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Off the Vietnam Mekong Delta in 1962, steaming alongside small fishing boats and distant rolling hills, the Destroyer Escort USS Vammen (DE 644) put to work her full complement of Navy Reserve Sailors. It was not a 1960s version of a Reserve training exercise, but an actual active duty deployment for the Navy Reserve Training ship.
NRTs were commonplace at the start of the Cold War. Reserve units would spend their drill weekends and two weeks a year bringing older Navy ships to life for training exercises at sea around fleet concentration areas. For Vammen, the ship was designated as an NRT for barely a year before being recalled to action.
Vammen was named after Naval Reserve aviator Ensign Clarence Earl Vammen Jr., who was lost at sea flying his Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless in pursuit of a retreating Japanese fleet during the Battle of Midway. Within two years of his citation for "courage and unflinching devotion to duty," there was already a ship with his name leaving a San Francisco shipyard. USS Vammen continued the fight throughout the remainder of WWII and later, in Korea.
In 1960, Vammen traded in its active duty crew for Reserve Sailors after being re-designated as an NRT ship. Its new role was to perform anti-submarine warfare, gunnery and shipboard training drills off the coast of California for the benefit of Reservists from the 11th Naval District.
But escalating Cold War tensions in Berlin and the Far East brought about a reactivation of 40 NRT ships to active duty including Vammen, which was recommissioned and activated with its entire Navy Reserve crew.
Assigned to Escort Division 72, it sailed across the Pacific arriving at the southern tip of South Vietnam in March, 1962. The ship joined other NRT destroyer escorts and began training South Vietnamese navy units and helped maintain American presence in the Gulf of Siam.
Originally, the ship was to return to the states early in the year but heavy pressure from communist Viet Cong forces brought a fresh demand for U.S. forces to bolster the American-backed regime. Vammen’s commanding officer, Cmdr. Charlie Nelson, USNR, later reported that "the efforts of Vammen and the other ex-NRT ships on the South Vietnam training missions were apparently of such value it was decided to retain Escort Division 72 on the mission through mid-May."
Ultimately, the performance of the Vammen crew drew praise from then Secretary of the Navy Fred Korth in 1963. Without the call to active duty of our 40 Reserve Crews and 18 antisubmarine air squadrons, the Navy's build-up of forces could not have been accomplished within the time frame imposed by Berlin, he said. We in the Navy shall never forget the magnificent response of our Naval Reservists, their superb performance, and their unselfish acceptance of sacrifice.
This Navy Reserve History article was first published in The Navy Reservist magazine Volume 18 Issue 4.
| Date Taken: | 12.04.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 08.31.2019 23:27 |
| Story ID: | 309437 |
| Location: | NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, US |
| Web Views: | 281 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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