Son of Jorg
Posts: 38
Joined: 1/18/2006
From: South Dakota
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This was taken from a book called "Old Nameless", written in 1943 by Sidney Shalett. I'm sure a guru or two will nail it immediately 
"There is no telling when you will be permitted to learn her name. It may be months, or a year or more hence, when reasons of naval security no longer require the strict secrecy that now is necessary. Or it may not be until the end of the war, when the last Jap ship lies at the bottom of the receptive Pacific or has sneaked back to whatever may be left of the place called Tokyo.
The Navy, in its official reports on her gallant and glorious deeds, calls her merely "a United states battleship". That's a cold appellation for such a fighting, slugging, sharpshooting, indestructible battlewagon. Perhaps, for the time being, until her rightful and honorable name can be posted on the Roll of Honor of the United States Navy, along with such other immortals as Old Ironsides, the Decatur, and the Bonhomme Richard, you might prefer to think of her as Old Nameless.
She's not really old, of course-that term is used affectionately. Actually, she is one of the newest battleships Uncle Sam has in service, and she and her sister ships of her class are just about the toughest, fightingest things that any nation has afloat on any sea. Old Nameless and her sisters can both hurl iron and take it: they can blast an enemy battleship (when they can find one) out of the water; they can hurl ten tons of metal at a target twenty miles away, and they can absorb punishment like a killer whale shrugging off the nip of a sardine. With their modern and multitudinous anti-aircraft guns and the "Chicago pianos"-the American version of the British pom-poms- they are well protected as a porcupine, and their aim is as deadly as that of a Tennessee turkey-shooter. About the only satisfaction the japs can get out of Old Nameless and her sister sea-going Amazons is to sink them., which they frequently do-on paper, and over the Tokyo radio.
OLD NAMELESS - Old incredible would be an equally appropriate name for her-has a very real and very glowing claim to glory. She was a brand-new ship, and she'd never had time ever for a proper shakedown cruise when the Navy sent her out to sea looking for trouble. More than 60 percent of her crew was made up of green boys, who had joined the Navy since Pearl Harbor. Back in their own home towns they had been excellent salesmen or mechanics or accountants or soda fountain clerks, but they just hadn't been sailors-until they met a man named Gatch. Many of her junior officers were freshly appointed Naval Reservists, the crease hardly out of their new blue pants, and the ink hardly dry on their new commissions.
But Old Nameless went out to sea under the command of a hard-boiled, methodical skipper, who was something of a wizard at training men. Thomas Leigh Gatch was his name, and to be under his command was about as good a break as a green crew could get. He was a black-browed, broad-shouldered, unflustered fighter, whose only gripe in like was that he hadn't seen enough action in the First World War and whose principal current ambition was to relieve an old grudge be bore against the Japanese Empire by reducing the numerical qualities of its ships and subjects. "
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Name this Ship (from a Book excerpt) - 
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