USS Vance (DE-387) - Postwar Refit

Postwar Refit

The ship remained in "mothballs" for the next nine years, before she was towed to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in November 1955 for conversion to a radar picket destroyer escort. The extensive alterations involved the addition of: improved air-search radar, extensive communications equipment, and complete facilities for fighter-direction operations. It also entailed the enclosing of the entire main deck areas amidships to provide accommodations for officers and men. Designated DER-387, Vance was recommissioned on 5 October 1956 and Mare Island, Lt. Comdr. Albert M. Brouner in command. Between March 1957 and the end of the year, Vance was homeported at Seattle, Wash., as a unit of CortDiv 5 and completed eight patrols on various stations of the Radar Early Warning System in the northern Pacific. Each tour lasted approximately 17 days, and the ship maintained a round-the-clock vigil, with air-search radars, tracking and reporting every aircraft entering or approaching the air space of the northwestern United States. On Labor Day 1957, Vance drew emergency duty—an engineering casualty prevented the assigned ship from going out—and got underway in a fast 75 minutes. Although she was only manned at 60 percent of her complement (because many of her officers and men were ashore on leave or liberty and could not be notified in time to return to the ship before she weighed anchor) Vance was deployed for 12 days and completed a successful mission.

On 1 June 1958, the radar picket escort ship's home port was changed to Pearl Harbor; and she began operating with CortRon 7. One month later, she departed Hawaiian waters for a 29-day patrol on the mid-ocean picket lines which provided radar coverage from Alaska to Midway Atoll. Vance thus became the first ship on the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line in the Pacific and the first to sail under the newly organized Pacific barrier patrol. In mid-January 1959. following routine overhaul and refresher training at Pearl Harbor, Vance again took station on the mid-Pacific stretch of ocean on her second DEW-line deployment.

Vance continued to conduct regular DEW-line patrols until May 1960, when CortRon 7 was dissolved. At that time, she rejoined CortDiv 5 and served with her old unit into 1961. On occasion, the picket ship took Russian trawlers under surveillance—undoubtedly while the communist vessel was returning the compliment.

Early in 1961, Vance's communications capabilities were extensively augmented during an overhaul at Pearl Harbor. After resuming DEW-line patrols late in the spring, the ship received orders in August 1961 designating her an ocean station vessel with TF-43, Operation "Deepfreeze 62." Temporarily based at Dunedin, New Zealand, Vance served as a communication relay ship for aircraft bringing in vital supplies to the Antarctic stations from New Zealand. She remained on station in the cold, bleak, southern waters into March 1962, when she headed home via Melbourne, Australia, and Papeete, Tahiti, to Pearl Harbor. She soon resumed duties on the DEW-line and—but for periodic interruptions for maintenance, replenishment, and training—devoted herself to the task of operating mainly off the Aleutian Islands through February 1965.