COMMAND HISTORY
The following information displays the year-to-year history of USS Brooke. Each year Brooke, as well as other naval commands, was required to submit a "Command History" to the Chief of Naval Operations. This chronological order of events documented the day-to-day operations that happened during the year as well as the location in which they occurred.
As you look at the different browse through the files you will notice that in the early years, the history was fairly lengthy. Somewhere in the middle 70s, the reports became more compact, while still containing the pertinent information. Since all of the files were scanned from official documents (all declassified) they come in varying degrees of legibility (but still readable if you "zoom" in). You can trace the advances in technology (from Underwood typewriters to word processors) and even see some blue mimeographed copies (for you youngsters that was how we used to copy documents before printers).
As previously mentioned, all documents have been declassified. As you look as some of them you will notice that there are still some "black out" markings. I can only assume that there was still some information in there that was not for public dissemination. The year 1969 is missing and it is my understanding that the year was not submitted to Washington. Don't have a solid answer why other than the year is not on file. until recently I only had the years 79-82 in hard copy so they were scanned and could only be seen as an HTML page. Thanks to James O. Shannon (LT 79-80) who took the time to create the years 79 and 80 in MS Word, they can now be seen in that format.
I have made a correction to 1967 in that page 20 of the history indicated that Brooke had two "Babcock and Wilcox" boilers when in fact they were Foster Wheeler. I was able to make the change to the MS Word document but could not edit the PDF file (at least at this time). My thanks go to Mr. Bob Shvodian who worked 35 years as a civilian engineer in BUSHIPS/NAVSEC/NAVSEA Steam Boiler Code. Bob found the discrepancy and brought it to my attention.
My special thanks to Admiral P.J. Coady (LT 68-71), USN Ret. who made the contacts that allowed us to obtain these rare documents of Brooke.
I have provided two formats for you to look at the documents (except 79-82 which are HTML pages): Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF. Simply click on the format you wish to see. If you select PDF you will find 1966 combined with 1968.