USS Josephus Daniels CG 27 – History of the U.S. Navy's Guided Missile Cruiser & Navy Decals

USS Josephus Daniels CG 27 – History, Service Record & Navy Decals

The USS Josephus Daniels (CG-27) was the second ship of the Belknap class of guided missile cruisers, serving the Atlantic Fleet through nearly three decades of Cold War service. Named for Josephus Daniels — the civilian newspaper editor from North Carolina who served as Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1921 under President Woodrow Wilson, overseeing the United States Navy through one of the most consequential and transformative periods in its history, including the entirety of World War I and the massive naval expansion that made the United States a first-rank naval power.

Josephus Daniels was one of the most controversial and consequential Secretaries of the Navy in American history. A progressive Democrat and crusading newspaper editor who came to the Navy Department with no military background, he nonetheless exercised vigorous and determined civilian control over the Navy with a reforming zeal that earned him both fierce admirers and fierce critics within the service. His most famous — and to the Navy, most notorious — act was General Order 99, issued in 1914, which banned all alcoholic beverages from U.S. Navy ships and stations. The order was so unpopular with naval officers that the non-alcoholic coffee that replaced the officers' wine mess became known as “a cup of Joe” — a phrase that has endured in the American language for more than a century as an inadvertent monument to Josephus Daniels's temperance convictions.

Beyond the coffee order, Daniels's tenure was marked by genuine and significant achievements. He oversaw the Navy's massive mobilization and expansion for World War I, dramatically increasing the size of the fleet and its personnel. He championed the rights of enlisted sailors against what he saw as officer class privilege. He supported the development of naval aviation in its earliest years. And he presided over the Navy Department with a young Franklin D. Roosevelt as his Assistant Secretary of the Navy — a relationship that would have enormous consequences for American history, as Roosevelt's years in the Navy Department under Daniels shaped the future president's deep and lifelong love of the sea service and his strategic understanding of naval power that would prove decisive in World War II. USS Josephus Daniels honored that complex, consequential, and thoroughly American legacy throughout her Cold War career.

Keel, Launch & Commissioning

Josephus Daniels's keel was laid down on April 23, 1962, at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. She was launched on December 2, 1963, and commissioned into the U.S. Navy on May 8, 1965, as the second ship of the Belknap class under hull designation CG-27 (originally designated DLG-27, reclassified as CG-27 in 1975).

Class & Design

USS Josephus Daniels was one of nine Belknap-class guided missile cruisers — the second generation of American purpose-built guided missile cruisers, improving on the all-missile Leahy-class design with a single-arm missile launcher forward and a 5-inch/54 caliber gun aft. At approximately 547 feet in length and displacing approximately 8,200 tons fully loaded, she carried the Terrier (later Standard Missile) surface-to-air missile system, the ASROC anti-submarine rocket system, torpedo tubes, and later upgrades including Harpoon anti-ship missiles and the Phalanx close-in weapon system.

Cold War Atlantic Fleet Service

Commissioned in May 1965, USS Josephus Daniels was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet, where she served as an escort for carrier battle groups and conducted Cold War operations throughout the Atlantic and Mediterranean over nearly three decades of service. She deployed repeatedly to the Mediterranean with the Sixth Fleet, providing the air defense, anti-submarine warfare, and surface warfare capabilities that protected carrier battle groups operating in the most strategically contested body of water in the Cold War.

Throughout her Atlantic Fleet career, Josephus Daniels participated in the full range of Cold War naval operations — NATO exercises in the North Atlantic testing Alliance readiness against the Soviet submarine threat, Mediterranean deployments during the region's many crises and confrontations, and the carrier battle group escort missions that were the primary operational role of the Belknap-class cruisers through the Cold War's most consequential decades.

There was a certain historical symmetry in USS Josephus Daniels serving as a carrier battle group escort — for it was her namesake's Navy Department, with young Franklin Roosevelt at his side as Assistant Secretary, that had nurtured the earliest development of American naval aviation, planting the seeds that would grow into the carrier-centered naval power that USS Josephus Daniels spent her career protecting.

Decommissioning

USS Josephus Daniels was decommissioned on January 24, 1993, after nearly 28 years of commissioned service — a career spanning from the Johnson administration through the Cold War's end, encompassing every major naval crisis and confrontation of that era.

Legacy

For the sailors who served aboard Josephus Daniels — the missile technicians, sonar operators, electronics warfare specialists, and surface warfare professionals who kept this Atlantic Fleet guided missile cruiser operational and ready through nearly 28 years of Cold War service — she represents a career of exceptional dedication to American naval power. And every time those sailors reached for a cup of coffee at sea, they were — whether they knew it or not — reaching for a legacy that Josephus Daniels left to the U.S. Navy and to the American language more than a century ago.

Shop USS Josephus Daniels CG 27 Navy Gifts & Decals

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