The 549 was built and commissioned in February, 1943 in Barber NJ. This photo was taken a few months later in Perth-Amboy NJ. during her fit out. Note that in this photo she has her stern guns but still had not received her bow, and mid-ship anti-arcraft guns.
USS LCI(L)-549 was built, launched, and commissioned in February of 1943. She served during WWII in the Asiatic/Pacific Theater of operations from 1943 to the wars end in 1945, earning 2 battle stars.
She continued to serve post-war until mid 1946. She was decommissioned in California in late 1946, and stricken from the US Naval Registry of Ships. In 1947 she was towed to Pearl harbor where she sat idol for two years. And then in 1949, she was towed to Bikini Atoll in the marshall Islands, where she was subjected to the disgrace of being deliberately SUNK by the US Navy during target training, as if we didnt already know how to sink ships, having just won a nearly 4 year-long world war. Dozens of other ships the Navy couldn't dispose of honorably met the same fate.
If you think I am angry, I am. And I am sure every other sailor of the 549 would have been, too.
From the Governments point of view, I suppose they really didnt have much of a choice. I would have at least scrapped her and used the steel for other things. But at the war's end, the Navy had roughly 5,000 ships and small craft to dispose of, and no one to crew them any longer.
Looking at it sensably, The LCI was designed to do a very specific job, during a very specific period of time, and that was to land on beaches and deploy fighting men onto them. When the war ended, there was no longer a need to land men on beaches, and as such, the small, and once vital ship suddenly became disposable.
Some were sold, or given to other countries. Some were sold privately. One that I know of is even still operating off Alaska as a fishing boat, although if you saw her today you'd never know she was ever an LCI.
I suppose the Navy did what they had to do, but the fact remains that my ship now rests 150 feet below the surface on the bottom of the lagoon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, and I am probably going to be angry and hurt and emotional about that fact for the rest of my life.
I have earned my sour-grapes, and I am going to have them.
