USS JOHN WILLIS DE-1027

A Tin Can Sailors Destroyer History

USS JOHN WILLIS DE-1027

The Tin Can Sailor, October 2009

The DEALEY-class destroyer escort JOHN WILLIS (DE-1027) was launched by the New York Shipbuilding Company of Camden, New Jersey, on 4 February 1956 and was commissioned at the Philadelphia Naval Yard on 21 February 1957. Following shakedown, she operated out of Newport, Rhode Island. That June, she took her first transatlantic cruise visiting ports on the North and Baltic Seas. In May 1958 she was bound for the Mediterranean, where, by  mid July, the Middle East was in turmoil. The pro‑Western government of Iraq fell to Arab nationalists on 14 July and the next day, President Chamoun of Lebanon requested U.S. aid to thwart the possible overthrow of his government. In response, President Eisenhower dispatched the Sixth Fleet to Lebanon and ordered Marines to land at Beirut to protect Lebanon’s territorial integrity and independence. The WILLIS operated intermittently with the Lebanon Patrol for the next two months. With an easing of the crisis in September, the WILLIS headed for home.

In November, she entered the New York Shipyard to receive an experimental model of the Variable Depth Sonar (VDS), becoming the first destroyer escort to employ this latest ASW equipment. Subsequent operations in 1959 and 1960 involved testing and evaluating the new equipment, conducting ASW exercises along the Atlantic coast, and four months of American and NATO operations in the North Atlantic. She returned to Newport in October 1960.

Routine operations took her into May 1961, when she began patrol duty along the Windward Passage of the Caribbean. Her duties were intensified following the assassination of Dominican Dictator Trujillo on 27 May, and she conducted patrols along the the Dominican coast until her return home in late June. That fall, she participated in the recovery of the Project Mercury MA‑5 spacecraft, which on 29 November took the chimpanzee Enos around the earth twice.

Trouble in the Dominican Republic again took her back to that area in December to patrol with the fleet in support of the government of President Balaguer. She began 1962 with another cruise to Northern Europe. While sailing the North Sea on 23 January en route to Norway, she assisted units of the British navy during search and rescue operations for the Norwegian ship, EYSTEIN. The WILLIS subsequently visited several Norwegian ports in order for officers and engineers of the Norwegian navy to study the construction and operational characteristics of the  DEALEY class DE, which had been selected as the prototype for five new Norwegian warships. She left Norway for the states in mid February 1963.

The WILLIS resumed ASW and convoy escort exercises out of Newport and during August received additional ASW equipment. Following an overhaul and NATO operations in the North Atlantic, she underwent extensive training, which included convoy escort and ASW maneuvers along the East Coast. She also attended the ASW Tactical School at Norfolk and  served as a training ship at the Fleet Sonar School at Key West. During maneuvers in September to detect and destroy nuclear submarines, the WILLIS provided search and rescue assistance for a MATS plane, lost on a flight from Dover, Delaware to the Azores.

In early December 1963, she steamed from Newport with Escort Squadron 10 for amphibious exercise at Vieques in the West Indies. During this exercise, she conducted barrier patrols and practiced the latest ASW techniques against nuclear and conventional submarines before returning to Newport.

For the next three years, the WILLIS operated along the Atlantic Coast and in the Caribbean and served as school ship at Key West. In 1964 and 1965, she participated in UNITAS V and UNITAS VI and made two cruises along the coasts of South America as part of the U.S.  “People‑to‑People” Program. In an overhaul at Boston during that period, she received DASH capabilities and communications alterations. In May 1967, she was assigned to Escort Squadron 8, operating in European waters and the following month joined the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Thereafter, routine operations took her into 1972, when she was decommissioned and stricken from the Navy Register on 14 July. The JOHN WILLIS was sold on 18 May 1973.