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About the Ship's Coat of Arms

About the Name "Oldendorf"

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USS Oldendorf (DD 972)

USS OLDENDORF was the tenth SPRUANCE - class destroyer and the first ship in the Navy named after Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf, one of the most distinguished surface warfare flag officers to serve during World War II. Last homeported in San Diego, Calif., the OLDENDORF was sunk as a target during a live-fire exercise off Hawaii by the USS RUSSELL (DDG 59) on August 22, 2005.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USS OLDENDORF. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

• Click here to view the list.

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• Click here to see which USS OLDENDORF memorabilia are currently for sale on ebay.

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About the Ship's Coat of Arms:

The Shield:

The shield commemorates Admiral Oldendorf's "crossing of the T" in the brilliant and decisive victory at Surigao Strait during World War. The vertical blue bar, resembling a narrow passage or waterway, refers to Surigao Strait. The eight red and white sections of the backgound represent the total losses of the enemy in terms of the number of ships sunk, crippled or damaged. The blue chief at the top crossing the vertical bat at center forms the letter "T" in reference to the crossing of the "T" battle plan. The upper section alludes to the red sky over the night battle of Surigao Strait. Four stars connote Admiral Oldendorf's highest rank.

The Crest:

The crest symbolizes the award of the Navy Cross, the Navy's highest decoration, to Admiral Oldendorf for exceptional leadership and heroism in the Battle of Surigao Strait. The trident signifies authority and power and the annulet with red center suggest the muzzle of a gun in action. The two wavy bars are indicative of World War II and the Pacific theater.

The Motto:

The ship's motto, "Ad Proelium Victoriamque Futuram" (To the Fight and Victory Ahead) is a translation from Admiral Oldendorf's memoirs regarding his charge to his forces on the eve of the decisive battle.

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About the Ship's Name, about Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf:

A native Californian, Admiral Oldendorf was catapulted to fame due to his overwhelming victory at the Battle of Suriagao Strait on 24-25 October 1944. Suriagao Strait was one of a series of battles that took place in the aftermath of General Douglas MacArthur's return to the Philippines in 1944. History books have referred to these various naval engagements as the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In response to the American amphibious landing at Leyte Gulf, the Imperial Japanese Navy mounted a massive counterattack, seeking to reverse the course of the Pacific war. Their objective was the huge collection of amphibious ships and transports anchored in Leyte Gulf. One of their counterattacks involved a Japanese force of two battleships, three cruisers and eight destroyers whose mission was to pass through Surigao Strait at night and surprise the American shipping in Leyte Gulf.

Alerted by aerial reconnaissance, Admiral Oldendorf deployed his forces of old battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and PT boats at the point of exit from Surigao Strait. Ironically, five of his six battleships were survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. These veterans had been salvaged and refitted and were anxious for a chance to even the score. "Even" it they did! In the nighttime darkness, the Japanese force was attacked first by the PT boats and destroyers, and then as the range closed, by heavy gunfire from the cruisers and battleships crossing back and forth at the head of Surigao Strait. Passing ahead of the enemy column in the classic "crossing the T" maneuver, Admiral Oldendorf's Pearl Harbor veterans rained heavy projectiles on the hapless enemy.

Only one Japanese cruiser and destroyer survived the carefully planned attack. None of the U. S. vessels were sunk or even seriously damaged. The tactical disposition and the battle plan of Admiral Oldendorf were perfect!

Although no one knew it at the time, this was to be the last time in which battleships would engage each other in a classic surface to surface battle line-action. As the distinguished naval historian, Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, wrote of the battle:

"In the unearthly silence that followed the roar of Oldendorf's 14" and 16" guns in Surigao Strait, one could imagine the ghosts of all great admirals, standing at attention to salute the passing of a kind of naval warfare they all understood. For in the opening minutes of 25 October 1944, the Battle Line became as obsolete as the row-galley tactics of centuries before."

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History of USS OLDENDORF:

USS OLDENDORF was laid down at Ingalls Shipbuilding, Pascagoula, Mississippi, on December 27, 1974, launched on October 21, 1975, and commissioned on March 4, 1978. After post-commissioning trials and combat systems qualifications on the Southern California operating areas, the destroyer settled into a San Diego routine of refresher training, type exercises, and escort workups typical for early SPRUANCE-class ships, alternating short shipyard availabilities in Long Beach with at-sea periods to wring out machinery plant reliability and refine anti-submarine warfare procedures. Those two years of workups and local operations set the pattern for her first Western Pacific (WESTPAC) deployment.

