laststandonzombieisland

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk/dieselpunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  December 5

Here we see the old dreadnought USS Idaho showing some love to Japanese infantry ashore on Okinawa on 1 April 1945, easily distinguished by her tower foremast & 5”-38 Mk 30 single turrets (visible between the barrels of the forward main turrets). Idaho was the only US battleship with this configuration.

With lattice masts as originally commissioned.

As a New Mexico-class battleship, she was designed just before World War One, and her construction from her award in November 1914 to her commissioning in March 1919, covered the entire period of that great war. One of the most advanced US battlewagons of her days, she spent most of her career from 1919-1941 in the Pacific. That makes it even more amazing that she was not on Battleship Row on December 7, 1941..but was quietly at anchor in Iceland enforcing the US Neutrality Patrol in the Atlantic. She and her sistership USS Mississippi steamed to the Pacific and she had a very active war from then on to make up for it.

She was one of the only US ships that ever bombarded the United States in anger when she pummeled the Japanese held islands of the Aleutian chain in 1943. She later went on to lend a hand at landing after landing across the Pacific and was awarded 7 battle stars. At Iwo Jima and Okinawa she came almost point-blank to the beaches and hammered those hard-fought battlefields 24/7 as needed. She may have been designed for Jutland but the 30-year old hull was a lynchpin to the embattled Devil Dogs dug in among the volcanic ash of the Japanese home islands.

Sadly, less than a year after the end of the war, she was decommissioned and within a year of that date, scrapped.

Specs:
Displacement:     32,000 tons
Length:     624 ft (190 m)
Beam:     97.4 ft (29.7 m)
Draft:     30 ft (9.1 m)
Speed:     21 kn (24 mph; 39 km/h)
Complement:     1,081 officers and men
Armament:     (1919)

12 × 14 in (360 mm) guns
14 × 5 in (130 mm)/51 cal guns,
4 × 3 in (76 mm) guns
2 × 21 in (530 mm) torpedo tubes
(added after 1942)
10×4 40mm, 43×1 20mm, 8×1 .50-caliber MG for AAA

Armor:

Belt: 8–13.5 in (203–343 mm)
Barbettes: 13 in (330 mm)
Turret face: 18 in (457 mm)
Turret sides: 9–10 in (229–254 mm)
Turret top: 5 in (127 mm)
Turret rear 9 in (229 mm)
Conning tower: 11.5 in (292 mm)
Decks: 3.5 in (89 mm)

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

Founded in 1963 INRO, while based in the United States, has members around the globe. The membership includes, besides many of the leading authorities in the field, members of a large variety of professions, both men and women, active and retired naval personnel, historians and just plain “warship buffs”. Anyone interested in the subject will find INRO a most valuable source of information and contact with others who have the same interest.

One of the most amazing services of the INRO/Warship International is the INFOSER . Since its inception, Warship International has included an question/answer section in which questions submitted by readers were published and responses were provided by the general membership. This section was initially known as Warship Information Service through the No. 1, 1975, issue, and thereafter as Ask INFOSER. From the first issue of WI in January 1964 through the No. 4, 1996, issue, 2377 questions were published in the WIS/INFOSER section. Well researched answers were provided for 1866 of these questions, many of which contained never before seen illustrations, charts, and diagrams.

This is an invaluable source for the naval historian.

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