USS Fred T. Berry
1945 Gearing-class destroyer
USS Fred T. Berry (DD/DDE-858) was a Gearing-class destroyer of the United States Navy.
Namesake
Fred Thomas Berry was born 23 November 1887 in Logan, Iowa. He was a member of the United States Naval Academy class of 1908. Through much of his early career he specialized in engineering duty. During World War I commanded USS McCall and was awarded the Navy Cross. In 1927, he began training in dirigibles, and later commanded the airship Los Angeles (ZR-3). Commander Berry, then commanding Naval Air Station Lakehurst, was lost in the crash of Akron (ZRS-4) off the New Jersey coast 4 April 1933.
Construction and commissioning
Fred T. Berry was launched on 28 January 1945 by Bethlehem Shipbuilding, San Pedro, Los Angeles; sponsored by Mrs. Fred T. Berry, widow of Commander Berry; and commissioned on 12 May 1945.
Service history
Sailing from San Francisco, California on 29 August 1945, Fred T. Berry trained with aircraft carriers in Hawaiian waters and completed a tour of occupation duty in the Far East before returning to her home port, San Diego, on 21 February 1947.
“USS Fred T. Berry” enters the record as 1945 Gearing-class destroyer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fred, Berry and Gearing-class can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7869492. Authority coordinates are 24.463, -81.555. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1908, 1927 and 1933.
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