The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS for short) is the official reference work

Reference work

A reference work is a compendium of information, usually of a specific type, compiled in a book for ease of reference. That is, the information is intended to be quickly found when needed. Reference works are usually referred to for particular pieces of information, rather than read beginning to end...

 for the basic facts about ship

Ship

Since the end of the age of sail a ship has been any large buoyant marine vessel. Ships are generally distinguished from boats based on size and cargo or passenger capacity. Ships are used on lakes, seas, and rivers for a variety of activities, such as the transport of people or goods, fishing,...

s used by the United States Navy

United States Navy

The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...

. In addition to the ship entries, DANFS includes appendices on small craft, histories of Confederate Navy

Confederate States Navy

The Confederate States Navy was the naval branch of the Confederate States armed forces established by an act of the Confederate Congress on February 21, 1861. It was responsible for Confederate naval operations during the American Civil War...

 ships, and various essays related to naval ships.

When the writing project was developed the parameters for this series were designed to cover only commissioned US Navy ships with assigned names. If the ship was not assigned a name it was not included in the histories written for the series.

Publication data

DANFS was originally released by the Naval Historical Center

Naval Historical Center

The Naval History & Heritage Command is the official history program of the United States Navy and is located at the historic Washington Navy Yard in the District of Columbia.-Mission :...

 (NHC) in bound hardcover volumes, ordered by ship name, from Volume I (A–B) published in 1959 to Volume VIII (W–Z) published in 1981. Volume I (A–B) subsequently went out of print. In 1991 a revised Volume I Part A, covering only ship names beginning with A, was released. Work continues on revisions of the remaining volumes.

Volunteers at the Hazegray website undertook to transcribe the DANFS and make it available on the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

. The project goal is a direct transcription of the DANFS, with changes limited to correcting typographical errors and editorial notes for incorrect facts in the original.

Subsequently, the NHC developed an online version of DANFS through a combination of optical character recognition

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 (OCR) and hand transcription. The NHC is slowly updating its online DANFS to correct errors and take into account the gap in time between its publication and the present date. NHC prioritizes updates as follows: ships currently in commission, ships that came into commission after the volume (missing), ships decommissioned after the volume (incomplete), and finally updates to older ships. The NHC has begun a related project to place Ship History and Command Operations Reports online at their DANFS site.

Volume	Date	Ships	Notes
I	1959	A–B	Out of print
II	1963	C–F	Out of print
III	1968	G–K	Out of print
IV	1969	L–M
V	1970	N–Q	Out of print
VI	1976	R–S
VII	1981	T–V
VIII	1981	W–Z	Out of print
I-A	1991	A	Out of print
Hazegray		A–Z	Histories end at dates above
Naval Historical Center		A–Z	Histories being brought up to date

Reference use

Because DANFS is a work of the U.S. government, its content is in the public domain, and the text is often quoted verbatim in other works. Many websites organized by former and active crew members of U.S. Navy vessels include a copy of their ship's DANFS entries.

Since the Dictionary limits itself to the bare facts, it includes almost no analysis or historical context. Typically, it will say that a ship was transferred from one station to another on a specific date, but not why, and the reader must consult other sources for explanations. While most entries are limited to objective data, some use a pro-U.S. tone, especially with reference to Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

 and World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 events. For example, the DANFS entry for the USS King (DLG-10) states, "Operating with this mighty peacekeeping force, King helped to check Communist aggression in Southeast Asia." Something on the order of a few hundred entries out of the thousands contain something along these lines, though to varying degrees. Some vessels, especially ones with proud records like USS Enterprise (CV-6)

USS Enterprise (CV-6)

USS Enterprise , colloquially referred to as the "Big E," was the sixth aircraft carrier of the United States Navy and the seventh U.S. Navy ship to bear the name. Launched in 1936, she was a ship of the Yorktown class, and one of only three American carriers commissioned prior to World War II to...

 and USS Constitution

USS Constitution

USS Constitution is a wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy. Named by President George Washington after the Constitution of the United States of America, she is the world's oldest floating commissioned naval vessel...

, have articles strongly praising of their subjects' histories.

DANFS also utilizes some of the Navy's more obscure jargon. For example, DANFS, along with several other U.S. Navy ship chronologies, uses the "19th Fleet" as a term to indicate the location of a ship after it has been decommissioned, struck, or scrapped. In Navy tradition a ship never dies, it is simply "transferred to the 19th Fleet."

External links

• Naval History & Heritage Command DANFS Site (DANFS maintainer)
• Hazegray DANFS Site