USS New Jersey: Typhoon Cobra, Beirut Shelling and an Azur Lane Fan Event

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The Iowa-class battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) was ordered in 1939 and launched on December 7, 1942, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Franklin D. Roosevelt named her to repay a political debt to New Jersey governor and former Navy secretary Charles Edison, who had pushed to build her there. In World War II she guarded aircraft carriers, throwing up dense antiaircraft fire at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, and in December 1944 she rode out Typhoon Cobra, which sank three destroyers and cost 790 lives. Decommissioned in 1948, she returned for Korea in 1950, where a shore battery at Wonsan hit her number one turret, killing one sailor.

Reactivated in 1967 for Vietnam as the world's only active battleship, she lost her small antiaircraft guns, held 35.2 knots for six hours in trials and fired over 5,000 16-inch shells before Captain Robert Peniston told her to sleep lightly in 1969. Under Ronald Reagan's 600-ship Navy she came back with Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles, Phalanx guns and Pioneer drones, then shelled Druze and Syrian positions above Beirut in 1983, which Colin Powell later wrote made local factions see the U.S. as joining the fight. Decommissioned for good in February 1991 after 21 years of active service, the most of any Iowa-class ship, she opened as a museum in Camden in 2001.

• She earned 19 battle stars, the most of any U.S. Navy battleship.
• Each 16-inch shell weighed 2,700 pounds and could hit targets more than 20 miles inland.
• Some Lebanon shells missed by up to 10,000 yards after powder from different lots was remixed into the same bags.
• In 2024 a $10 million preservation project put her in dry dock number three at the Philadelphia shipyard, where she was built.
• In 2025 she hosted a two-day live event for Azur Lane, a mobile game that turns warships into anime characters.