USS Perkins, a 2425-ton Gearing class destroyer, was built at Orange, Texas. Commissioned in early April 1945, she was soon converted to a radar picket destroyer, work that was completed in July. In the middle of August 1945, when Japan agreed to surrender, Perkins was at Pearl Harbor. Continuing on to Tokyo Bay, where she arrived in early September, she operated in the western and central Pacific until April 1946. Two more Far Eastern deployments took place in 1947 and 1949. In 1948 she went to the Marshall Islands for atomic weapons tests. While in Chinese waters in February 1949 she was redesignated DDR-877, a belated recognition of the radar picket capabilities she had received some three and a half years earlier.
In mid-1950 Perkins made a cruise in the central Pacific and executed Korean War aircraft carrier escort and shore bombardment missions in February-September 1951. A second combat deployment followed in 1952, during which she suffered the loss of one crewman when enemy shore battery shells near-missed her off Kojo, Korea, on 15 October. For the rest of the decade, and into the early 1960s, Perkins regularly served with the Seventh Fleet in the often tense Far Eastern waters, as well as operating elsewhere in the Pacific.
Between March and December 1962 Perkins was converted to FRAM II configuration, trading her special radar picket gear and three-inch guns for anti-submarine torpedo tubes and the capability of operating drone anti-submarine helicopters (DASH). Her designation reverted to DD-877 while this work was in progress. The updated destroyer began her next series of Seventh Fleet cruises in October 1963, continuing them nearly to the end of her U.S. Navy career. Perkins performed Vietnam war carrier escort, bombardment and search and rescue duties during deployments in 1966-1967, 1967-1968, 1969 and 1970-1971. Assigned to Naval Reserve training service after her last western Pacific visit, she spent most of 1971 and all of 1972 operating along the U.S. West Coast, with side trips to Alaska and Hawaii. USS Perkins was decommissioned in mid-January 1973 and transferred to Argentina. Renamed Comodore Py, she served in that nation's navy until 1984.
USS Perkins was named in honor of Commodore George H. Perkins (1836-1899).
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Page made 17 September 2004