Today is December 7, 2019, 78 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I take this occasion for a bit of nautical history…
There have been two battleships named U.S.S. Pennsylvania. The first Pennsylvania was a ship of the line (the term battleship was not yet in use) built in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. As it was to become the largest ship on the planet, a special shiphouse had to be built to house it while it was under construction.
Twelve years passed from the time the keel was laid until its launch on July 18, 1837. It was a monster (at the time): 212 feet long and when fully outfitted, would carry 120 guns on three gun decks.
Her launch occurred as full force of the Panic of 1837 was washing over the American economy, so people were looking for something to celebrate. An estimated 100,000 people crowded Philadelphia’s wharves and rooftops to witness the event. [This was a scene too good for me to pass up, and becomes a pivotal moment in The Girl Who Led the Mob, Book 2 of Rian Krieger’s Saga.]
The Pennsylvania was expected to be the pride of the US Navy, but two historical currents got in her way.
- No naval wars were on the horizon.
- When her keel was laid in 1825, only the most prescient envisioned that steam-powered ships would soon enough replace ships of sail.
The U.S.S. Pennsylvania never saw action. She sailed to Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia and was used as a receiving ship (quite a comedown from “pride of the US Navy”) to house newly recruited sailors before they were assigned to sea duty. She was burned by Union troops at the beginning of the Civil War to prevent her from falling into Confederate hands.
The second battleship Pennsylvania was launched in March 1915 out of Newport News, Virginia. During this arms-race era, bigger/faster/more powerful battleships were being launched annually by nations who dreamed of dominating the high seas. This ship was known as a super-dreadnought. She and her sister ship, the Arizona, were constructed with “all or nothing” design, which meant that the thickest armor was placed around the most important parts of the ship, with almost no armor in other places.
Ironically, the U.S.S. Pennsylvania never saw action during World War I because her engines ran on fuel oil and only coal was available in England, where she would have had to resupply. Re-outfitted and modernized in the early 1930s, she was transferred to duty in the Pacific. The Pennsylvania was in drydock at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and thus escaped the fate of the Arizona, moored not far away. She was repaired and saw significant action from Alaska to the Philippines throughout the rest of World War II.
When researching these battleships, I was more than a little disappointed when I learned the fate of this proud ship, the second U.S.S. Pennsylvania. As the Cold War heated up, she was used as a target to test the effect of atomic bombs on fleets of ships. She was bombed twice off Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Crossroads, studied for over a year, and finally scuttled into the depths of the Pacific in 1948.
History Pendulum 