The keel of USS New Jersey (BB.62) a battleship of 45 000 tons; (57 216 tons fully loaded) was laid at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on 16th September 1940. On 7th December 1942, exactly one year after Pearl Harbour, she was launched by the wife of Governor Edison of New Jersey. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the ship to be named New Jersey to repay a political debt to Governor Charles Edison. Edison had pushed to have the ship built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, so that Roosevelt could secure votes in Pennsylvania for the 1940 election. BB.62 was the second to carry the name of the 'Garden State', the first New Jersey launched in 1904, ended sadly in 1922 as a bombing target.
The Iowa-class i.e. Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin were the last and largest US battleships designed between 1934 and 1940. The programme called for a doubling of naval strength by 1946. However, delays in the late 1930s meant that only two battleships of the 35 000 ton North Carolina class were complete before Pearl Harbour. All other US battleships were over 17 years old.
After commissioning on 23rd May 1943 and fitting-out completed, New Jersey sailed from Philadelphia for a shakedown Caribbean cruise manned by a war time crew of 2 700. New Jersey carried a main armament of 9 x 16inch guns (in three triple turrets, two forward and one aft) each capable of throwing a 2 700 pound shell thirty miles. The battleship was protected by a 17inch armour belt. Her secondary armament comprised 20 x 5inch dual-purpose (DP) guns in twin mounts. The AA battery consisted of 64 x 40mm guns in 16 quadruple mounts and 60 twin mounted 20mm. Together these 5inch and light AA guns provided New Jersey with the ability to put up a barrage of 17.8 tons of AA fire every minute.
On 7th January 1944 she passed through the Panama Canal (a 65 000-ton limit was imposed by the Panama Canal) on her way to join Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher's Task Force 58 of the Fifth Fleet. On 25th January her first combat action was Operation Flintlock, the occupation of the Marshall Islands. While carrier fighter bombers blasted Kwajalein Atoll, New Jersey, Iowa, heavy cruiser Wichita and nine destroyers guarded the carriers. On 4th February, after similar operations off Eniwetok, New Jersey dropped anchor in Majuro lagoon, and here Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commanding Fifth Fleet, shifted his flag from the heavy cruiser Indianapolis to New Jersey. Next was the invasion of the Marianas where her heavy guns battered Saipan and Tinian. On 12th February 1944, New Jersey left Majuro to head a strike on Truk, the Imperial Japanese Navy's vaunted 'Gibraltar of the Pacific'. While TF58 was refuelling at sea, Japan's Admiral Koga was pulling out his major warships.
Nevertheless, when TF58's planes hit Truk early on 16th February, they caught the enemy unprepared, destroying many aircraft on the ground and taking a heavy toll of merchant shipping. Spruance himself led New Jersey, Iowa, a carrier, two heavy cruisers and four destroyers on a sweep to intercept fleeing warships. About forty miles NW of Truk, Spruance's ships sank a light cruiser and a destroyer. Another destroyer straddled by New Jersey's 16inch salvoes at more than twenty miles, escaped after firing a defiant torpedo spread. New Jersey carried Spruance's flag in attacks on Palaus, but on 10th April, the Admiral transferred back to Indianapolis. At the end of the month, New Jersey's guns bombarded New Guinea and then, during another blow at Truk, wrecked the Japanese airfield. When the Marine Corps hit the Saipan beaches on 15th June, New Jersey was one of seven battleships of Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee's, providing fire support for Operation Forager.
On 24th August, Fifth Fleet was designated Third Fleet when Admiral William F. Halsey, relieved Spruance, hoisting his flag on New Jersey at Pearl Harbour. Halsey would have preferred a carrier, but carriers are vulnerable, and he could not afford to risk command functions being interrupted by battle damage. His only alternative was the New Jersey. 'The Big J' sailed on 30th August to rendezvous with TF38 on 11th September. After strikes in the southern Philippines, New Jersey went for repair to Ulithi Atoll, the USN's new fleet anchorage in the Carolines, where preparations for the Leyte Gulf Landings were already in hand. While the 'Marianas Turkey Shoot' broke Japan's airpower, New Jersey helped to screen the carriers as American and Japanese pilots duelled in battle overhead.
In October 1944, she was Admiral William Halsey's 3rd Fleet flagship during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The Japanese had decided to make one last, great sortie. The battle was devastating to the Japanese, who lost around 400 planes and three of their aircraft carriers. New Jersey's role during the four days (23-26 October) of the greatest sea battle in history was scarcely glorious. She missed both the actions she might have fought in. Halsey thought that his carrier strikes had sufficiently mauled the converging Japanese squadrons trying to get amongst the invasion fleet in Leyte Gulf. On the evening of 24th October he rose to the bait presented by Vice-Admiral Ozawa when he left the invasion beaches to steam after Ozawa’s four almost empty carriers. Halsey mistakenly followed a decoy fleet, leaving valuable ships virtually unprotected. Halsey now realised his folly, he had missed a great opportunity to destroy the Japanese main force. At 10 55 hours Halsey swung his fast battleships and three carriers south, working up speed until New Jersey and Iowa, with light cruiser escorts, were way ahead. Halsey reached the invasion beaches just after midnight but Kurita was gone some two hours. Amazingly, the unprotected fleet, by the time Halsey arrived, had already repelled the Japanese in a stunning victory.
