USS Missouri: Served in World War II and Korean War

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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.

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.

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.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, American History, Historical Conflicts, Korean War, Naval Battles, World War II

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