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UNITED STATES SHIP TOPEKA
 

USS TOPEKA (PG-35) -- was a gunboat that served the U.S. Navy for 32 years. She was the only TOPEKA that was built on foreign soil and the first to make a Mediterranean deployment. The Gunboat had a 35 foot beam and a displacement of 2255 tons. During its era,14 officers and 153 men served aboard her.

The first USS TOPEKA (PG-35) participated in the Spanish American war, helped quiet several disturbances in the Caribbean, and later served as a patrol boat off of Central America during the last phases of World War I.  She was retired in 1930 and sold to the Union Shipbuilding Company of Baltimore. Her successor, USS TOPEKA(CL-67), came to life in late 1944, just in time to participate in World War II in the Pacific Theater. The second TOPEKA saw the surrender of the Japanese forces in Tokyo, and thereafter deployed to the Far East as a member of the occupation and patrol forces. She was placed out of Commission in June 1949 and retired to the West Coast Reserve Fleet. The TOPEKA  rested within the boundaries of the "mothball fleet" of San Francisco for almost eight years. 

In the interim a new kind of conflict was brewing in the Far East; the Korean War had broken out; and an entirely new approach to war had come into being. The all-out bombing attacks of World War II were replaced by "conflicts" and sneak maneuvers of "cold war." Concurrently changes were demanded of the instruments of war.

USS TOPEKA (CL-67) -- was launched on August 19, 1944 under the sponsorship of Mrs. Frank J. Warren (above), Wife of the Mayor of Topeka, Kansas. Commissioned on December 23 1944. TOPEKA  (below) saw action in World War II in the Pacific. She served as a unit of the Seventh Fleet's Occupation and Patrol force until June 1949 when she was decommissioned.

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