In 1935, the US Navy laid down a heavy cruiser at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. She would be the last American cruiser designed to meet the limits of the London Naval Treaty, which capped displacement at 10,000 tons.
A prototype built on a light cruiser
They named her Wichita. She was a transitional design: New Orleans-class armament on a hull derived from the Brooklyn-class light cruisers, with more armor. The idea was straightforward: heavy cruiser guns, light cruiser hull, more armor.
The Brooklyn hull gave her higher freeboard and a longer cruising radius than the earlier treaty cruisers. Her belt was Class A armor, 6.4 inches thick amidships, a real improvement on the thin protection of the first American heavy cruisers. Her nine 8-inch/55 guns sat in three new turrets that let each gun elevate on its own, fixing a problem found in older designs. She was 608 feet long, made 33.5 knots on 100,000 shaft horsepower, and carried about 900 men.
She was launched on November 16, 1937 and commissioned on February 16, 1939, with Captain Thaddeus A. Thomson in command.
Two hundred tons of ballast
The problem showed up when they installed all eight 5-inch guns. Four sat in enclosed single mounts, four in open mounts, all of them high on the superstructure. Wichita was top-heavy. Not a little. A lot.
The Navy’s solution was 200.4 long tons of pig iron, added to the bottom of the hull as ballast. Two hundred tons of dead weight, serving no purpose except to keep the ship from rolling over.
Only one Wichita was ever built. She was a prototype, and the Navy knew it. But her hull form, armor scheme, and general arrangement became the direct basis for the Baltimore class: fourteen heavy cruisers that fought through the rest of the war and into Korea. The Baltimores fixed Wichita’s stability problem by adding two feet of beam.
The Navy did not learn the lesson everywhere. The light cruisers built alongside the Baltimores had the same weight problem on a much bigger scale. The Cleveland class ended up with ballast, removed catapults, and restricted ammunition for the same reason.
Wichita herself went to war carrying her pig iron.
Atlantic and Arctic
She started in the Atlantic. In October 1939 she relieved USS Vincennes on Neutrality Patrol. Over the next two years she patrolled the western Atlantic and West Indies, made a diplomatic cruise to South America, trained naval reservists, and took part in the occupation of Iceland. She was in Icelandic waters when the United States entered the war.
In 1942 she worked with the British Home Fleet on the Arctic convoy run to Murmansk. On June 30, 1942, she sailed from Seidisfjordur in the cruiser covering force for Convoy PQ-17. On July 4, with the German battleship Tirpitz believed to be at sea, the Admiralty ordered the convoy to scatter and the cruisers to withdraw west at high speed. The merchant ships, left alone, were picked apart by U-boats and aircraft. Most of them never reached port. Wichita reached Hvalfjordur on July 8. The same route would see six British destroyers hold off a German pocket battleship six months later.
On November 8, 1942, she was part of the invasion of French North Africa at Casablanca. She opened fire on the El Hank coastal battery at 07:06 and spent the day trading fire with the battery and with French warships coming out of the harbor. At 11:28 a 194mm shell from El Hank hit her on the port side and exploded below, injuring fourteen men. None of the injuries were serious. She kept firing until mid-afternoon.
The Pacific
In 1943, she transferred to the Pacific. At the Battle of Rennell Island on January 29, Japanese torpedo bombers attacked the cruiser force at dusk. A torpedo hit Wichita’s hull. It didn’t explode. She kept fighting. The heavy cruiser Chicago, nearby, was not so lucky and was sunk the next day.
That spring she went north to the Aleutians as a flagship at Adak. In January 1944 she sortied for the invasion of the Marshall Islands, and from then on she worked with the fast carrier forces across the central Pacific.
At Leyte Gulf in October 1944, Wichita and three other cruisers ran down the crippled Japanese light carrier Chiyoda and destroyer Hatsuzuki. She fired 148 rounds of 8-inch armor-piercing ammunition at Chiyoda and 173 at Hatsuzuki. Both went down. Chiyoda sank late in the afternoon. Hatsuzuki blew up and sank after dark.
Off Okinawa on May 12, 1945, a friendly 5-inch round struck her port aircraft catapult during an air raid. Shell fragments hit an antiaircraft director, killing one man and wounding eleven.
She earned 13 battle stars. Atlantic, Arctic, Mediterranean, Pacific. Two oceans, three years of combat, one torpedo that didn’t go off, and 200 tons of pig iron in her belly the entire time.
No museum
When Japan surrendered, Wichita went to Nagasaki, arriving on September 11, 1945. Then she joined Operation Magic Carpet, carrying former prisoners of war and returning servicemen home.
After the war, the Navy considered converting her into a guided-missile cruiser. They chose USS Boston and USS Canberra instead. Wichita was decommissioned on February 3, 1947, sat in mothballs for twelve years, was struck from the Navy list on March 1, 1959, and was sold for scrap on August 14, 1959.
No museum. No memorial. Just the fourteen Baltimore-class cruisers she made possible.
