Cabin Fever Successfully Averted
Posted By Russ Emerson on March 28, 2005 at 9:19 pm
BB-55, the USS North Carolina…
[Click to view large image – 1024×680, 600KB]
[More photos to follow.]
Can you say “behemoth?” I knew you could.
‘Twas a beautiful day in Wilmington, where the “Showboat” is permanently moored. It rained until I got there, was sunny and breezy while I was there, and began raining in earnest when I got back to my SUV for the drive home. Excellent timing on my part, if I do say so myself.
I think I can now return for a while to my hermit-like ways. I’ll have to get out again when baseball season starts, of course, but in the meantime I’ve had my recommended quarterly allowance of sun and fresh air.
[Just kidding, Mom.]
While touring the ship, I had a remarkable encounter, the details of which I will relate tomorrow.
If the technical details of battleship design really float your boat (sorry about that…) then I haven’t seen anything better than Norman Friedman’s work, U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History, which really gets into the specifics of how our battlewagons were conceived, designed and built.
The book begins in the pre-Dreadnought era, covering ships such as the infamous USS Maine, continuing with the first true battleship in the US Navy, the USS Indiana (BB-1) of 1895, and carries on through to the USS Iowa (BB-61) and the sister ships of her class, USS New Jersey, USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin.
As a History Guy (I think that’s an official title…) I found it particularly interesting to see how the 1922 Washington Treaty, which limited the numbers and sizes of battleships, influenced ship design in the interwar period.
[USS North Carolina was designed and built just as Japan began ignoring the Washington Treaty, making her the first of the U.S. WW2-era “fast battleships” to mount the deadly 16″ guns, but among the last to have artificial limits constraining her overall size.]
Copiously illustrated, this book is a must-have for serious students of U.S. naval history.
The Iowa class battleship Kentucky, BB-66, was sleeker. None of that clutter above the deck
BB-66.