Missouri: The Most Famous Battleship Of All Time (And a Truly Deadly Warship)

Robert Farley

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USS Missouri entered service in June 1944 and joined Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 (fast carrier task force) in January 1945. Missouri’s primary mission was aircraft-carrier escort, although it participated in the bombardment of Okinawa in 1945. On April 11, it suffered superficial damage from a kamikaze strike.

In 1999 USS Missouri opened as a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, not far from the wreck of USS Arizona. It has subsequently appeared in a pair of terrible movies; the 2001 Michael Bay effort Pearl Harbor, in which it fills in for USS West Virginia, and the 2012 film Battleship, in which it fights aliens. Missouri was also the setting for 1992’s Under Siege which was altogether better than either of the other two films.

The North Carolina– and South Dakota–class battleships were designed with the limits of the Washington Naval Treaty in mind. Although much more could be accomplished in 1938 with thirty-five thousand tons than in 1921, sacrifices still had to be made. As had been practice in the first round of battleship construction, U.S. Navy architects accepted a low speed in return for heavy armor and armament. Consequently, both the South Dakotas and the North Carolinas had speeds a knot or two slower than most foreign contemporaries. The Montanas, the final battleship design authorized by the Navy, would also have had a twenty-eight-knot maximum speed. In any case, Japan’s failure to ratify the 1936 London Naval Treaty bumped the maximum standard tonnage from thirty-five to forty-five thousand, giving the designers some extra space to work with. The result was the Iowa class, the most powerful and best-designed battleships ever built.

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