USS NOrth Carolina

USS North Carolina (BB-55) began her life in the Brooklyn New York Naval Shipyard in October 1937. She was the first of a new class of fast battleships and the first new USN battleship in two decades. Her main armament was nine 16-inch guns in three turrets plus numerous smaller size guns for air defense. At 728 long she was over two football fields long and 108 feet wide. Top speed was 27 knots (31 mph) so she could keep up with the new fast attack aircraft carriers. Her crew was 144 officers and 2195 men who all lived in very cramped quarters. Privacy was very scarce or nonexistent.

USS North Carolina was launched on 13 Jun 1940 and commissioned on 9 April 1941. There was a lengthy shakedown period before she joined the fleet due to vibrations in the propeller shafts. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Hawaii on 7 Dec 1941 she joined Task Force 16 where she escorted the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise for the invasion of Guadalcanal in Aug 1942. She took part in the Guadalcanal campaign during the rest of that year. While participating in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons in August 1942. She was damaged by a Japanese submarine torpedo on 15 September, in an attack that also fatally damaged aircraft carrier USS Wasp(CV-7).

After repairs, she returned to the campaign and continued to screen carriers during the campaigns across the central Pacific in 1943 and 1944, including the Gilberts and Marshall Islands and the Mariana and Palau Islands, where she saw action during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. This was the pattern of operations for her that lasted for the rest of World War II: serving in the anti-aircraft screen of aircraft carrier task forces and occasionally using her heavy guns to bombard Japanese-held islands. North Carolina continued her Western Pacific activities in 1945, participating in the invasions of Iwo Jima in February and Okinawa in March and April. The battleship also screened carriers on raids throughout the combat zone, including attacks on the Japanese home islands

At the end of the war, she remained in commission for a brief time before being laid up in reserve (“mothball fleet”). After a statewide fund-raising campaign in the early 1960s, North Carolina was sold to the State of North Carolina thus saving the ship the breaker’s yard.  In 1962, the North Carolina Museum was opened in Wilmington, North Carolina.