Construction
The Baltimore class heavy cruiser was laid down as USS Pittsburgh by the Bethlehem Steel Company Fore River Shipyard at Quincy in Massachusetts on 3 September 1941. During construction, in recognition of the valour displayed by the Australian cruiser HMAS Canberra during the Battle of Savo Island, United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wished to commemorate the Australian ship's loss by naming a US ship in her honour: Pittsburgh was selected and renamed USS Canberra. The ship was launched on 19 April 1943 by Lady Alice C. Dixon, the wife of Sir Owen Dixon, Australia's ambassador to the United States, and is the only United States warship to be named after a foreign warship or a foreign capital city. Canberra was commissioned into the USN on 14 October 1943, Captain Alex Rieman Early, USN commanding. The Australian Government returned this tribute by naming a new Tribal class destroyer, HMAS Bataan, in honour of the US stand during the Battle of Bataan.
Read more about this topic: USS Canberra (CA-70)
Famous quotes containing the word construction:
“No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.”
—Gus Van Sant, U.S. screenwriter and director, and Dan Yost. Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)
“No real “vital” character in fiction is altogether a conscious construction of the author. On the contrary, it may be a sort of parasitic growth upon the author’s personality, developing by internal necessity as much as by external addition.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)