Riding On Luck: The Saga of the U.S.S. Lang

by Rex A. Knight

They called her the "Lucky Lang." Commissioned 30 March 1939, she ranged from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean, from Scotland to the Mediterranean, before traversing the Panama Canal to engage the enemy in the Pacific at Guadalcanal, New Georgia, Kwajalein, Saipan, Leyte, and Okinawa. The Lang wreaked havoc along the "Tokyo Express" route and helped decimate Japanese air power. Yet, though heavily involved in nearly every major campaign of the war in the Pacific, she survived it all with hardly a scratch, and not one of her roster received the slightest enemy-inflicted wound. Over such an extended time and equal number of actions, no other U.S. Naval warship could boast such a record. Even the sum of her hull number's digits (399) adds up to 21, a lucky number to be sure. This is the story, the complete history of the USS Lang as told by the ship's official biographer, himself the fortunate son of a former Lang sailor.

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 11, 2001