For Halsey, watching from New Jersey's bridge, it was the first and only fleeting surface action he saw during his entire career. He had missed both enemy fleets. Halsey had misread the opportunity he had dreamed of since being a cadet.
After Leyte, New Jersey moved north of Luzon Island where, on 29th October, she first encountered kamikaze air attack in strength. Around thirty aircraft dived on her task group: most were downed by the fighter screen. New Jersey's gunners blasted one, but too late to prevent it ramming the notoriously unlucky carrier Intrepid (nicknamed 'Decrepit', because she spent so much time being repaired). Some of this ill-luck spread to New Jersey: badly-aimed MG fire from Intrepid wounded three of the battleship's crew. New Jersey winged another kamikaze but too late to prevent it crashing onto Intrepid, but was more successful with another diving on the carrier Cabot. When 'the Big J' entered Ulithi lagoon on 27th November 1944, she had steamed over 36 000 miles in 95 days under Halsey's flag.
She did not rest long. On 11th December she sailed with Iowa and Wisconsin again for Luzon. For three days, after the force refuelled at sea from tankers, carrier aircraft harassed Luzon’s kamikaze airstrips. The kamikazes were temporarily subdued, but an unsuspected enemy was advancing from the east. Because of the rapid advance into enemy waters, insufficient onshore meteorological stations had been established. Third Fleet was briefed twice daily by Weather Control from Pearl Harbour, but local weather patrol planes were hampered by having to keep radio silence. However, each carrier had its 'weather officer'. Early on 17th December, when TF38 rendezvoused once more with the tankers, a sudden Force 8 gale whipped up rising seas, parted fuel hoses and threatened collisions between closely linked ships.
Aboard the carriers, aircraft were lashed to the deck with steel cables. Some returning pilots were ordered to ditch rather than risk the wildly-pitching flight decks. Refuelling was cancelled and during the next few hours, Halsey ordered three course changes. The last took New Jersey into the heart of the typhoon. The US Navy now took its worst storm damage since the Samoan hurricane of 1889.
The 70foot seas smashed from all sides. The typhoon tossed New Jersey as if she were a canoe. What it must have been like on a destroyer one-twentieth of New Jersey's size, one can only imagine. The 2 100 ton Spence capsized on 18th December; only twenty four of her three hundred strong crew survived. The smaller destroyer Hull, pushed so far over by a 110 knot gust that the sea poured down her stacks, went down with two hundred and two men. Only six men were saved from Hull's sister ship Monaghan. The escort carriers lost 146 aircraft while Monterey and Cowpens narrowly escaped destruction when planes broke loose, collided and started fires. Ten other destroyers, one tanker and a fleet tug were lost or damaged. The death toll reached seven hundred and ninety.
New Jersey continued her Pacific combat operations into 1945. After replenishment from the Fleet Train, Halsey led TF38 through the Luzon Strait. Between 10th and 20th January, his sortie sank some 133 000 tons of Japanese merchant shipping for the loss of only a handful of aircraft. Another typhoon was survived without loss on 13th January. On 27th January, Halsey's flag was lowered on New Jersey at Ulithi and Third Fleet again became Fifth Fleet as Admiral Spruance took command. New Jersey was directly engaged in the conquest of Okinawa in early 1945. She fought off air raids and defended the carriers from Kamikaze suicide planes. New Jersey also provided heavy bombardment, preparing the beaches for American invasion forces. New Jersey now flew Rear Admiral Oscar C. Badger's flag. But she was not to participate in the final scenes of the Pacific war: on 18th April, she sailed stateside, for an overhaul in Puget Sound.
On 14th August, the day before the cease-fire, New Jersey once more became Fifth Fleet's flagship, running up Spruance’s flag at Guam. Not until 17th September did she arrive in Japanese waters, where she remained until January 1946. On the 28th of that month, she sailed from Yokosuka with what must have been her happiest ‘crew' ever, one thousand GI’s on their way back to San Francisco. New Jersey participated in nearly all of the Western Pacific campaigns from her arrival in the theatre in January 1944 until the end of World War Two.
