"need info on Tacoma Class PF" Topic

need your help on the US WW 2 Tacoma Class PF. I had heard that this frigate was the US built British River Class. is this true? how did the Tacoma differ from the River? also, did any see service with the US Navy in the Pacific? I look forward to your help

Here's a start:

link

Just put Tacoma frigate into Google and it should come up with a fair bit. Did see Pacific service, and a lot were transferred to the Soviets.

Dom.

Undergunned, minmal AAA capability, a mediocre ASW platform.

Al

I was just looking up all the info on this a few months ago.

It was a welded copy of the British River class frigate. Built in yards that could only accept civilian style engineering practices. About a hundred were built. Twenty one were transferred lend lease to the UK. Another three or four dozen wound up lend lease to Russia via the Pacific.

Armament wise, they used standard US patern 3" guns in A, B and Y positions. Otherwise pretty much identical to the River class frigates.

The US Navy called them Patrol Frigates (PF) and crewed them entirely with Coast Guard personnel. They used them all over the Pacific. I just picked up a great biography by a crewman, Albert Becker, "USS Muskogee PF49". A nice short read with lots of great pictures. A short 38 page self published book I found through the US Coast Guard site. Pretty funny details like training the Russian lend lease crews and how they carried their tobacco around loose in their pockets. If you want a copy, I can look up his email somehow.

In addition, Nicholas Monserrat captained one of the called the colony class in RN service. I have his book too, a rare copy of "HMS Frigate".

About being undergunned, absolutely, there were cases of the three inch shell bouncing off the hull casing of U-boats in the Atlantic. Not to mention the strikers were machined too long, so that when the breech block was closed, the gun went off immediately.

It was a superb seagoing ship to be on in a storm. It would ride through what would damage other ships.

As for being a mediocre ASW platform, I completely disagree. The River class frigates were some of the best. Much like the Royal Canadian Navy, the overfast expansion of the small escort US Navy left a huge number of escort ships that took a year for the crews to build up their experience.

Why did we stop building them and switch to DE's instead?

The navy didn't like the machinery arrangements, a non-standard practice. The fact they were made to a foriegn design and built by shipyards used to mercantile practice, meant a lot to the navy at a time when there were many anglophobes holding influence in the USN. Hence they were specifically crewed by the Coast Guard.

By the last year of the war the DE program was getting so far into production it had to be scaled back. A DE could carry better radar and light weapons arrangments such as 20mm and 40mm. This meant a lot in the last year of the Pacific when the navy demanded small ships serve as radar pickets against all the kamikaze threats.

The Tacoma class had a top speed of 19 knots. The DE top speed was between 21 to 24 knots.

Switching the civilian yards away from the Tacoma class alowed other priority of shipbuilding, by the last year of the war, that would be amphibious shipping.

Also, the shipyards that could handle building PF's, but not Liberty ships, were also in demand for the larger landing craft (LCI(L), LCM, etc.) which were even more needed than escort vessels by 1943.

thanks for all the info, you were very helpful