An intense group of junior officers sat in a darkened compartment aboard the USS Topeka (CLG-8). A group of enlisted men crowded in the doorway. As a guided missile cruiser, Topeka is one of the most modern warships in the world, and for several weeks, electronics engineers had been packing her with rare and exotic equipment. But the flickering screen they were watching wasn't Target Identification or Missile Plot; it was the wardroom television set. President De Gaulle was making his triumphal tour down Broadway.

Even though they had gathered especially for this program, they showed only impatience when the French president was on screen (which was most of the time). It was the indistinct, split-second, long range shots of the president's escort that stirred their interest. Their boys, the Seaman Guard of the USS Topeka, were marching in their third New York tickertape parade, and President De Gaulle, for all his grandeur, was only getting in the way.

The marching squad's precision is remarkable, especially since the Seaman Guard, and, in fact, the guided missile cruiser Topeka, has been in existence only a few short months. She was recommissioned at the New York Naval Shipyard on March 26,1960. Since 1957 when she was towed around from the West Coast, she had been undergoing conversion to CLG. The conversion was recent completed, and Topeka has begun her shakedown and training cruises in the Atlantic. She will go back to the West Coast as an operational combat ship sometime this summer.

Her armament now consists of six six-inch rifles forward six five-inch 38s, and a twin mount for the new Terrier an aircraft missiles aft. Back with the Terriers are two massive turret-like radar antennae that resemble giant searchlights. This the long range, high altitude missile guiding radar that provides tenaciously stable guidance for the Terriers against attacking super-sonic jets. Each unit combines many automatic radar functions; either one can control single-shot or missile salvoes, or both of them can track different target groups simultaneously. With their flexible modes of scanning the air space miles beyond the horizon, they can double as an early warning system.

In the Weapons Control Station, high in the forward superstructure, are nested the controls of the Target Designation System. This is the most advanced system of its kind, and Topeka is the first guided missile cruiser to be operational with it. This gear can select individual targets from close flying groups and track them at great distances, while the missiles are launched with extreme accuracy. This means that nuclear bombers can be picked out from their fighter escorts and blown from the air while they're still too far away to do the fleet any damage. Thus the modem threat of supersonic jets has been answered by the most modern and deadly anti-aircraft system afloat.

But for all her sophistication, Topeka is an old salt. She has traveled often and extensively, and as Light Cruiser number 67 she earned two battle stars in the Pacific in World War II.

Her first commissioning was at Boston, Massachusetts, on December 23, 1944. After a shakedown cruise to Trinidad, British West Indies, and operations along the East Coast, she sailed for the South Pacific. Near Ulithi Atoll, in the Carolinas, she joined Bull Halsey's famous Task Force 38. As part of the screen for Carrier Task Group 38.1, Topeka spent the late Spring of 1945 prowling the Okinawa archipelago and the southern islands of Japan, raiding in support of the Okinawa invasion. She earned her second battle star that Summer when she joined the cruiser-destroyer anti-shipping sweep off Sagami Nada, near Tokyo, and made inshore strikes against the coast of Honshu.

While American ships and carrier planes were attacking the south of Japan, the British were raiding to the north. It was during these operations that Ensign Harry Poindexter, USNR, won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Two British "Seafires" had been shot down in Ishinomake Bay, and Ensign Poindexter, flying an SC-l Curtiss "Seahawk" from Topeka, went in and rescued the stranded flyers under the noses of the Japanese.

In the off-shore strikes against Sagami Nada and Jajima Saki, Topeka was one of the first units of the U.S. Fleet to approach within 45 miles of Tokyo. When the war was over, Commander Charles Becker of Topeka led a battalion of Marines that helped secure the Yokosuka Naval Base, being one of the first Americans to set foot on enemy soil.

When the new year of 1946 began, Topeka was acting as naval support for the Eighth Army of Occupation in Japan. Later that year, she made the rounds of her old war haunts in the islands, and took a cruise to the China Coast. When the Philippine Republic came of age on the Fourth of July, 1946, Topeka was again witness to the making of history.

She finally went home, to Long Beach, in October

Almost a year later, in August of 1947, Topeka steamed again for the Far East. Making her home port at Yokosuka, the naval base she had helped to capture, she visited the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Tsingtao, Woosung, Amoy, and Keelung. Most of these ports will probably never be visited by the Navy of 1960. Topeka's stops that year also included Sasebo, Japan; Jinsen, Korea, and the atom-bombed city of Nagasaki.

In May of 1948, she went back to California, and after a trip to Pearl Harbor she went into the Pacific Reserve Fleet on June 18, 1949. The next time she saw open water was in 1957, when she was towed through the Panama Canal for conversion in New York.

With the advent of such up-to-date killers as Topeka, the fleet has had to make room for pushbuttons, computers, and Buck Rogers combat gear. Tattooed traditionalists of the dungaree Navy have been shaking their heads over "the end of an era," and watching with cynicism the coming of the Flying Saucer Navy. A day on Topeka would make them happy; she is still a bluewater lady of the underway fleet. In a little comer, hidden behind the hum and blinking lights of the Weapons Control missile brains, a dented pot of black coffee is always boiling. The gunner's mates still muscle powder cans in the six-inch turrets. Down in her firerooms, Topeka's BTs and Strikers are getting first-hand knowledge of one of the more antique boiler systems in the Navy, and if any salty ex- Watertender ever tells them about the good old days, they can answer him from experience.

So far, nobody has come up with a snappy electronic version of "Iron ships and wooden men," but even if they did, the Boatswains of Topeka wouldn't know what they were talking about. A slicing and knot-tying lesson in the crew's quarters is a way of life as old as Jonah, and when a man puts a small boat in the water, he soon finds out there's nothing modern about the ocean. Up on her bridge, her Signalmen still shoot the breeze with semaphore.

In thirty completely automatic seconds, Topeka can fire a brace of deadly missiles, reload, and fire again. She is good, and she knows it. She is one of the most advanced weapons in a dangerous world, and at the same time, she bears the long and honorable traditions of a seagoing service. She is a proud ship-no one doubts that who saw her Seaman Guard on Broadway. The Navy can be proud of her as she is of herself.

Taken from the July, 1960 edition of "Our Navy."

TAKEN ABACK: One of the hazards faced in days of sailing ships has been incorporated into English to describe someone who has been jolted by unpleasant news. We say that person has been "taken aback" The person is at a momentary loss, unable to act or even to speak. A danger faced by sailing ships was for a sudden shift in wind to come up (from a sudden squall), blowing the sails back against the masts, putting the ship in grave danger of having the masts break off and rendering the ship totally helpless. The ship was taken aback.