Kay Kopl Vesole was born on 11 September 1913 in Przedbórz, Poland. Sometime thereafter, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Iowa where he later attended the State University of Iowa. On 19 October 1942, he accepted an appointment as an Ensign in the United States Naval Reserve. He studied at a series of naval training schools during the remainder of 1942 and the first part of 1943. Beginning at the Naval Training School, Tucson, Arizona, he transferred to the Naval Training Station (Local Defense) at Boston, Massachusetts, in January 1943. The following month, he moved from Boston to Gulfport, Mississippi, to enter the Armed Guard School. In April, he moved to the Armed Guard Center located at New Orleans, then he was routed to Panama City, Florida, to take command of the armed guard gun crew on board a merchant ship.
By December 1943, he commanded the armed guard crew assigned to the Liberty shipSS John Bascom. On the night of 2 December, the ship was anchored at Bari, Italy, when a massive air raid of 105 LuftwaffeJunkers Ju 88 bombers attacked the port. During that raid the ship was bombed. Before it sank Vesole directed the defense of the ship despite severe multiple wounds. When it became apparent that the ship would sink, he led a party below and supervised the evacuation of the wounded. Once in the lifeboat, he manned an oar and helped to row the boat ashore even though he had only one functional arm. When he reached land, he disregarded his wounds in order to help pull survivors out of the oil-covered and flaming waters and to get them safely into a nearby bomb shelter. Finally, an ammunition explosion inflicted still further wounds on him, which proved fatal. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.
Construction and career
Vesole's was laid down by the Consolidated Steel Corporation at Orange, Texas on 3 July 1944, launched on 29 December 1944 by Mrs. Kay K. Vesole and commissioned on 23 April 1945. She was ordered as a radar picket destroyer. Her mid-section torpedo tubes were removed to make room for a second radar mast and aft torpedo tubes were replaced with quad mounted 40 mm BoforsAA guns
From April to September 1970, Vesole deployed from its homeport of Charleston, South Carolina, to the Persian Gulf, Red Sea and Indian Ocean as part of the three-ship Middle East Force (USS Valcour, a converted seaplane tender as flagship) and two destroyers deployed on six-month rotations. En route from Charleston, Vesole made port/refueling visits to Bridgetown, Barbados; Monrovia, Liberia; Luanda, Angola; and Lourenco Marques, Mozambique. While attached to MIDEASTFOR, the two destroyers operated as single ship units. Vesole visited Mombasa, Kenya; Diego Suarez, Madagascar; Djibouti, then a French overseas territory; Asmara, then-Ethiopia; Bahrain; Bandar Abbas, Iran; Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; Karachi, Pakistan; Cochin, India; Colombo, then-Ceylon; Malé, Republic of the Maldives; and Victoria, Seychelles. The ship embarked Robert Strausz-Hupé, the American Ambassador to Ceylon and accredited to the Maldives for that nation’s fifth anniversary of independence. The Ambassador presented that country’s president with a Moon rock from an Apollo program mission. Vesole returned to Charleston in October, with port/refueling visits in Lourenco Marques, Luanda, Dakar, Senegal; and St. John’s, Antigua.
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