USS Cony DD/DDE-508 · A people's history
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About & Sources

Who made this, and what it stands on

Publisher

usscony.com is published by Danziger & De Llano, LLP as a historical tribute to USS Cony (DD/DDE-508) and the people who built her, crewed her, and keep her memory. The domain was, for many years, the website of the USS Cony Shipmates association; the association let it expire in August 2022, it passed through other hands, and it was acquired in November 2026 so that the links still pointing here would reach a real historical tribute rather than a dead or misleading destination.

This site is not the website of the USS Cony Shipmates association, is not affiliated with it, and is not a U.S. Navy site. Nothing here speaks for the association, the crew, or the Navy. There are no contact forms, no claims services, and no advertising on this site.

The rule the site runs on

If a fact is not in a document we can name, it does not appear here. All copy is original, written for this site from the sources below — nothing is reused from the association's old site, whose writing belongs to its authors. Where records conflict, the conflict is printed. Where the record runs out, the page says so instead of guessing.

Conflicts we print

  • Launch date. Contemporary press and the Ocean-ship record place Cony's launching in the eight-ship Maine mass launching of Sunday, 16 August 1942. The Navy's official history (DANFS) and the ship's own 1949 recommissioning program print 30 August 1942. The site leads with the documented event and prints the Navy's differing date beside it — both on The Builders.
  • First detection, 27 October 1962. The published B-59 literature credits Cony with the sonar contact; other accounts hold claims for her sisters — Beale's log credits Murray, and patrol aircraft held contacts earlier still. The site does not credit Cony with first detection; both ships' deck logs are printed on October 1962.
  • Specifications. Derivative references vary (complement 273 vs 336; beam 39'7" vs 39'8"). The DANFS data block governs on The Ship.
  • Slaughter's hull number typo. The source article's narration calls his ship "DD-608"; the ship is DD-508. His direct quotations are unaffected and printed verbatim.
  • The first commanding officer's name. The wartime ONI combat narratives and the 1944 Navy Register give Harry Darlington Johnston; DANFS spells the name "Johnson." The site prints Johnston — and notes that Herman Matthew Johnson, one of the eight killed, is a different man whose name stays Johnson.
  • April 1961. A crew chronology kept by a Cony veteran places the ship in the Bay of Pigs operation; no deck log, official history, or primary document reached names her there. It is carried as a labeled crew account on The Ship, never a chronology entry.
  • Where she was decommissioned. Compiled records conflict — Philadelphia versus Norfolk — so the site prints the decommissioning date, 2 July 1969, without a place.
  • End of the ship. The compiled records give sunk-as-a-target 20 March 1970 off Puerto Rico; an authoritative disposition record has not been independently verified and remains an open item.

Sources

The spine — the ship's own record:

  • Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS), USS Cony (DD-508) — Naval History and Heritage Command, transcribed at ibiblio/HyperWar. The official ship history; it governs dates, the war narrative, and specifications.
  • USS Cony recommissioning ceremony program, Boston Naval Shipyard, 17 November 1949 — a primary document: keel date, launch date as the program prints it, commanding officer and ceremony principals.

October 1962:

  • William Burr & Thomas Blanton, "The Submarines of October," National Security Archive — publishes the deck-log excerpts: Cony's 5:29 PM challenge and B-59's 8:52 PM surfacing, and Beale's own challenge.
  • Peter Huchthausen, October Fury (2002) — the bread-and-cigarettes and shot-line account, and the nuclear-torpedo narrative's first public telling.
  • Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly, cited in the CSIS paper Of Ships and Cyber (2022) — the B-59 account in current scholarship.
  • Gary Slaughter's interview, Nashville PBS (WNPT), 17 October 2012 — the crew voice, quoted verbatim.

