Twenty-seven Cleveland-class light cruisers were completed between 1942 and 1945. No cruiser class in any navy, in any era, has ever been larger. The US Navy ordered fifty-two hulls total.
They were good ships. Twelve 6-inch guns, twelve 5-inch guns, and, as the war went on, a growing forest of 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikon antiaircraft guns bolted onto every available surface. Plus radar. Plus fire control directors. Plus ready-service ammunition lockers on the upper decks.
Weight Going Up
That was the problem. Every new piece of equipment went on top. The center of gravity kept climbing.
The Clevelands were designed at around 11,744 tons standard displacement. By the last year of the war, the extra antiaircraft guns had made them top-heavy. The fixes read like a weight-loss program. Some ships lost one of their two aircraft catapults. The rangefinder on the No. 1 turret came off. When new fire control radar went in, the 20mm clipping rooms, where gunners loaded rounds into magazines, had to go to pay for it. Every new item had to be weighed against something removed.
It wasn’t enough to make anyone comfortable. The follow-on Fargo class was redesigned with a more compact superstructure and a single funnel to cut topweight. Only two Fargos were completed before the war ended.
Clean Record, Hard Service
None of the 27 Clevelands were sunk in combat. That part of the record is clean, which is more than can be said for other American cruisers, like USS Indianapolis, which delivered the atomic bomb and then vanished. But the Clevelands served in nearly every major campaign from late 1942 onward.
At the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay on November 2, 1943, four Clevelands, Cleveland herself, Columbia, Montpelier and Denver, formed the core of Rear Admiral Aaron S. Merrill’s Task Force 39 off Bougainville. The Japanese came south under Admiral Omori to hit the invasion shipping: the heavy cruisers Myoko and Haguro, the light cruisers Sendai and Agano, and a screen of destroyers.
American radar picked them up first. The Cleveland-class guns sank Sendai. In the dark and confusion, the destroyer Hatsukaze collided with Myoko and was later sunk, and two more Japanese destroyers, Samidare and Shiratsuyu, ran into each other. Omori withdrew. In his postwar interrogation he named the cause himself: a lack of training in night operations, with ships thrown together from different fleets that had never worked as a team.
USS Birmingham was alongside the light carrier Princeton on October 24, 1944, trying to help fight fires, when Princeton’s bomb magazine exploded. The blast killed 233 of Birmingham’s crew, seriously wounded 211 and lightly wounded 215 more. Some counts run as high as 241 dead. It was one of the worst single-ship casualty events for any cruiser in the Pacific war, and Birmingham wasn’t even the ship that blew up.
Nine Hulls, Nine Carriers
But the strangest chapter in the Cleveland story happened before most of them even touched water. In early 1942, the Navy desperately needed aircraft carriers. The Essex class was still years from completion. President Roosevelt pushed for a fast solution.
The sources tell the start of it differently. Navypedia dates the presidential order to 1942. Naval Encyclopedia puts the first request earlier: Roosevelt asked for a study of cruiser-to-carrier conversions in 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and the Navy’s General Board turned it down in October that year. In this version the admirals did not want a carrier built on a cruiser hull, and it took Pearl Harbor to change their minds. Either way, the idea came from the White House, not from the Navy’s own designers.
The Navy took nine Cleveland-class hulls already under construction at New York Shipbuilding and converted them into light aircraft carriers: the Independence class. Cruiser hulls became flight decks. The designers had a stability problem of their own, because a hangar and flight deck put a lot of weight high up on a narrow cruiser hull. Their answer was blisters, bulges added along the sides that widened the beam by about five feet and added buoyancy. It was the same fix Japan had bolted onto its top-heavy Mogami cruisers a few years earlier.
They were narrow, cramped, and carried about thirty aircraft, roughly a third of an Essex. But they were fast, 31 knots on cruiser machinery, and they were ready.
USS Independence had been laid down as the cruiser Amsterdam. She was launched on August 22, 1942, and commissioned on January 14, 1943. Future President George H.W. Bush flew off USS San Jacinto, another converted Cleveland hull. USS Princeton, the only one lost, was hit by a single bomb from a Japanese dive bomber at Leyte Gulf on October 24, 1944. The fires reached her bomb magazine, and that was the explosion that killed so many men on Birmingham alongside.
Those nine carriers filled the gap until the Essex class arrived in numbers. Without them, the fast carrier task forces of 1943 wouldn’t have existed.
Mothballs, Missiles and Buffalo
After the war, almost all 27 cruisers went into mothballs immediately. None came back for Korea. They needed crews almost as large as the bigger Baltimore-class heavy cruisers, so the Navy reactivated those instead. The irony is that US cruiser design had been wrestling with weight problems for years. USS Wichita earned the nickname “Pig Iron” partly because of how the Navy tried to solve the same issue with heavier construction. Six were eventually completed as or converted to guided-missile cruisers in the late 1950s. The added topweight made their stability worse, and Little Rock and Oklahoma City needed large amounts of ballast to keep serving into the 1970s.
Independence herself ended up as a target. She was one of more than 90 ships anchored at Bikini Atoll for the 1946 atomic bomb tests. She survived, badly damaged, and was scuttled in 1951 off California. In 2015 NOAA and Boeing surveyed the wreck with an autonomous submarine. She sits upright off the Farallon Islands, and the sonar images show what appears to be an aircraft still in her hangar bay.
Only one Cleveland survives. USS Little Rock was built by William Cramp & Sons in Philadelphia and commissioned in June 1945, too late to fight. She was rebuilt as a guided-missile cruiser with a Talos launcher on her after deck, recommissioned as CLG-4 on June 3, 1960, and served as flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. She was towed to Buffalo in 1977.
Today she sits at the Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park in Buffalo, New York. She’s the last Cleveland-class ship you can walk through.
Weight trouble was not only an American problem. Japan’s Mogami class was built so light to stay inside treaty limits that the whole class had to be rebuilt in the mid-1930s.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Cleveland-class cruiser
- Wikipedia: Independence-class aircraft carrier
- History of War: USS Birmingham (CL-62)
- Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park: USS Little Rock
- USS Little Rock Association: Ship History
- History of War: Battle of Empress Augusta Bay
- US Strategic Bombing Survey, Interrogation of Japanese Officials: Empress Augusta Bay (HyperWar)
- Naval Encyclopedia: Independence class light aircraft carriers
- Navypedia: Independence light aircraft carriers
- NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries: USS Independence
