History
In February 1981, the U. S. Navy awarded Lockheed Shipbuilding Company of Seattle, Washington, a contract to construct LSD 41, first of a new Dock Landing Ship class to replace the aging Thomaston-class LSDs. At 4 August 1981 keel-laying ceremony, the Honorable John F. Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, affixed his signature to the LSD 41 keel; the first keel of an amphibious assault ship lain in more than five years.
Although the first ship to carry the name Whidbey Island, there was at one time a ship on Navy rolls named USS Whidbey (AG-141), a small transport purchased from the U. S. Army and servicing U.S. Trust Territories in the late 1940s.
Whidbey Island, the first ship in a class designed specifically to interface with the Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC), assisted in the operational and developmental testing of the amphibious assault craft from July to September 1985 and again in May and July 1986.
Read more about this topic: USS Whidbey Island (LSD-41)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)