Quincy (CA 71) - Naval Cruise Book

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HO EWARD BOUN I Heading homeward, our minds are all on that moment when the hills of Virginia will first rise before us. lt will be a glorious morning that finds us again passing Old Point Comfort Light, and nudging our way up the familiar channel of Norfolk harbor -- but this book is a chronicle of the past, not of the future. This book has been the story of a year, in the life of a single ship. It has not traced the momentous turns we have watched in the course of world history, nor has it explored the thousand different lives of its individual men, It has sought to catch for the future one bit of current drama. For the Quincy the past twelve months were a year of rebirth. of restoration and renewal. A tired, gray-shrouded hull in the Bremerton naval shipyard became one of the showpieces of the United States Sixth Fleet, Men whose feet had never left the dust of W'yoming: were turned into a fighting crew. We steamed 40,000 miles. We drilled and exercised incessantly. We visited twenty-one different ports in eleven nations, on four continents, We sailed the waters of the Pacific, the Arctic, WE STAND RELIEVEDU and the Atlantic Oceans, and of the Caribbean and Mediter- ranean Seasg we passed through the Panama Canal and the Straits of Gibraltar and the Irish Sea. lVe weathered freezing arctic gales and baked in the sultry heat of Cuba. And through it all, we were learning the art of war. Navy training is steeped in tradition, and often inscrutahle in its method, But how often, after perhaps months of exas- peration and skeptical disbelief, have we suddenly discovered that it has worked! - that. through some subtle chemistry of the spirit, hftei-n hundred diverse men have been molded and worked into a living, functioning body, with a dynamic will of its osm? That the complex problems of mechanized naval war have become a part of our daily lives, and what once was darkly hidden in mystery comes now with the easy competence of habit? These changes have been wrought, almost without our conscious notice. They began when the first nucleus crew were assembled. They gathered momentum as the ship was painstakingly readied for sea, and continued through the hammering pressure of Guantanamo and the overhaul period in Norfolk. They were renewed with the Atlantic crossing, with Mainbrace and Longstep, and with the Fleet Exercises that have bulked so large in our Mediterranean lives, they are going on even now. And they will continue. No military force can afford to remain static, We have come far and done much, but in the constant flow of human history there is no refuge in present satisfaction. Personnel shift, and technology advances., the history of a ship becomes a story of its changing character. Even as we close this chapter we are beginning a new, and our proudest hope for the ship is that chapters will follow chapters, as long as there is a free world left to defend.

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