There were earlier Missouris. This is the one that matters: USS Missouri (BB-63), last battleship the United States completed, the deck where the Second World War ended, now moored at Pearl Harbor a few hundred yards from Arizona.
Last of the line
Keel laid at the New York Navy Yard on 6 January 1941, while her sister Iowa was already rising in the same yard. Margaret Truman, daughter of Missouri’s junior senator, christened her on 29 January 1944. Commissioning was 11 June 1944, Captain William M. Callaghan in command. Iowa-class: 887 feet, nine 16-inch/50 guns, designed for 33 knots so she could stay with the carriers.
She was the last U.S. battleship finished. Illinois and Kentucky were not.
Shakedown in the Chesapeake, then Norfolk on 11 November, the Canal on the 18th, San Francisco to fit out as a fleet flagship. She reached Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve 1944 and Ulithi on 13 January 1945. There she was temporary headquarters ship for Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher.
Eight months of war
Combat began in the screen of Task Force 58. On 16 February 1945 the carriers she guarded launched the first carrier strikes on Japan since Doolittle. She bombarded Iwo Jima for the 19 February landings, then Okinawa. A kamikaze hit her in April. She kept station. She fired on the home islands in the last weeks.
She had been in the war eight months. That was enough to put her in Tokyo Bay.
2 September 1945
On 29 August she entered the bay with the occupation force. On the morning of the 2nd the Allied signatures and the Japanese signatures were taken on her veranda deck. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur presided. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz signed for the United States. Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru and General Umezu Yoshijiro signed for Japan. The ceremony lasted twenty-three minutes and was broadcast around the world.
The choice of ship was not an accident. She was new, undamaged, and named for the home state of the president who had ordered the bombs. The surrender plaque is still on that deck.
She left the bay soon after, reached New York in October, and hosted President Truman for Navy Day. Official credit for the war is three battle stars.
The only battleship left
By June 1950 she was the only U.S. battleship still in commission. On 17 January that year, outbound from Hampton Roads on a training run, she ran aground 1.6 miles from Thimble Shoals Light and stayed there for weeks. The Navy got her off. Then Korea began.
She made two combat deployments, 1950–53, flagship work and the gun line: Inchon approaches, Wonsan, the coast opposite the Chosin fighting. In those two tours she fired thousands of 16-inch and 5-inch rounds—more stars for Korea (five) than for the war that made her famous. After midshipman and European cruises she decommissioned at Bremerton on 26 February 1955. For three decades she sat in the reserve fleet and became a tourist stop on the Washington waterfront.
Last guns, last missiles
The 600-ship Navy brought her back. Recommissioned at San Francisco on 10 May 1986, she carried Tomahawk, Harpoon, and Phalanx on the 1944 hull. She circumnavigated. On 7 December 1991 she was at Pearl Harbor for the fiftieth anniversary of the attack, with President George H. W. Bush aboard.
In the Persian Gulf she became the first battleship to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles in combat, 17 January 1991, at the opening of Desert Storm. Twenty-eight missiles in five days. The 16-inch battery spoke again on 3 February for the first time since Korea, then in the Faylaka Island feint that helped fix Iraqi attention on a landing that did not come. A Pioneer drone spotting for her guns took surrenders—the first surrender to an unmanned aircraft in the field. Wisconsin fired with her. They were the last battleships to fire in anger.
She left the Gulf on 21 March 1991 and decommissioned for the last time on 31 March 1992. Captain Albert L. Kaiss was the last man off. Struck in 1995, donated 4 May 1998, she opened as a memorial at Pearl Harbor in 1999, pointed at the channel Arizona never left.
Three wars. One surrender. The last American battleship completed, and the last one to shoot.