page_title: USS Winston S. Churchill
section_title: Naming
hierarchical_section_title: USS Winston S. Churchill / Naming
caption_attribution_description: Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) English: Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. Deutsch: Winston Churchill, 1940 bis 1945 sowie 1951 bis 1955 Premier des Vereinigten Königreichs und Literaturnobelpreisträger des Jahres 1953.
context_page_description: USS Winston S. Churchill is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer of the United States Navy. She is named after Sir Winston Churchill, the renowned former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This ship is the 31st destroyer of her class. Winston S. Churchill was the 18th ship of this class to be built at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, and construction began on 7 May 1998. She was launched and christened on 17 April 1999. On 10 March 2001, she was commissioned during a ceremony at Town Point Park in Norfolk, Virginia.
context_section_description: On 29 November 1995, on a visit to the United Kingdom, President Bill Clinton announced to Parliament that the new ship would be named after Sir Winston Churchill, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She was the first destroyer and only the fourth United States Navy warship named after a British citizen, and the first since 1976 named after a non-U.S. citizen, though Churchill was an honorary U.S. citizen and his mother was American.
  Other U.S. warships named after Britons were Alfred, an armed merchantman named after King Alfred the Great; Raleigh, a continental frigate, named after Sir Walter Raleigh (though three later USS Raleighs—and two Confederate warships—would be named after the North Carolina city, which did not exist at the time) and Effingham, named after The 3rd Earl of Effingham who resigned his commission rather than fight the colonists during the American Revolutionary War. The former frigate Harold E. Holt was also named after a person from a country in the Commonwealth of Nations, Harold Holt, the Australian Prime Minister who is presumed to have drowned in 1967. However, this is the first ship to be named after a modern British citizen, or British Prime Minister.
caption: Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill
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