OLDENDORF deployed to the Western Pacific in May 1980 and, as the Indian Ocean crisis of 1979-80 pulled more U.S. combatants westward, the ship rotated through the 7th Fleet's forward patrol boxes and the usual logistics hubs - Subic Bay and Singapore - en route to exercises with allied navies. On July 10, 1980, she was recorded transiting the South China Sea from Singapore toward Subic Bay, a snapshot of the routine rhythm of replenishment and onward movement during that cruise. In August 1980, she joined a trilateral Australian-American-New Zealand anti-submarine exercise off Western Australia and made well-documented port visits to Bunbury and Perth before returning to San Diego in November. The deployment gave her crew extended blue-water time in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and exposed the ship to allied ASW tactics that were central to 1980s maritime strategy.

She sailed again in October 1981, this time to escort the carrier CONSTELLATION (CV 64) and her battle group into the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf amid the lingering tensions of the Iran-Iraq War. The cruise mixed presence patrols, Strait of Hormuz approaches, and exercises with allied units. OLDENDORF again visited Perth before the group turned for home, and she returned to the U.S. West Coast in May 1982. A lengthy overhaul followed from September 1982 through July 1983, centered at Long Beach, to reset hull, machinery, and combat systems after back-to-back deployments. With workups completed, she made a third WESTPAC from January to May 1984.

In August 1984, OLDENDORF shifted home port to Yokosuka, Japan, joining the permanently forward-deployed MIDWAY (CV 41) battle group. From that Seventh Fleet base she settled into a pattern of Western Pacific patrols, Japan-Korea-Philippines exercise cycles, and presence operations in the East and South China Seas that reflected the Cold War's closing phase in Asia. In October 1986, as Australia marked the Royal Australian Navy's 75th anniversary with an international naval review, Seventh Fleet units - including MIDWAY group escorts - showed the flag alongside Commonwealth and regional partners. A month later, from November 5-11, 1986, OLDENDORF entered Qingdao with the cruiser REEVES (CG 24) and the frigate RENTZ (FFG 46) for the first U.S. Navy port visit to the People's Republic of China since 1949. The one-week call, hosted by the PLA Navy and attended by the Pacific Fleet commander, was a carefully calibrated piece of naval diplomacy in a period of gradually warming U.S.-China military contacts.

After continued Seventh Fleet patrols through 1987, OLDENDORF deployed with the NIMITZ (CVN 68) battle group as that carrier commenced its first Western Pacific cruise from a new Pacific Northwest home port. Between September 13 and October 2, 1988, NIMITZ operated off the Korean Peninsula to provide maritime security during the Seoul Olympic Games. At the end of October the group shifted to the North Arabian Sea to support Operation Earnest Will, the protection of re-flagged tankers in the Persian Gulf, a mission that kept the battle group swinging at anchorages and on stations across the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea until early 1989. NIMITZ returned to Bremerton on March 2, 1989.

As Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Seventh Fleet units surged; through Desert Shield and into Desert Storm, OLDENDORF operated with coalition naval forces enforcing embargo and maritime control measures and supporting strike and mine countermeasures efforts in the northern Gulf. The ship's participation in Desert Storm is reflected in the Navy's Combat Action Ribbon eligibility list for vessels serving in the war zone during the January-February 1991 combat phase. In the spring of 1991, she left Japan and shifted home port to Long Beach, California, for an extended modernization that would keep her in shipyard hands for much of the next two years.

From July 1991 through July 1993 OLDENDORF underwent a major overhaul at Long Beach Naval Shipyard that included installation of the Mk 41 Vertical Launching System and associated combat system upgrades, ensuring she could fire the Standard Missile family and Tomahawk in addition to her ASROC capability. As the yard period tapered, her administrative command shifted to San Diego (late 1992), and by mid-1993, she was again at sea for post-availability trials, certifications, and a return to the Pacific Fleet's deployment rotation.

