USS Wainwright (CG-28)

USS Wainwright (CG-28): Live Engagement in the Persian Gulf

Commissioned on 8 January 1966, USS Wainwright was a Belknap-class guided missile cruiser named for General Jonathan Wainwright, the Army general who commanded American and Filipino forces in the Philippines after MacArthur's departure in 1942 and surrendered Corregidor to the Japanese after the position became untenable. He endured three years of brutal captivity in Japanese prison camps before liberation in 1945 and received the Medal of Honor. Naming a warship for Wainwright honored a different kind of courage: the courage to hold when holding meant becoming a prisoner, and to endure what followed.

Wainwright earned four Vietnam battle stars for service in the Gulf of Tonkin and Western Pacific. Her most notable combat action came years after Vietnam during the tanker war of 1988. On 18 April 1988, the same day as Operation Praying Mantis, the largest American naval surface engagement since World War II, Wainwright was operating in the Persian Gulf when Iranian F-4 Phantom aircraft approached in a threatening manner. Wainwright fired Standard missiles at the aircraft, which turned away. It was one of the few American surface-to-air missile live firings against manned aircraft in the Cold War era.

Operation Praying Mantis that same day saw American surface forces sink or damage several Iranian naval vessels, a demonstration that American Cold War surface combatants could fight and win conventional naval actions. Wainwright's role that day was small but real: she fired missiles in anger in a situation where the outcome mattered.

Wainwright was decommissioned on 29 June 1993. Four Vietnam battle stars and a live engagement in the Persian Gulf. Tactically Acquired's USS Wainwright (CG-28) collection honors the cruiser that kept Wainwright's name alive in American naval service through the Cold War's final decade.