USCGC Tahoma (WPG-80)
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The United States Coast Guard Cutter Tahoma (Coast Guard Cutter No. 60) was built by the Defoe Shipbuilding Company in Bay City, Michigan. Completed in 1934, the steel-hulled cutter operated on the Great Lakes between 1934 and 1941, attached to the 9th Coast Guard District and homeported at Cleveland, Ohio. She was named after a glacier on the southwestern slope of Mount Ranier in the state of Washington.
As the United States moved closed to full participation in World War II, President Roosevelt issued an executive order on 1 November 1941 transferring the Coast Guard from the Treasury Department to the Navy. Accordingly, Tahoma was sometime thereafter reclassified as a gunboat and designated WPG-80.
By July 1942, the former cutter had left the Great Lakes to escort Allied convoys in the North Atlantic in the vicinity of Casco Bay, Maine; Ivigtut, Greenland; St. John's and Argentia, Newfoundland; and Sydney, Nova Scotia; into the spring of 1944. The remainder of her naval service was spent in serving on weather and ice patrol duties between Greenland and Iceland and plane guard operations in the same waters. In the latter service, she alternated with the Coast Guard cutters Frederick Lee (WPC-139), Algonquin (WPG-75), and Mohawk (WPG-78) into 1945. At the time of the Japanese surrender in mid-August 1945, Tahoma was at sea on a plane guard station.
Released from duty with the Atlantic Fleet on 30 September 1945, Tahoma was returned to the Coast Guard for a resumption of peacetime service.
[edit] Sources
This article includes text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.