In early 1994, she headed west for a combined deployment that encompassed the Western Pacific, Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf. During April, OLDENDORF took part in Eager Sentry - under the broader Native Fury '94 umbrella - bringing U.S., Kuwaiti, and British forces together in Kuwait for amphibious beach operations, maritime interception practice, and joint live-fire evolutions designed to demonstrate coalition readiness in the Gulf three years after the war. The ship's schedule in 1994 also included long legs between Diego Garcia, the northern Arabian Gulf, and return transits across the Indian Ocean, a familiar arc for Pacific Fleet surface combatants in the immediate post-Desert Storm years.

By the mid-1990s, the Pacific Fleet re-cast its surface forces into core battle groups and destroyer squadrons. OLDENDORF became part of Destroyer Squadron 23 as the NIMITZ-centered Carrier Group Seven prepared for another WESTPAC. She sailed on December 1, 1995, for the Western Pacific. Two months later, that deployment took on geopolitical weight: in March 1996, as Beijing announced missile tests and live-fire drills around Taiwan ahead of the island's first direct presidential election, the Secretary of Defense ordered the NIMITZ battle group to redeploy at speed from the Arabian Gulf to the Western Pacific to join INDEPENDENCE (CV 62) east of Taiwan. Reporting from the period - and later Navy and Department of Defense accounts - record OLDENDORF as a named destroyer in NIMITZ's group for that crisis response, one of the signal U.S. demonstrations of resolve in the Western Pacific in the 1990s.

After stateside training in 1997, OLDENDORF joined the CARL VINSON (CVN 70) team's work-up cycle. From April 13-24, 1998, she participated in Pacific Joint Task Force Exercise (PAC JTFEX 98-1) off Southern California - an integrated air-sea-land rehearsal that folded in maritime interception, non-combatant evacuation, ballistic-missile-defense test play, amphibious landings at Camp Pendleton, and coalition air coordination - before the group buttoned up for deployment. On November 9, 1998, she deployed with the CARL VINSON battle group across the Pacific and Indian Oceans to the Persian Gulf, arriving on station in time to contribute to Operation Desert Fox in mid-December, a focused four-day strike to punish Iraqi noncompliance with U.N. disarmament obligations. OLDENDORF then remained in theater supporting Operation Southern Watch before the group departed the Gulf on March 18, 1999, and returned to the Pacific Northwest and San Diego in May.

Back on the West Coast, OLDENDORF entered 2000 with developmental testing under the SPQ-9B Radar Improvement Program meant to sharpen the ship's short-range, high-elevation air-track picture and gunfire support solution inputs. On August 23, 2000, while operating in the Gulf region, she was directed to the crash site of Gulf Air Flight 072 off Bahrain to assist with the search and recovery of the flight recorders and to support the multinational recovery effort, an atypical but not unprecedented tasking for a surface combatant proximate to a civil aviation disaster at sea. She continued carrier-group training the following year and took part in the first Joint Task Force Exercise of 2001, the capstone integrated rehearsal before the next deployment cycles.

In 2002, the Pacific Fleet launched "Sea Swap", a proof-of-concept program designed to keep a single hull on extended station by swapping complete U.S. crews at intervals in theater. OLDENDORF was slated into the destroyer phase with FLETCHER (DD 992) and KINKAID (DD 965). As planned, crews would decommission their home hulls, fly to the deployed ship to assume her, and then rotate again before the final crew returned the hull for decommissioning. The program matured alongside the 2003 NIMITZ deployment: as NIMITZ's battle group sailed in March, Navy reporting noted that the crews of BENFOLD (DDG 65) and OLDENDORF would join later in the year under Sea Swap arrangements.

OLDENDORF's active service concluded in the immediate aftermath of those experiments. She was decommissioned on June 20, 2003 and towed to the inactive fleet at Bremerton. The Navy struck her from the Naval Vessel Register on April 6, 2004. On August 22, 2005, during a live-fire exercise off Hawaii, the guided-missile destroyer RUSSELL sank the former OLDENDORF as a target, closing the ship's twenty-five years of commissioned service with one final training contribution to the Pacific Fleet.

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USS OLDENDORF Patch Gallery:

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USS OLDENDORF Image Gallery:

The photos below were taken by William Chiu when USS OLDENDORF visited Hong Kong around 1991/1992.

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