Warship Wednesday, May 22 The Mighty Miss
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
– Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, May 22
Mississippi as a brand new battleship in WWI complete with lattice masts and disruptive anti-U boat camouflage
Here we see the New Mexico class battleship USS Mississippi (BB-41) in about 1918. The Mighty Miss had a career much longer than most other WWI-era battleships and gave good service for over forty years.
Laid down just a few months after the start of WWI in Europe, she was commissioned 18 December 1917 some eight months after the entry of the US into the Great War. Built as a oil-fired ship (most other warships of the era were coal burners), her WWI career was spent largely in US waters, a fleet in being along the US East Coast should the High Seas Fleet of Kaiser Wilhelm ever make a sortie to New York. In 1931 she was overhauled and modernized, spending almost all of the time period from 1919-1941 in the Pacific.
(Notice the much lower masts and more streamlined look. She was one of the most modern battleships of WWI, but sadly was pushing obsolescence by 1940)
She would have been at Pearl Harbor more than likely alongside her sisters New Mexico and Idaho, but all three ships were sent to the Atlantic in June 1941 to help enforce the neutrality patrol against Nazi U-Boats. Once the Japanese struck in the Pacific however, Mississippi and her sisters were sent racing back to the Pacific. For the first several months of the war she protected convoys up and down the West Coast as California braced for invasion. In 1943 she helped protect the landings in the Aleutian Islands. After conducting shore bombardments in Peleiu, Makin Island, Kwajalein, and others, she found herself in the last Battleship vs Battleship action– the Battle of Suriago Strait. There, Mississippi herself fired the final salvo in history by a battleship against other warships– contributing to the sinking of Japanese battleship Yamashiro.
(Again with the camouflage. During WWII her armament of anti-aircraft guns steadily increased)
More shore bombardments in the Philippines and Okinawa took place before she witnessed the surrender of Japan in Tokyo Bay, winning a total of eight battle stars. In 1946, while most of the rest of the pre-1938 US battleships were laid up and/or scrapped, Mississippi was reclassified from BB-41 to AG-128 (auxiliary, gunnery training/guided missile ship) and spent the next decade as a platform for development of surface to air and surface to surface missiles. For this her rear turrets were removed to give a platform of missile launchers. Without her, the RIM-2 Terrier and Petrel missiles would never have been adopted.
Mississippi firing Terrier missiles in 1955. This hybrid missile/gun arrangement was a wet-dream for battleship advocates for the next fifty years. When the Iowa class were eventually recommissioned in the early 1980s, they were given 16 harpoon anti-ship missiles and 32 Tomahawk cruise missiles in place of a few of the 5-inch twin mounts, but never a large SAM complement as envisioned earlier.
Stricken in 1956, at the time she was the last pre-WWII battleship in active service with the US Navy. Of the 12 WWII era US dreadnoughts, only three of the Iowa class were on active duty when Mississippi was decommissioned. The other 9 much newer North Carolina, SoDak, Alaska, and Iowa-class battleships and battle cruisers all being laid up in red lead row as members of the mothball fleet. Within a few years all of these except the Iowas would be pulled from mothballs and sent either to live the rest of their lives as museum ships, or broken up.
Mississippi herself was scrapped without ceremony at the end of 1956, just shy of her 40th birthday. Today knick knacks of the ship sail beneath the sea with the modern Virgina-class submarine USS Mississippi, after being carried for a while by a large nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser of the same name while her bell and silver set are on display in her home state.
Specs
Displacement: 32,000 long tons (32,500 t)
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: 55 officers, 1,026 enlisted
Armament: (1917)
12 × 14 in (360 mm) guns,
14 × 5 in (130 mm)/51 cal guns
4 × 3 in (76 mm) guns, and
2 × 21 in (530 mm) torpedo tubes
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)
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