The next two years saw New Jersey active in new waters in the Atlantic. The battleship 'showed the flag' in Britain, at Rosyth and Portsmouth in June-July1947, and to Norway, where she was inspected by King Haakon VII. On 29th June 1948, tugs took her under Brooklyn Bridge (with only 2 feet clearance) en route to her decommissioned berth at Bayonne, New Jersey. The USN's 'mothballed' monsters, many believed, had no part to play in the nuclear age, and that was probably a majority opinion on 25th June 1950, when the Korean War began. On 4th July, when President Harry S. Truman ordered a naval blockade of the Korean coast, Missouri was the only US battleship in service. Then on 21st November, New Jersey was recommissioned under Captain David M. Tyree.
With much the same armament she had carried in 1943-45, the veteran battleship joined Fast Carrier Task Force 77 east of Korea, as flagship of Vice Admiral Harold M. Martin's Seventh Fleet, on 17th May 1951. During her two tours of duty in Korean waters, she operated in direct support of United Nations troops, interdicting Communist supply and communication routes. During her first shore bombardment mission at Wonsan, on the night of 20th May, her 16inch guns thundered for the first time in six years, as she hurled shells into Wonsan harbour. Communist shore batteries responded; New Jersey won the duel, but took a hit on No 1 turret and a near-miss aft, killing one man. This was her only combat fatality in her forty eight years of service. The value of fire-support from heavy ships was obvious from the outset. The North Korean Navy consisted of a few patrol-craft and torpedo boats, most of which were destroyed.
Nor was Communist airpower much to be feared, over the sea, at any rate. But the United Nations ‘interdiction’ of the enemy's troop and supply movements proved difficult, for the Communists had a good transport network and skilful camouflage and maintenance techniques. The navy cruisers scored notable successes, but the shallow coastal waters were cleverly mined, and well-sited. Concealed shore batteries also made off-shore bombardment hazardous. Obviously, battleships with their greater range, aided by spotter-aircraft, were needed. Missouri, arriving in September 1950, proved this immediately by wrecking a bridge and other railroad installations with 50 rounds of 16inch shells. When UN ground forces were on the defensive, it was inevitable that a wide front needed to be held against an enemy greatly superior in numbers, who did not hesitate to concentrate men in frontal mass-attacks. Much of the terrain was unfavourable for conventional land artillery so 'floating artillery' came into its own. On 18th August 1951, for example, New Jersey was mainly responsible for breaking up two determined North Korean attacks with a 24-hour bombardment.
The main limitation of naval gunfire was the vulnerability of spotter-planes and helicopters. As the war progressed, new land-sea cooperation techniques were evolved. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, Commander Naval Forces, Far East, put the 'air-gun' system into operation: simultaneous strikes by carrier and land-based aircraft and naval gunfire, with the planes 'repaying' the naval gunners for keeping down enemy AA fire by spotting for them. First used on 13th April 1953, New Jersey fired from thirteen miles out because of coastal minefields. Admiral Joy's verdict was: “We cannot write off the naval gun as obsolete”. During her first tour of duty off Korea, ending on 22nd November 1951, New Jersey steamed forty nine thousand miles and fired more than 3 000 rounds of 16inch and about 4 000 rounds of 5inch. She spent the greater part of 1952, after an overhaul at Norfolk Naval Yard, on training duty in the Atlantic and Caribbean. But on 10th April, 1953, after taking aboard Seventh Fleet's C-in-C from Missouri, she was once more off Korea. During the next month, she switched operations from the east to the west coast where, with the British cruiser HMS Newcastle, she silenced enemy gun positions in major Yellow Sea ports.
In July 1953 New Jersey and her consorts ranged the east coast. New Jersey's last shots in the Korean War were fired at gun emplacements around Wonsan on 26th July 1953, the day before the ceasefire. On 16th September, at Pusan, President Syngman Rhee awarded the Korean Presidential Unit Citation to the Seventh Fleet in a ceremony aboard New Jersey. General Matthew B. Ridgway, who had replaced MacArthur as Supreme Commander, credited naval forces with maintaining a near 100 per cent effective blockade, but commented that “the excellent gunfire support from the battleships was not sufficient, under the artificial circumstances in Korea (i.e. the absence of enemy sea and air opposition) to warrant the retention of large rifled guns in the US Navy”. Ridgway's verdict notwithstanding, New Jersey remained in commission for four years after the Korean War, employed once more on training duty and 'goodwill' visits.
From September 1954 to January 1956 she served with the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. In December 1956, however, New Jersey arrived at New York once more for deactivation, joining the Atlantic Reserve Fleet at Bayonne on 21st August 1957. When Iowa and Wisconsin followed her into reserve in 1958 (Missouri had been decommissioned in 1954), it seemed that the big-gun ship was really extinct. However, her third career began on 6th April 1968 when she was re-commissioned in Philadelphia. Operating from her new homeport of Long Beach, California. She arrived off the coast of Vietnam in September 1968. USS New Jersey was the only active battleship recalled to duty during the Vietnam War. The Department of Defence later estimated that one hundred American servicemen's lives were saved for each day she served off the coast of Vietnam, destroying enemy gun positions, troop concentrations and supply areas.
