The korean war had begun a month and a half earlier, on June 25, 1950. As Communist North Korea army units advanced into South Korea, President Truman committed American troops to the hostilities. Because the Missouri possessed the only active 16-inch guns in the fleet–an important factor in the planning of amphibious assaults–she received orders to report for duty half a world away.

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Five years earlier, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had accepted the Japanese surrender on the captain’s veranda deck of the Missouri. Now the general was planning an invasion at the port of Inchon, behind North Korean lines. He scheduled the action for mid-September and wanted the Missouri’s big guns to stop North Korean traffic on roads leading into the Inchon-Seoul area.

The Missouri’s crew had much to do. The ship traveled first to her home port of Norfolk, Virginia, where she spent four days and nights taking on supplies of food, fuel, and ammunition. The battleship’s peacetime crew increased to a fighting complement of 114 officers and 2,070 enlisted men.

On Saturday morning, August 19, 1950, the 887-foot-long warship cruised through Hampton Roads and Thimble Shoal Channel and into the Atlantic Ocean. The same routine trip had been a disaster seven months earlier. On January 17, while leaving for a training cruise to Cuba, the Missouri had run aground in the same port, a huge embarrassment for the navy. Captain William D. Brown was relieved of command shortly after that.

The Missouri’s role in the Inchon mission was considered so important that she went to sea in the face of threatening weather. That night newly appointed Captain Irving Duke and his crew paid heavily as they encountered a hurricane off North Carolina. Under normal conditions the Missouri was rock steady, but these waters were anything but normal. The wind and waves sent two helicopters over the side and caused serious damage elsewhere. Trying to outflank the storm had been a calculated risk, and the ship suffered for it.

The battleship passed through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific Ocean and proceeded to Pearl Harbor for repairs and installation of antiaircraft guns that had been removed after World War II. She then continued westward–through the Philippine archipelago and toward Japan.

Nature, though, didn’t respect the navy’s scheduling. Typhoon Kezia lay in the ship’s path. This time, Captain Duke took a more deliberate approach, following a course that diminished the risk of storms. The ship came through unscathed, but the delays from the repair period and the zigzag course kept the ship from reaching Korea in time for the Inchon invasion.

Up until this point the fighting in Korea had not been going well for the ill-prepared United Nations forces. The North Koreans had pushed steadily southward, driving the U.N. troops into the Pusan perimeter at the southern end of the Korean peninsula. MacArthur’s invasion at Inchon, however, proved to be a brilliant success even without the Missouri’s firepower. When it became apparent that the battleship could not make it to Inchon in time for the invasion, which had to be precisely timed to take advantage of the tides, the Missouri received orders to bombard North Korean transportation facilities and ground troops along the way. When the ship finally reached Inchon on September 21, MacArthur, an old soldier who was then 70, came aboard for a visit.

Members of the ship’s Marine detachment scoffed at the theatrical general, whom some people scornfully referred to as “Dugout Doug.” Some of the men under MacArthur’s command during World War II had given him the nickname due to his absence during the siege of Bataan on the PhilippineIslands.

When the five-star general arrived on board, he spoke with Captain Lawrence Kindred, commanding officer of the Missouri’s Marines. The general told him, “I have just returned from the far north, where your comrades-in-arms are in close combat with the enemy. And I wish to report to you that there is not a finer group of fighting men in the world than the U.S. Marines.” The previously skeptical Kindred became an instant MacArthur fan.

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