The Navy required ships' captains to submit periodic histories for their ships. During World War II these were monthly "War Diaries." Between wars the requirements were loosened and the resulting histories are very sketchy. The ship went into Long Beach shipyard for a 15 month overhaul in December, 1962, so there is no ship's history for 1963, and little survives for 1966, 1967 and the first half of 1968. During the late 1960s and the 1970s the "Command History" reports were fairly complete. The Navy also kept records of naval gunfire support missions (NGFS) and shore bombardments in Combat Naval Gunfire Support File (CONGA) records. These record dates the ship was involved with NGFS and shore bombardments.

I have combined the "Brief Chronologies" from each of the reports into a 65 page (almost) daily history for the ship. If you want to know where the ship was on a particular date, or get a general idea of what ship operations were like, this is where to look. This summary is composed of five parts:

If anyone has more complete histories for the ship for 1966-68 I would like to include it in the history summary.

If you want to know the details of daily operations, what VIPs came to visit the Admiral, and other minutiae (hundreds of pages), here are the the complete reports (at least all that are available). These are PDF files that were regenerated using Optical Character Recognition from scans of photocopies of the original pages, including some that are barely readable.

Not included in these histories are the Captains' Quarterly Narrative reports which were submitted with each Command History. These included highly classified information that isn't mentioned in the Confidential reports.

I have summarized the data from the War Diaries, Ships Histories, Command Histories and CONGA reports for NGFS and shore bombardment in the NGFS page. The complete CONGA record for the USS Oklahoma City is available in PDF and Excel formats.

Miscellaneous

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