In the 1960s the yard stayed busy with outfittings, missile and ASW conversions, and Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization (FRAM) overhauls that added five to seven years of service to aging warships. Charlestown’s FRAM program specialized in World War II-era destroyers. Ranging from brief dockings to major operations of a year or more costing millions, these projects involved such sophisticated work as installing or upgrading sonar (see pages [76-77]), radar, communications, and computer equipment; major alterations such as replacing engines and entire superstructures; and the more prosaic tasks the yard had been performing for over a century: cleaning and painting hulls, renovating propellers and rudders, and rebricking or replacing boilers.
Nevertheless, by 1972 work was falling off at Charlestown, and signs did not bode well for the yard’s future. For years the Navy had invested little there for maintenance or modernization, making it harder to stay efficient. The marine railway and ropewalk had been shut down in 1971. Elsewhere, superfluous or inefficient military bases were being closed to save money. (The New York Navy Yard was closed in 1966.) A massive infusion of funds was needed to upgrade the old Charlestown yard—too small in any case for proper expansion of its facilities.
The Navy in general was retrenching for economic reasons. The destroyer fleet, especially—the lifeblood of the yard in the 20th century—had steadily dwindled since 1960. The fewer destroyers there were to service, the harder it was to justify the Charlestown yard’s existence. The failure of the Navy to carry through modernization plans, including one whereby the majority of the yard’s industrial activity would be transferred to an enhanced South Boston facility, helped to hasten the inevitable. Many associated with the yard also suspected that Massachusetts, as the only state going Democratic in the 1972 presidential election, would pay a penalty for failing to back the winner.
On April 16, 1973, the yard commander, Captain R. L. Arthur, announced that the Charlestown yard, along with the yard at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, was to close. Over the next year it ceased all fleet servicing and manufacturing operations, and on July 1, 1974, nearly 175 years of service to the nation ended with a formal disestablishment ceremony. Only one naval activity remained at Charlestown: the protection and maintenance of the old warship long associated with the yard, U.S.S. Constitution.
The launching of a ship celebrates the time, energy, and skill spent in its making. Here U.S.S. Guest, one of 24 destroyers built at Charlestown during World War II, slips into Boston Harbor in 1942. The big Fletcher-class destroyer took only five months to build.
A destroyer is traditionally named for a distinguished naval figure, and if possible the closest female relative sponsors the namesake ship. In a centuries-old ritual, DD-461’s sponsor Eileen Fairfax Thomson breaks a bottle of champagne against the ship’s bow in 1941, sending it down the ways with the words, “I christen thee Forrest, and may God bless all who sail in her.” Captain French Forrest commanded the Charlestown-built Cumberland in the Mexican War. Siding with the Confederates during the Civil War, he oversaw conversion of the burned U.S.S. Merrimack into the ironclad C.S.S. Virginia—destroyer of Cumberland (see pages [28-29]).
Ships for World War II
From 1933 to the end of World War II, the Charlestown yard moved outside its traditional role as repair yard and became a shipbuilding facility. It began with destroyers—ships it had long specialized in repairing—averaging two a year in the 1930s. This period of steady production was preamble to the World War II crash building program. Charlestown launched almost 200 vessels, including 24 destroyers, between 1939 and 1945. In 1942 it began building destroyer escorts—smaller, less expensive versions of destroyers designed to counter German submarines. The final big program was the production of LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) for amphibious assaults in Europe and Asia. LSDs (Landing Ship, Dock) for carrying other vessels; submarines; and various auxiliary vessels also came down the ways during the war. These programs spurred major changes at the yard. Greater specialization, for instance, broke up traditional shops. The biggest change was in construction methods, most notably prefabrication. Several bow and stern sections, each with its own keel, were built separately—many in the Shipfitters Shop, but also “in playgrounds and schoolyards and parts of the yard, and all around greater Boston,” remembered Rigger Charles Snell. These were then joined to the midship hull section rising on the shipways. “Economy was not the name of the game,” recalled Snell. “The name of the game was time.”