• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

CL-51 Atlanta

USS Atlanta, first of a class of 6000-ton light cruisers, was built at Kearny, New Jersey. Commissioned on Christmas Eve, 1941, she spent the next four months in shakedown work along the Atlantic coast and left for the Pacific in early April 1942. After a escort voyage to the south Pacific in May, she became part of a task force built around the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Hornet, operating with them during the early June Battle of Midway.

In mid-July 1942, Atlanta left Pearl Harbor for operations in the southern Pacific. When the Guadalcanal campaign began in early August, she screened the carriers that supported the landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Later in the month, she escorted Enterprise during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons and protected USS Saratoga after that carrier was damaged by a Japanese submarine torpedo. During the next two months, she kept busy escorting combat and auxiliary ships engaged in the ongoing struggle to hold Guadalcanal. After providing distant support during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in late October, she was employed closer to Guadalcanal. On 30 October, she used her five-inch guns to bombard Japanese positions on that island and nearly two weeks later, on 11-12 November, her guns helped fight off enemy planes attacking U.S. transports and supply ships nearby.

On the night of 12-13 November 1942, Atlanta was part of a cruiser-destroyer force ordered to stop a Japanese bombardment of the U.S.-held airfield on Guadalcanal. During the ensuing Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, one of World War II's most brutally chaotic surface actions, the enemy was driven off, but at great cost. Hit by one Japanese torpedo and riddled by gunfire, both enemy and "friendly", Atlanta suffered heavy casualties among her crew and was almost completely disabled. Though her men worked throughout the day on 13 November to save their ship, by late afternoon she was clearly sinking. Accordingly, she was sunk on her Captain's orders after all her men had been taken off.

USS Atlanta lies on her port side off Guadalcanal's Lunga Point, some five-hundred feet below the surface of Iron Bottom Sound. Her wreck was briefly examined in 1991-92 by remotely-operated deep-sea vehicles and more recently by a team of civilian divers.