USS Missouri: Tokyo Bay Surrender, a Chesapeake Grounding and Cher

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USS Missouri, BB-63, was an Iowa-class fast battleship ordered in 1940 and commissioned in 1944, the last battleship commissioned by the United States. More than 887 feet long and over 57,000 tons fully loaded, she had more than 200,000 shaft horsepower, up to 19.5 inches of armor on her turret faces, a 32.5-knot top speed and a narrow beam to fit the Panama Canal locks. Her nine 16-inch guns fired 2,000-pound shells. She screened carriers as an anti-aircraft platform and bombarded Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On April 11, 1945, a kamikaze hit just below her main deck and caused only superficial damage. On September 2, 1945, Japan signed the instrument of surrender aboard her in Tokyo Bay, anchored near where Commodore Matthew Perry anchored in 1853, with Perry's flag displayed under glass.

President Harry Truman, a Missourian whose daughter Margaret christened the ship, kept her active while her sisters went to reserve. In 1946 she carried a Turkish ambassador's remains to Istanbul amid Soviet pressure on the Turkish Straits. On January 17, 1950, Captain William Brown ran her aground in Chesapeake Bay, and freeing her took two weeks. Five months later the Korean War began; she was the first U.S. battleship in Korean waters and earned five battle stars before going to the mothball fleet in Bremerton, Washington, in 1955. Reactivated in 1984 with Tomahawk, Harpoon and Phalanx systems, she fired nearly 30 Tomahawks and her 16-inch guns in the 1991 Gulf War, then was decommissioned in 1992 and moved to Pearl Harbor as a museum in 1998.

• In Korea she fired on trains as they left coastal tunnels and shelled Samchok as a diversion from the Inchon landings.
• In 1989 Cher filmed the video for If I Could Turn Back Time on her deck, a public relations problem for the Navy.
• In the Gulf, HMS Gloucester shot down an Iraqi Silkworm missile tracking toward her with a Sea Dart.
• A Phalanx on a nearby U.S. frigate locked onto her chaff and hit her with depleted uranium rounds; no one was killed.
• At Pearl Harbor her bow points toward the USS Arizona, and her superstructure blocks the Arizona from view on the surrender deck.