Deployment Records

Available Records

A Deployment Record is a report on a single deployment of a single ship — the 1970 Western Pacific cruise of a carrier, not the carrier's whole career. It is built from the records that deployment produced: the deck logs the ship's watch officers wrote, the command history the ship filed, and the published federal record around them. $29, delivered as a PDF.

The substance of the product is extraction. Hekkova transcribes the deployment's deck-log pages into structured entries, reviews them for accuracy, and assembles the report from that reviewed data.

What a Deployment Record Contains

Each Deployment Record is unique to its ship and deployment. What a record contains depends on what that ship's records hold, so one record may include parts another does not. Each record listed above shows the parts it contains and their length.

• A title page with an official Navy photograph of the ship, where one is available, and a guide to reading the record.
• The ship's service history and characteristics, from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS) and her Command History.
• A map of the deployment track, with track statistics and the deployment in sequence, port by port.
• The deployment at a glance, from the ship's Command History.
• Personnel casualties, each with its sources.
• The deployment in detail, in date order. Each period at sea or in port opens with a map of where the ship was and a short summary, followed by dated entries from the deck log and the Command History, in the records' own words.
• The deployment in figures: days under way and in port, and the activity the log records, such as flight operations and replenishment.
• The ships in company with her during the deployment, under way and in port.
• Lists of events the log records, such as aircraft incidents, fires, and man-overboard events, each cited to its source.
• The abbreviations and naval terms used in the record, defined.
• Sources and method: every source named, and how the record was assembled.
• A citation on every entry, to the deck-log page and National Archives image or the Command History page it comes from.

Where the Record Comes From

Deployment Records are drawn from primary federal records: the deployment's deck logs held by the National Archives, the ship's command history (Command Operations Report) filed with the Naval History and Heritage Command, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, and comparable published federal sources. Claims are cited to their sources, and where sources disagree, the record reports the conflict rather than choosing silently.

Names follow a strict policy. Officers named in command roles, and casualties whose status is a matter of permanent public record, appear by name. Other names are withheld, and the event is still described. Every name in a record is checked by a person before the record is sold.