The eight of 27 October 1943:

  • The ship's own action report for 27 October 1943, in the transcription the association's site preserved — names all eight: four killed in the attack, four dead of wounds. Rates print; service numbers stay in the research file.
  • U.S. Navy Memorial — the Lost Ship's Tribute page for USS Cony (DD-508), which logs exactly the eight sailors lost 27 October 1943, and individual Navy Log entries for Bunting, McCluskey and Mott.
  • National Archives wartime casualty lists (the Navy Department's state-by-state next-of-kin reports), as compiled alphabetically at naval-history.net — corroborating each name with its next-of-kin home.
  • Supporting memorials: the Navy Cross citation for Seaman Bernard Barney; his Oakwood Cemetery, Penfield, New York record; Steward's Mate Herman Johnson's grave at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Honolulu; Mario Balistreri's school memorial (Abraham Lincoln High School, San Francisco); and Claude Denton's Iowa county roll of honor.

The shipmates and the old site:

  • Korean War Project, USS Cony page — the 2006 posting by association contact Roger Rieman describing the old site's contents.
  • Open Directory (ODP) decommissioned-destroyers listing — the directory-era description of the main page at /Cony.htm.
  • Congressional Record, Vol. 164, No. 160, House, 27 September 2018 — Rep. Ted Yoho recognizing the 36th annual reunion.
  • An entertainer's published review (GigSalad) — the 35th annual reunion, 2017, Charleston/Summerville area.
  • The association's own closing record — its final newsletter (July 2021), its reunion index (ending 2019, Pensacola), and the closing notice its webmaster posted on this domain (archived homepage, 16 August 2022 capture): the 2021 Baltimore reunion cancelled, the account closed with a last check to the Tin Can Sailors, the memorabilia to a Maine Maritime Museum exhibit, and the site's closing on 22 August 2022.

1961–1969, beyond DANFS:

  • NASA History Office, recovery-ships directory — Cony listed in the recovery forces for Mercury-Redstone 4 (21 July 1961) and Gemini 3 (23 March 1965).
  • Department of Veterans Affairs, "Navy and Coast Guard Ships Associated with Service in Vietnam and Exposure to Herbicide Agents" (ships list) — Cony on Ganh Rai Bay, 6–7 November 1967.
  • An NHHC-photograph-anchored secondary account (Last Stand on Zombie Island's Warship Wednesday), flagged single-source family, for the 1967 deployment detail; the Fletcher-class construction list (abbot.us) for the disposition dates — both flagged where they stand alone.

The evidence record: USS Cony vessel record, Asbestos Atlas (publisher-sponsored secondary registry; litigation search incomplete). The record and its limitations are discussed on The Ship. Also in the public record: In re Asbestos Litigation — Rogers v. Air & Liquid Systems Corp., No. 17-1570 (D. Del.), Report and Recommendation filed 15 May 2019, and VA Board decision Citation Nr. 1325548 (2013) — records about individuals, described as such on The Ship.

Image credits

All photographs are U.S. Navy photographs in the public domain, retrieved via Wikimedia Commons and self-hosted here. Catalog numbers are printed in each caption.

  • NH 104882 — Cony in Hampton Roads, 12 March 1957 (homepage hero).
  • NH 104876 — Cony in San Francisco Bay, 25 February 1944 (The Crews).
  • National Archives 24746309 — Cony underway, 15 December 1949 (The Crews).
  • NH 96944 — Task Group Alfa formation, Atlantic, 1959 (The Crews).
  • 80-G-289679 — smoke screen off Leyte, 20 October 1944 (The Ship).
  • NH 104498 — Cony in the Atlantic, 12 March 1968 (The Ship).
  • All Hands magazine, March 1968 — Destroyer Division 222 off Oahu (The Ship).

Legacy addresses

The old site's documented main page, /Cony.htm, still resolves — it now carries an honest orientation page. So do its two proven live-backlink targets: /Chronology/ConyChronology.htm, which again carries a real chronology page, and /Chronology/USS-Cony-Commissioning%20Ceremony-1949.pdf — the U.S. Navy's own 17 November 1949 recommissioning-ceremony program (PDF), preserved unaltered exactly as the old site served it. The full inventory of the old site's addresses is mapped from the Internet Archive; further legacy paths will be restored as they are verified.

Housekeeping

Static HTML and CSS, self-hosted; no trackers, no analytics, no cookies, no external calls home. Type is your system's own. Photographs are public domain as credited; everything else on this site is original text written for it.