The Last Battleship: February ‘99 American History Feature

 | American History  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The Last Battleship

World War II ended on the deck of the USS Missouri. Five years later the Korean War broke out–and the “Mighty Mo” was the only U.S. battleship ready to fight.

By Paul Stillwell

Life was exciting for 23-year-old Ensign Lee Royal in the summer of 1950. The tall, slim Texan had recently graduated from the United States Naval Academy and reported for duty on board the most famous warship in the world, the USS Missouri. Royal was wearing the gold bars of a commissioned officer, a step up from the previous year when he had served on the same ship as a midshipman on a training cruise.

The Missouri had visited England during that cruise, and Royal and two classmates had been brash enough to go to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country home. They wanted to shake the hand of the former British prime minister. Churchill had been even more obliging than that, taking the three young midshipmen on a tour of the grounds and then presenting them with books, cigars, and wine. An amazed bodyguard told them privately that the British statesman had been much more hospitable to them than to many of his famous visitors. The guard mentioned that Churchill was fond of navy men, Americans, and young people. The midshipmen belonged to all three categories.

By 1950, the Missouri was the U.S. Navy’s only active battleship–just a decade after the navy had considered battleships to be its foremost fighting ships. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, however, had dramatically changed the situation. Soon aircraft carriers and submarines became the navy’s primary offensive weapons, while battleships were relegated to a secondary role. They had been designed to fight gun duels against large surface vessels, but those encounters rarely occurred in World War II. The United States entered the war with a number of old, slow battleships commissioned between 1912 and 1923, which were primarily used for shore bombardment and to support amphibious landings. Only the navy’s 10 new battleships, commissioned between 1941 and 1944, were fast enough to travel in aircraft carrier task groups and provide antiaircraft protection.

The USS Missouri was the last battleship the navy completed. Commissioned in June 1944, she reached the Western Pacific war zone in early 1945. The ship served with carrier forces in support of landings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and near the end of the war, the Missouri’s 16-inch guns bombarded industrial targets in Japan itself.

“Mighty Mo” became world-famous as the site of the Japanese surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, bringing World War II to an end. The Missouri and dozens of other U.S. warships arrived home to a triumphant welcome, but the nation demobilized rapidly once the hostilities ceased. At the end of the war, the navy had 23 battleships in commission but soon began withdrawing them from active service–mothballing the newest ones and scrapping the oldest. The return to peacetime defense budgets emphasized the fact that the battleships’ period of primacy was over.

By the summer of 1950, the Missouri had been downgraded from a full-fledged warship to a training vessel with a reduced crew. Economy-minded Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson would have preferred to decommission the Missouri entirely to save money, but President Harry S. Truman wouldn’t allow it. The president was particularly fond of the ship. Not only was she named for his home state, but his daughter Margaret had christened her.

When Lee Royal returned to the Missouri the year after his visit with Churchill, the ship was making another training cruise, but this time budget considerations limited her itinerary to the western Atlantic Ocean. Still, Royal found it an enjoyable experience, particularly when the battleship made a port visit to New York City in mid-August. One evening Royal and a date went to see a Broadway musical. When he returned to the ship at one in the morning the officer on the quarterdeck asked him, “Did you have a good time?” The ensign replied that he had. “Good,” the officer said, “because that’s the last one you’re going to have for some time.” The Missouri was going back to war.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.