Key facts
- Namesake
- State of Iowa
- Ordered
- 1 July 1939
- Builder
- New York Naval Yard
- Laid down
- 27 June 1940
- Launched
- 27 August 1942
- Sponsored by
- Ilo Wallace
- Commissioned
- 22 February 1943
- Decommissioned
- 24 March 1949
- Recommissioned
- 25 August 1951
- Stricken
- 17 March 2006
- Identification
- Callsign : NEPM Hull number : BB-61
- Motto
- Our Liberties We Prize, Our Rights We Will Maintain
- Nickname s
- "The Big Stick" (1952), "The Grey Ghost" (Korean War), "The Battleship of Presidents"
- Honors and awards
- 11 battle stars
- Fate
- Museum ship
- Class type
- Iowa -class battleship
- Displacement
- 48,110 long tons (48,880 t) Standard 57,540 long tons (58,460 t) full load
- Length
- 887 ft 3 in (270.43 m)
via Wikipedia infobox
~40 min read
Encyclopedic overview
USS Iowa (BB-61) is a retired battleship, the lead ship of her class, and the fourth in the United States Navy to be named after the state of Iowa. Owing to the cancellation of the Montana-class battleships, Iowa is the last lead ship of any class of United States battleships and was the only ship of her class to serve in the Atlantic Ocean during World War II.
During World War II, she carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt across the Atlantic to Mers El Kébir, Algeria, en route to a conference of vital importance in 1943 in Tehran with Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom and Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. When transferred to the Pacific Fleet in 1944, Iowa shelled beachheads at Kwajalein and Eniwetok in advance of Allied amphibious landings and screened aircraft carriers operating in the Marshall Islands.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “USS Iowa” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.