What is interesting about the battleship New Jersey?

Answer 1

The New Jersey was one of the four Iowa Class battleships built by the US, the last battleships the nation ever completed. There were two more Iowas under construction when WWII ended which were never finished. All the Iowas saw service in the Korean War, but by 1957 the last of them, the Wisconsin, joined the others in the mothball fleet, where mostly they slumbered for a quarter of a century. When Reagan was president he had all the four Iowas returned to the active fleet, with extensive modernization, which cost about three times per ship what they had cost to build when new. This was controversial, because their design was forty years old by that time, and no other nation had felt the need for battleships for decades. Reagan was a very old-fashioned guy though. As soon as he was out of office the Iowas went back into mothballs, where they will no doubt remain. As a bit of political patronage to spread the wealth of tax dollars from the program to bring the old ships back to the fleet each was to have its own separate home port, in four different congressional districts, and billions were spent dredging channels for the massive ships to their new homes, most almost finished.....when the ships went back into the reserve fleet.

The only exception to the lengthy stay in the mothball fleet was the New Jersey, BB 62. When the Vietnam War was heating up, the New Jersey was brought out of mothballs. At that time the New Jersey, Wisconsin and Iowa were tied up together in the reserve fleet at Bayonne, New Jersey. The New Jersey was selected because she was the one moored outboard, and thus the one that was easy to get loose, using tugboats. It was not possible to just go aboard and start her engines and pull out, she had to be moved with tugboats and brought back to life. After a brief modernization, she was off for Vietnam.

The Marines and Army troops LOVED the New Jersey. The biggest guns put on any new Navy ships since the battleship days are 5 inch guns. They rely on missiles now, which are good for certain things. But one shell from the Jersey's 16 inch main guns could create an instant helicopter landing zone in the thickest jungle, knocking down every tree for one hundred yards, and knocking all the leaves off the trees beyond that for a couple of hundred more yards.

EIGHTY PER CENT of Vietnam was within range of the New Jersey's main guns.

You could send one multimillion dollar navy fighter-bomber, with a pilot it had taken years and millions of dollars to train, to knock out a little bridge over a stream. Or you could send one 16 inch shell from the New Jersey, which cost $1300 dollars when they were last made in the early 1950s.

Battleship shells arrive on target supersonically. That means there is no warning screech of incoming artillery shells like in the movies. The first thing the enemy knows, is he is blown shy high. And the guns were accurate, unlike bombs dropped in close air support, which might or might not destroy enemy reinforced strong points if they actually managed to hit it. There was no doubt with a battleship shell.

So effective was the New Jersey in her role off the coast of Vietnam that the North Vietnamese Communists made a big controversy over her at the Paris Peace Talks. These talks dragged on for years, and were a joke, the US allowing the Communists to use the talks to buy time while haggling over trivialities. Almost a year was spent squabbling over the shape of the table they should sit down at to begin talking. But the one thing the Communists were able to accomplish was to raise such a stink over the New Jersey that the US voluntarily withdrew the New Jersey after barely a year, and put her back in mothballs in 1968.

All the last battleships the US built, including the Iowas, developed their motive power in high speed turbines, which churned out revolutions in thousands per minute. But the ships massive propellers operate most efficiently at no more than 200 rpm. Thus the thousands of RPMs generated by the turbines have to be slowed to hundreds turning the massive propeller shafts. This was done through reduction gears, a very complex, extremely finely machined cluster of gears housed in a metal box in the engine rooms, from which the propeller shafts went out the back of the ship to turn the screws. During the Vietnam War the New Jersey's reduction gear housings had to be kept padlocked and guarded. Military service was so unpopular that some disgruntled sailor drafted into the Navy might have been tempted to throw a handful of scrap metal shavings in amongst the reduction gears, which would have ruined the gears and forced the ship into a many-months long overhaul in a shipyard to try to repair the damage, during which the disgruntled sailor could have enjoyed unlimited shore leave.