A unique compilation of technical data and the career histories of the lowa, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Missouri.

In 1938, the United States abandoned the constraints imposed by the Washington Teaty and began work on a new class of super-battleships. This book covers the design, construction, and employment of the four Iowa-class battleships, the largest in the American fleet. During World War II, they served as guards for the aircraft carriers and their bombardments provided cover for the numerous landings in the Pacific. At the war's end, the Japanese signed their surrender on the decks of an Iowa-class battleship, the USS Missouri. After World War II, the ships continued to serve, providing support during Korea, Vietnam, and even the first Gulf War. This book tells the full story of the greatest of the American battleships.

USS Iowa BB-61, the first of four Iowa-class battleships built for the U.S. Navy, was launched in 1942. Capable of thirty-three knots and armed with nine new fifty-caliber sixteen-inch guns, she was the pinnacle of battleship design for the U.S. Navy during World War II. The Iowa class perfectly merged the heavy armor of battleships with the speed of battlecruisers. Iowa's speed and heavy armament positioned her to accompany and protect U.S. Fast Carrier task forces through the Pacific War by participating in multiple actions from Truck, the Philippine Sea, Leyte, and ending in Tokyo Bay. Deactivated in 1948, the outbreak of the Korean War saw Iowa recommissioned in 1951 for shore bombardment duty in support of United Nation troops against the North Korean army invasion. Iowa returned to the U.S. in 1952, and then participated in NATO exercises until she was decommissioned in 1958. Soviet expansion and rearmament programs in the 1970's saw Iowa recommissioned in 1984 following a two-year modernization program. This program saw the addition of nuclear capable Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles and modern computer-based communication technology. Extensive exercises with NATO forces and goodwill visits carried through until April 1989, when tragedy struck the ship with an explosion in gun turret two killing 47crew members. The soundness of Iowa's design and her armored strength prevented the explosion from reaching her magazines and the potential loss of the ship. Decommissioned in October 1990 and placed in reserve, she would eventually be stricken from the Navy record in 2006. Transferred to the Port of Los Angeles in 2012, Iowa now serves as the National Museum of the Surface Navy located at San Pedro, California.

The Iowa-class battleships were America's--and the world's--last active battleships, serving as recently as 1995. Back in the World War II era, six of the class were ordered, and four completed: Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri and Wisconsin. The Missouri rose to fame as the site of the Japanese surrender ending WWII. Each armed with nine 16-inch rifles able to hurl 2,700-lb shells more than 23 miles, the Iowas were capable of combating formidable sea-going foes. In actuality, however, their huge main guns were used instead to shell enemy land positions during WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. In later years their original arrays of 16-inch and five-inch guns were augmented with missiles, including the Harpoon as well as the Tomahawk cruise missiles. Explore the decks and depths of these mighty warships, once home to thousands of sailors, 88 pages packed with over 270 color photos, carefully chosen to show the subtle differences between these four near-identical ships.

USS Iowa (BB-61) was the lead ship in one of the most famous classes of battleships ever commissioned into the US Navy. Transferred to the Pacific Fleet in 1944, the Iowa first fired her guns in anger in the Marshall Islands campaign, and sunk her first enemy ship, the Katori. The Iowa went on to serve across a number of pivotal Pacific War campaigns, including at the battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. The ship ended the war spending several months bombarding the Japanese Home Islands before the surrender in August 1945. After taking part in the Korea War, the Iowa was decommissioned in 1958, before being briefly reactivated in the 1980s as part of President Reagan's 600-Ship Navy Plan. After being decommissioned a second and final time in 1990, the Iowa is now a museum ship in Los Angeles. This new addition to the Anatomy of the Ship series is illustrated with contemporary photographs, scaled plans of the ship and hundreds of superb 3D illustrations which bring every detail of this historic battleship to life.

The four battleships of the Iowa class, the crowning achievement of U.S. battleship construction, had exceptionally long careers and each in their way left a distinctive mark not only on the U.S. Navy but on naval history at large. Built as the ultimate American battleship and designed to engage the major units of the Japanese and German fleets, the vessels were commissioned in the closing stages of World War II, the beginning of half a century of service during which individual units saw action in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Lebanese Civil War and finally the Persian Gulf War. As such, these ships are symbolic of the primacy of U.S. seapower during the Cold War, and the preservation of all four members of this mighty class as museums is testament not only to their enduring fascination for successive generations of Americans, but also to the immense technical, financial, military, and political resources wielded by the United States during the second half of the twentieth century.

A Visual Tour of Battleship USS New Jersey is a photographic exploration of the entire ship, from the top of the mainmast to the bottom of the chain locker. It capture areas of USS New Jersey that have never appeared in print before.

This volume details the design, construction, and operation of the first six of the ten US fast battleships, two of the North Carolina class and four of the South Dakota class. These six battleships were all authorized in 1936 and were the first vessels built in the US since 1923. Consequently, these ships benefitted from enormous technological leaps, with improvements in ship design, power, armor, armament and the single most important improvement the use of radar guided fire control helping to change the course of the war in the Pacific. Packed with first-hand accounts, battle reports, and specially created artwork this book tells the story of these war-winning vessels.

This book presents an overview of proposed conversions of the Iowa class battleships and Alaska class large cruisers from 1942 to 1964. This book covers 16 conversions, with line drawings and full color original art illustrations for 11 of 16 proposed projects. Coverage extends from MACK-equipped double-ended Talos Guided Missile Battleship designs to Jupiter-IRBM-carrying "Missile Monitor" designs. This is a truly unique volume that provides not only new proposed conversion information, but a look at the ongoing US Navy modernization and experimentation projects of the early postwar/cold war era. This book is a must for those who have an interest in battleships in general and the Iowa class in particular.

Warship Builders is the first scholarly study of the U.S. naval shipbuilding industry from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, when American shipyards produced the world's largest fleet that helped defeat the Axis powers in all corners of the globe. A colossal endeavor that absorbed billions and employed virtual armies of skilled workers, naval construction mobilized the nation's leading industrial enterprises in the shipbuilding, engineering, and steel industries to deliver warships whose technical complexity dwarfed that of any other weapons platform. Based on systematic comparisons with British, Japanese, and German naval construction, Thomas Heinrich pinpoints the distinct features of American shipbuilding methods, technology development, and management practices that enabled U.S. yards to vastly outproduce their foreign counterparts. Throughout the book, comparative analyses reveal differences and similarities in American, British, Japanese, and German naval construction. Heinrich shows that U.S. and German shipyards introduced electric arc welding and prefabrication methods to a far greater extent than their British and Japanese counterparts between the wars, laying the groundwork for their impressive production records in World War II. While the American and Japanese navies relied heavily on government-owned navy yards, the British and German navies had most of their combatants built in corporately-owned yards, contradicting the widespread notion that only U.S. industrial mobilization depended on private enterprise. Lastly, the U.S. government's investments into shipbuilding facilities in both private and government-owned shipyards dwarfed the sums British, Japanese, and German counterparts expended. This enabled American builders to deliver a vast fleet that played a pivotal role in global naval combat.