History
The 46 ships of the Knox class were the largest, last and most numerous of the US Navy’s second-generation ASW escorts. The lead ship of the class was the USS Knox (FF-1052), laid down 5 October 1965 and commissioned 12 April 1969, at Todd Shipyards in Seattle. Planned as the follow-on to the twin 5-inch gun armed Garcia class frigates and the Tartar missile-equipped Brooke class frigates, their initial design incorporated the prior classes’ pressure-fired boilers (the design later was changed to conventional 1,200 psi (8,300 kPa) boilers) in a similar-sized hull designed around the massive bow-mounted AN/SQS-26 sonar.
Ten ships were authorized in FY 1964, sixteen in 1965 and ten each for FYs 1966, ’67 and ’68; six were canceled in 1968 and four more in 1969. They were built in four different shipyards and were originally commissioned as destroyer escorts (DEs) 1052–1097 in 1969–1974, they were redesignated as frigates (FF) on 30 June 1975.
The Knox class was the Navy’s last destroyer-type design with a steam powerplant.
Due to their unequal comparison to destroyers then in service (large size with low speed and a single screw and 5 inch gun), they became known to a generation of destroyermen as “McNamara’s Folly.”
These ships were retired from the US Navy at the end of the Cold War due to a declining need for an advanced ASW capability. By 1994 all ships of this class had been retired from the US Navy, although some remain in service with foreign nations such as Egypt, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Mexico.
Read more about this topic: Knox Class Frigate
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)