Katie and Asroc aboard WWII warships

Asroc and Katie were two methods of introducing nuclear weapons to WWII-era warships. One was fairly well thought-out and had a long run in service during the Cold War. The other did not and is remarkable for how unusual it was.

(A nuclear RUR-5 Asroc detonates near the WWII aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10) during 1962.) (photo via Federation of American Scientists)

(Blueprints for the 1950s modification to the WWII Iowa class battleships to enable them to fire 16″ nuclear shells.) (photo via Battleship New Jersey Museum)

cruiser Nürnberg: post-WWII service

The most famous German surface warship to survive WWII was the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, studied by the US Navy after WWII and then expended as a nuclear target.

The only large WWII German warship to see active duty in its intended role during the Cold War was the light cruiser Nürnberg, which served on in the Soviet navy.

(The light cruiser Nürnberg of the WWII German navy.)

(The Soviet light cruiser Admiral Makarov, the former Nürnberg, during the mid-1950s.)

scrapping the warships of WWII

I debated writing on this topic as it really doesn’t fit the theme of WWII weaponry being used after WWII. However in the past I have described how WWII warships were preserved, how they were modernized, and how they were transferred between countries. So maybe this will be of interest.

(The ex-USS Franklin (CV-13) being scrapped in 1966. This aircraft carrier had been terribly damaged in 1945, repaired at great expense, but never again used. Cut metal from other WWII warships fills the property of Portsmouth Salvage.)

(A Mk15 triple 8″ gun turret yanked off a WWII cruiser by Zidell during the 1970s. Zidell scrapped hundreds of WWII warships.)

(The ex-USS Sphinx (ARL-24), a WWII repair ship, being scrapped in 2007 by Bay Bridge Enterprises. The original shipbreaker for this job went bankrupt, which happened with increased frequency in the 1990s and 2000s.) (photo by Robert Hurst)

missile attack on battleship USS Missouri

The fact that Iraq fired an anti-ship missile at the WWII battleship USS Missouri in 1991 is not secret, but is still relatively not known in the general public. Even inside the defense community, the event is often poorly understood, or full of errors and bad timelines.

What makes this so curious is that more than any war before or since, operation “Desert Storm” was saturated with media coverage, and the two battleships in particular were among the most interesting pieces of hardware. Furthermore this event was the first time in history that a warship shot down a missile with a missile, and the last time that a battleship was attacked by any method.

(WWII ends aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.)

(Iraqi “Seersucker” missiles captured during operation “Desert Storm”.)

(USS Missouri firing in the Persian Gulf in 1991. A departing 16″ shell is visible.)

putting cruise missiles on WWII battleships

Photos of USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin firing 16″ rounds at Iraqi targets in 1991 are well-known as the last instances of battleships in combat. Less widely known is their operations with Tomahawks during that war, and even less, about how cruise missiles ended up on WWII battleships in the 1980s to begin with.

(USS Wisconsin during WWII.)

(USS Wisconsin firing a BGM-109 Tomahawk during operation “Desert Storm”, four and a half decades later.)

Twilight of catapult aviation after WWII: pt.1

(A Kingfisher scout plane catapults off the cruiser USS Detroit (CL-8) during WWII.)

(Abandoned Kingfishers lay in a US Navy storage lot in 1946, a year after WWII ended)

Because most photos of battleships concentrate on the inter-war and WWII era, it’s generally assumed that catapults and seaplanes were always a fixture on them, but this isn’t accurate.

If one considers the “battleship era” starting with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and ending with the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 , it was only half a century that that this type of warship ruled the seas. Of that, seaplanes aboard battleships had an even shorter run, about 24 years. For context, there were US Navy sailors who enlisted before battleship catapults existed and retired after they were already gone.

Cleaning up after WWII

Since starting wwiiafterwwii, I receive from time to time suggestions for topics. These are wide-ranging but two in particular seem very popular: WWII weapons in the Vietnam War, which has been touched on several times; and a general question of how the world “cleaned up” WWII battlefields after the war. For the latter, I was surprised at how very little is written about it so perhaps this will be of interest.

One of the reasons WWII battlefields did not remain littered with vehicles for long was that, with the lone exception of the USA, all of the major warring powers made some official level of combat usage of captured enemy arms during WWII. The most formal was Germany’s Beutewaffe (literally, ‘booty’ or ‘loot’ weapon) effort, which encompassed everything from handguns to fighter aircraft with an official code in the Waffenamt system; for example FK-288(r) (the Soviet ZiS-3 anti-tank gun), SIGew-251(a) (the American M1 Garand rifle), and Sd.Kfz 735(i) (the Italian Fiat M13/40 tank). Captured gear was assembled at points called Sammelstelle and then shipped back from the front lines for disposition.

Postwar advertising legacy of WWII

The defense industry is a business like any other, and just like any other industry, advertising is a part of it. After WWII’s end in 1945, many wartime weapons systems remained in Cold War use and required upkeep, upgrading, resale, integration with newer systems, and eventually disposal.

Some of these advertisements ran in general-interest magazines and newspapers. Others were limited to niche defense journals and trade gazettes, and were typically unseen by the mass public.

Above is a 1971 newspaper ad for the disposal of USS Hazard (MSF-240), an Admirable class minesweeper of the WWII US Navy. Typically, smaller mothballed WWII ships like this were bought cheaply in lots by brokers, then parceled out individually to scrapyards for a profit. USS Hazard was bought by a group of Nebraska businessmen and is today a museum ship in Omaha, NE.

Mothballing the US Navy after WWII: pt.2

(part 2 of a 2-part series)

(The 1945 decommissioning ceremony of USS Tunny (SS-282), showing the blown plastic preservation technique on the deck gun.) (official US Navy photo)

(Protective grease is applied to machinery on a mothballed warship, in a still from a  post-WWII training video.)

(Mothballed WWII destroyers at Charleston, SC in the 1950s, with their radars removed and AA guns enclosed in igloos.)

Mothballing the US Navy after WWII: pt.1

(part 1 of a 2-part series)

The US Navy at the end of WWII was the largest on the planet, and would be unaffordable at that size  in peacetime. What followed was the largest warship preservation effort in history.

(WWII Cruisers USS Huntington (CL-107), USS Dayton (CL-105), and battleship USS South Dakota (BB-57) in mothballs at Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility Philadelphia, PA in August 1961. These warships had been in reserve for 14 years and show the characteristic “igloos”.) (official US Navy photo)

(The Suisun Bay, CA facility packed full of mothballed warships after WWII.)