U.S. Battleships in action, Part 1 (Squadron/Signal Publications 4003)

Old, slow and ungainly, they had little 'glamor'. They escorted convoys and bombarded shores, leaving the headline-making battles for their newer sisters. So, at least, it seemed from reading those headlines. Yet the reality was quite different. That they were old was undeniable. The newest of them was already 18 years old when WW II broke out, the oldest was an antique 29. A few of them had been re-engined, giving them a top speed of 23kt. Most were still slogging along on their original power-plant and would be lucky to ever see 20kt again. They were far from beautiful, most having been refitted and rebuilt so many times that any notion of the original plan had long since disappeared. Yet, somehow, they managed to be at the right place at the right time, when history hung in the balance. They were at Pearl Harbor on a quiet Sunday morning when America suddenly found itself at war. They were at Surigao Straits, winning the last battleship surface engagement in history, while their newer sisters were off chasing decoys. And, fittingly, they were off the coast of Japan at the end of that great struggle, four long years after it began. While a case can be made that the US Navy's fast battleships were underemployed and misused, no such criticism can be made about the older battleships. They gave all that was asked and more, from the first shot of the war to the last.