946, and the "Baker" was blown up underwater on July 25, 1946. Due to radioactive contamination from these tests, Bikini Atoll remains uninhabitable to this day, although it is frequently visited by scuba divers.

It was assumed that the Fall River participants and their contingent were well protected from radiation sickness, although tests in later years showed that the crew's life expectancy was reduced by an average of three months.

Fall River returned to Camden, NJ for an overhaul in late 1946, then served as flagship of the Far East Cruiser 1 Division from January 1947 to June 1947. She was decommissioned on October 31, 1947, and returned to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard as a reserve.

She was removed from the Naval Register on February 19, 1971, and sold as scrap on August 28, 1972. However, about 200 tons of armor plates were removed from the USS Fall River for the Fermi National Accelerator Library.

Today, her iconic remaining arch graces the Battleship Cove entrance in Fall River, Massachusetts.

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