Tag Archives: USS Missouri (BB-11)

A Forest of Doomed Lattice

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105 years ago today. Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania. 22 October 1919. Obsolete “pre-dreadnought” type battleships in the Reserve Basin almost a year after the conclusion of the Great War, awaiting a very near future that would turn nearly all of them into recycled scrap iron or sunk in live fire exercises.

Courtesy of Frank Jankowski, 1981. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 92300

Ships in the front row are, from left to right: USS Iowa (BB-4), USS Massachusetts (BB-2), USS Indiana (BB-1), USS Kearsarge (BB-5), USS Kentucky (BB-6), and USS Maine (BB-10), while at least three other battlewagons are in the rear, almost certainly including USS Missouri (BB-11) and USS Ohio (BB-12). Although some including the three Maine-class ships were rather “low mileage” — Ohio had only joined the fleet 15 years prior and had spent much of her latter career in ordinary, only venturing out of mothballs for summer midshipman cruises– others were relics of the Span-Am War, with Indiana credited with having dispatched two Spanish destroyers at the Battle of Santiago. 

While all had seen updates in their service life, switching from pole masts and the gleaming paint schemes and bow crests of the Great White Fleet days to lattice masts and haze grey, they could not compete with the new way of war. For instance, a single Colorado-class super-dreadnought, the first of which would enter service in 1921, weighed 32,000 tons and carried eight 16-inch guns compared to Indiana’s circa 1893 10,000-ton displacement and main battery of four 13″/35s.

Of the above nine or ten battleships, all save for Kearsarge— the only United States Navy battleship not named after a state– would be sold for scrap or sunk (Iowa and Massachusetts) by 1923 to comply with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty. They were left to be remembered only by their silver services, bells, and bow crests, typically preserved somewhere in their namesake states. 

Soon after the above image was snapped, Kearsarge was converted into a cruising heavy-lift crane ship (AB-1) in 1920, then was unimaginatively renamed Crane Ship No. 1 in 1941, before being finally sold for scrap in 1955.

Heavy Lift Crane Ship No1,(Ex Lead Ship, Battleship USS Kearsarge) pictured in dry dock at Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston. c.1925.

 

During her “second life,” Kearsarge raised the lost submarine USS Squalus in 1939 and would lift into place much of the heavy guns, turrets, and armor for cruisers and battleships constructed or rebuilt at Norfolk/Newport News through 1945. Here, she is seen, left, alongside the new SoDak-class fast battleship USS Alabama (BB-60), right, fitting out at the Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1942. Note the size difference between the two hulls. NH 57767

Interestingly, the wreck of Massachusetts scuttled off Pensacola in shallow water in 1923, was still used as a target through WWII when she passed to the ownership of the state of Florida.

Mighty Mo and O’Ryan’s Roughnecks: Hail, Hail, the Gang’s all here

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The original caption of this Underwood and Underwood news service photo received 3 May 1919:

U.S.S. Missouri steaming into her berth at Hoboken with last of 27th Division, namely the 106th Machine Gun Battalion. Red Cross women at left nearest the river’s bank are waiting for the ship to dock so as to distribute delicacies to the men, a regimental band playing, “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s all here,” and shows the men getting their first eyeful at the rail of the ship, of New York and the skyline of the city with the Metropolitan tower in bold relief against the eastern sky.”

War Department Archives, LOC 165-WW-138A-119

USS Missouri (BB-11), was the middle child in the three-ship Maine-class of pre-dreadnoughts ordered during the Spanish-American War. Commissioned 1 December 1903, she was obsolete just three years after she joined the fleet. A veteran of the circumnavigating Great White Fleet, she would spend most of her career alternating between ordinary and training cruises. Speaking of which, her Great War experience was spent in the Chesapeake, schooling new gunners and firemen. Once the war ended, she transitioned to what would have been termed “Magic Carpet” duty in the next World War, shuttling back and forth to Europe to bring 3,278 Doughboys back from “Over There” across four runs.

She would decommission 8 September 1919, at the ripe old age of 16 years old, and be sold for scrap three years later to comply with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty. Her name would be recycled in the 1940s for a “fast battleship” that you may have heard of.

As for the 27th ID, the Division was formed from NY Army National Guard units in 1917 and put under the command of Maj. Gen. John F. O’Ryan, an NYC attorney and politician who later went on to be Fiorello LaGuardia’s Police Commissioner. “O’Ryan’s Roughnecks” arrived at Brest, France, 10 May 1918 and by July were in action, seeing heavy losses along the St. Quentin Canal before going on to break the Hindenburg Line.

After WWII service in the Pacific from Makin Atoll to Okinawa, the 27th was later downgraded to an infantry brigade in 1986, the 27th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (“Empire”) of the NYANG, and has recently seen action in Afghanistan and Iraq.