The decision to give the name ANNAPOLIS to the Navy’s first Communications Major Relay Ship came from a suggestion which emanated from the office the Director of Naval Communications. The naming of the first AGMR after the city of Annapolis commemorated the establishment of one of the Navy’s first "wireless" stations there in 1902. In addition, Annapolis today is the site of the Navy’s oldest existing radio station which then provided the transmitter facilities for the Naval Communications Station in Washington, D.C.

The history of the AGMR-1 began in August of 1962 when the decommissioned Escort Aircraft Carrier, USS GILBERT ISLANDS (CVE-107) [a USS COMMENCEMENT BAY class CVE] was towed from her berth at Bayonne, New Jersey, to the New York Naval Ship Yard for conversion to the AGMR-1. As a CVE she had seen action in the Pacific during the Okinawa-Gunto operation and Australian operations in Borneo. Now the 19 year old ship was to be converted and recommissioned to fulfill a vital communications need of the Navy’s operations forces. The conversion from CVE to AGMR involved the modification of the flight deck with a hurricane bow, deletion of Second World War armament and the addition of four radar controlled twin 3 inch 50 caliber anti-aircraft gun mounts, two per side.

Her mission was to provide fleet broadcast and relay communications for ship-to-ship-to-shore communications. She was a floating communications station, able to stay beyond the reach of hostile powers, not depending upon the whims of reluctant allies, carrying vital communications wherever a ship can go, and capable of reaching any land areas with her powerful transmitters. As her motto states, she was truly "VOX MARIS," the "Voice of the Sea" and the Voice from the Sea: the Voice of Naval Command, the Sound of United States Seapower.

The USS ANNAPLOLIS (AGMR-1) was used during the Vietnam era relaying messages from command centers in-country Vietnam back to the national command authority in Washington. She was deployed off the coast of Vietnam from 1965 to 1969, when she was withdrawn from service. Although the Annapolis was homeported in Long Beach, California she never saw that port. She was decommissioned at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on December 22, 1969 sold for scrape in 1972.

Other links about the Annapolis can be found at here.

USS ANNAPOLIS (AGMR-1), Auxiliary General Major Relay Number One, was designed to bring Naval Communications to any naval unit ashore or afloat, anywhere in the world, with speed and accuracy, to provide a voice for command when and where it is needed. Specially designed antenna systems were constructed on her flight deck with the latest in complex communications equipment in her newly-constructed communications spaces gave the ANNAPOLIS unparalleled electronic communications abilities. Capacious fuel tanks gave her extended range. What is most important, was her smoothly functioning and well trained crew of 708 (42 officers and 666 enlisted), ANNAPOLIS. Capable of operation for protracted periods of time in remote corners of the world’s oceans, augmenting existing shore communications facilities, temporarily extending essential Naval communication services in areas where they might have been once lost or where they may never have existed.

The AGMR-1 is the third ship to bear the name ANNAPOLIS. The first ANNAPOLIS was a gun boat commissioned in 1895 which served with distinction in the Spanish-American War and later with the Asiatic Fleet, as a training ship at the Naval Academy, and on patrol in Mexico and Central American waters before being decommissioned in 1919. The second ANNAPOLIS was a patrol frigate, commissioned in December, 1944, which served as a convoy escort ship making convoy runs to Algeria and later being attached to the Pacific Fleet where she was decommissioned in 1946 and sold to Mexico. Even today, some many years later after the decommissioning of the first AGMR and third Annapolis, there is a fourth USS Annapolis (SSN 760) in the form of a modern Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarine.

	The USS Gilbert Islands before conversion to the USS Annapolis.
	The USS Gilbert Islands at anchor during WW II with what appears to be Hellcat fighters and Avenger torpedo-bombers planes on her flight deck.
	The USS Gilbert Islands and then converted to the USS Annapolis. Source: Escort Carriers in Action, Squadron Signal Publications, ISBN 0-89747-356-6
	Photo believed to be taken about 1965 or 1966.
	Photo taken 1967 and used in the 1967 ship's cruise book..