USS Quincy (CA-71)

USS Quincy (CA-71): The Ship That Carried a President to History

Commissioned on 15 December 1943, USS Quincy was a Baltimore-class heavy cruiser that earned five battle stars in the Pacific War, and secured a permanent place in diplomatic history by carrying a dying president to the last great Allied summit of World War II. She was the second American warship named Quincy; the first, CA-39, was sunk at Savo Island in 1942. The name was carried forward in better steel.

Quincy fought through the Central Pacific campaign and Philippine theater operations, contributing to the carrier task force actions that drove Japanese naval power back toward its home waters. Five Pacific battle stars represent sustained service in the war's pivotal 1944–1945 period.

In February 1945, USS Quincy carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference, the final meeting of the "Big Three" Allied leaders, where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin negotiated the shape of the postwar world: Germany's occupation zones, the UN's founding structure, and Soviet entry into the Pacific War. FDR was already gravely ill. He would be dead in two months. Yalta was among his last great acts of statecraft, and Quincy was his ship for that final journey.

She was decommissioned on 19 October 1946 and sold to France, where she served as Montcalm and then De Grasse into the 1960s. Tactically Acquired's USS Quincy (CA-71) collection honors a ship that served both as a Pacific War fighter and as the vessel that carried American leadership to one of history's most consequential diplomatic summits.