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Correct me if I’m wrong haven’t Iowa class battleships all been decommissioned sometime in the early 1990s?



Yes, and it was a colossal waste of money keeping them running even that long. Realistically they should have been scrapped in the period after the Korean war.


It has been proposed that the reason the battleships were in Pearl Harbor was so they would be the ships sunk when the Japanese attacked. The aircraft carriers were all far out to sea.

Whether this is true, it shows that the obsolescence of battleships (since aircraft carriers came on line) was recognized well before WWII.


Pearl Harbor converted the US in the Pacific from a 17 knot navy to a 25 knot navy.

We did get five of the eight battleships back (although some were basically cored out like a rotten tooth and rebuilt almost from scratch.) Two ships were left there (Utah and Arizona). Oklahoma was raised mostly to free up its slot in the harbor, but sank in 1947 while being towed to San Francisco Bay to be scrapped.

The BB's role in the Pacific War was as AA platforms and for shore bombardment.




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