USS Huntington (CL-107)

USS Huntington (CL-107): End of the Wartime Build

Commissioned on 23 February 1946, USS Huntington was the second and last Fargo-class light cruiser, and the final light cruiser of the entire World War II construction program to be completed as a gun-armed surface combatant. Named for West Virginia's industrial city at the confluence of the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers, she closed out an era of American naval construction that had produced more and better cruisers than any previous program in the nation's history.

The timing of Huntington's commissioning captures a particular moment in American naval history: the wartime emergency was over, the fleet was being cut dramatically, and the next generation of naval technology, guided missiles, jet aircraft, nuclear weapons, was already under development. Huntington was built on World War II lessons and World War II funding, commissioning into a Navy trying to figure out what the Cold War would require of it.

She served through the immediate postwar period in Atlantic operations and fleet exercises before being decommissioned on 10 June 1949, a brief service life that reflected both the postwar drawdown and the rapid change in naval technology. The Fargo design she embodied, with its improved anti-aircraft arcs through the single-funnel arrangement, was part of the thinking that influenced subsequent cruiser and destroyer designs built for a different kind of war.

Tactically Acquired's USS Huntington (CL-107) collection honors West Virginia's ship and the final chapter of America's wartime light cruiser building program, the last page of a construction story that had kept the Pacific Fleet fighting for four years.