In Vietnam, however, the 'artificial circumstances' of Korea also prevailed. It was estimated that about one thousand of the important targets in Vietnam listed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff lay within range of 16inch naval guns. When she sailed from Long Beach, California, on 3rd September 1968, the battleship's main armament remained the same as in 1943-45. Fire-control computers and ordnance systems were updated, and her 40mm AA gun mountings had been removed and a helicopter landing pad provided. Her helicopters had already seen service: on 24th July, when New Jersey took on16 inch shells and powder tanks from the ammunition ship off San Diego, it was the first time helicopters had been so employed.
New Jersey's big guns fired on the new enemy for the first time on 30th September 1968, when she hit North Vietnamese batteries and fortified positions in and near the so-called Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). However, the naval commitment to Vietnam was nowhere near as great as in Korea. The use made of New Jersey's firepower in Vietnam has been described as 'amateurish if not unprofessional'. But, tributes to her from men on the ground go some way towards contradicting that comment. A US Army spotter-aircraft observer stated: “After New Jersey got on station and started shelling, she held ground fire to a minimum. This gives us more freedom in picking out better targets. New Jersey is best at rooting out and destroying enemy bunkers”. In the words of a Marine lance-corporal, “I have seen the New Jersey fire and we Marines find it a great comfort to know that if we ever needed her we could have her”. Another Army pilot reported to New Jersey: “Each round has a tremendous psychological effect on Communist troops, and have seen Communist gun crews run away from their guns when you are laying in your big ones”. In October-November 1968, New Jersey 'laid in' more than 3 000 'big ones', as well as close on 7 000 rounds of 5inch, hammering targets all along the coast. On 9th April 1969, New Jersey sailed from Yokosuka, Japan, for the States.
But her homecoming was delayed: the destruction of a Lockheed EC121 Constellation spy plane by North Korean fighters over the Sea of Japan, far from the battle zone, threatened to cause a major reversal of the US policy of disengagement. New Jersey was ordered back to Japanese waters to join a quickly assembled carrier task force. In such a situation, where surface action might threaten, her presence was of token value rather than a real deterrent: a Soviet missile-armed heavy destroyer, firing a missile many times more powerful than New Jersey's 16inch shells, outranges her by some three hundred miles. But the crisis passed without further incident and on 5th May 1969, New Jersey came back to Long Beach for what her crew assumed would be a thorough overhaul before another tour off Vietnam. Suddenly economies were demanded, and top of the Defence Department list was New Jersey. On 2th August 1969, Capt. Peniston relieved Capt. Snyder for the sad duty of taking the battleship back to Bremerton to await the call, should it be sounded, to provide 'firepower for freedom'.
New Jersey was decommissioned for the third time at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard on 17th December 1969. Captain Peniston relinquished command of USS New Jersey, the world's last active battleship at that time, on 17th December 1969. New Jersey joined the Inactive Fleet in a permanent berth alongside her sister ship Missouri, where skeleton crews kept 'Big J' and 'Mighty Mo' in a state of preservation. The two remaining battleships of the Iowa-class were similarly berthed at Philadelphia, and the battleships Alabama, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas were also preserved as memorials, by their name-states. Are these great ships now no more than museum pieces? Most certainly not, as was to be clearly seen in the future. The US Navy officially stated that the four Iowa-class battleships “will remain subject to recall to active service, should a need for them arise”.
New Jersey returned to the active fleet for the final time in December 1982. After mounting a show of strength off troubled El Salvador, she rushed to the Mediterranean in the fall of 1983 to provide fire support for Marines in Beirut, Lebanon. The first U.S. Navy warship to fire a Tomahawk cruise missile or enter the Persian Gulf, the ‘Big J’ served in a variety of roles, including regular deployments to the Western Pacific. She was decommissioned for the fourth and final time in February 1991. She had travelled more miles and fired more shells than any other battleship in history. New Jersey was awarded nineteen battle and campaign stars for her actions against enemy forces in three conflicts, making her the most decorated battleship in U.S. naval history. New Jersey was towed from the Pacific to the Atlantic in 1999 to become a museum at Camden, New Jersey.
As America's most decorated surviving warship, New Jersey has been meticulously restored to her 1990 appearance, and opened for tours in October 2001. Today, as the most modern and complete missile armed museum warship open to the public, visitors can also experience an up close and detailed look at the impressive weapon systems on board the ‘Big J’. New Jersey also offers regular tours, each covering seven decks including the flag and navigation bridges, wardroom, enlisted sleeping quarters, galley and mess decks. All tours feature New Jersey's fully restored Seasprite antisubmarine helicopter and massive 16inch and 5inch guns.