USS Mississippi (BB-41) fought across the Pacific for four years. She earned eight battle stars, took two kamikaze hits and kept firing at enemy positions. She survived two catastrophic turret explosions and watched Japan surrender from Tokyo Bay. After the war, she fired the first guided missiles ever launched from an American surface warship.
But it is her role at the Battle of Surigao Strait in October 1944 that cemented her place in naval history, where she fired the last shot any battleship ever fired at another.
A Ship Built For WWI
Newport News Shipbuilding laid down Mississippi's keel on April 5, 1915. She slid down the ways and was launched on Jan. 25, 1917, sponsored by Miss Camelle McBeath, daughter of the chairman of the Mississippi State Highway Commission. The Navy commissioned her as BB-41 on Dec. 18, 1917, with Capt. Joseph Lee Jayne in command.
She was the third U.S. Navy ship to carry the state's name and the second of three New Mexico-class battleships. She was 624 feet long, 32,000 tons at full load and carried twelve 14-inch guns in four triple turrets.
The Navy sent her to the Atlantic Fleet for the remainder of American involvement in World War I. She ran training exercises along the East Coast, though she never fired at an enemy during the war.
By July 1919, she had sailed through the Panama Canal and settled into Pacific Fleet operations at San Pedro, California. She spent the next 12 years on exercises and Caribbean winter cruises under a succession of commanding officers.
Among them was Capt. William A. Moffett, who led the ship from 1919 to 1921 and later became the Navy's first chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, the father of American naval aviation.
The No. 2 Turret Accident
On June 12, 1924, during routine gunnery practice off San Pedro, the center gun of No. 2 turret exploded on a reload. A burning ember left in the barrel from the previous shot ignited 470 pounds of propellant as the crew loaded for the next round.
The blast warped the steel passageways shut, sealing the gun crew inside.
Forty-four men asphyxiated before rescue teams could cut through the sealed metal with acetylene torches. When the ship reached port, residual powder detonated inside the same turret and killed four men from the rescue party.
Forty-eight men were killed, three of them were officers and 45 were enlisted. It was the deadliest peacetime disaster in Navy history to that point.
The Bureau of Ordnance concluded that the center barrel received weaker air purging than the outer barrels, allowing burning debris to remain in the breech. Reload procedures were updated and the ship received extensive refitting over the next decade. However, the problem, as would become clear later, was not fixed.
Mississippi entered Norfolk Navy Yard in March 1931 for a two-year overhaul that transformed her silhouette entirely. Her old cage masts came down, a new superstructure went up and torpedo protection was added along the hull. She returned to the Pacific in late 1934 on a visually different ship.
The USS Mississippi Goes to War
In May 1941, with U-boats ravaging Allied shipping in the North Atlantic, the Navy transferred Mississippi and her sister ships to the Atlantic Fleet. The battleships spent months escorting convoys to Iceland, under the constant threat of an unprovoked submarine attack.
When Japan struck Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, she was at Reykjavik, one of the few American battleships fully operational in those first 48 hours. With Germany's surface fleet and the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean held up by the Royal Navy, American battleships were almost exclusively sent to the Pacific.
She turned west and reached San Francisco on Jan. 22, 1942. While the battleships that survived Pearl Harbor spent years in salvage and reconstruction, Mississippi trained and ran escort duty along the West Coast.
In May 1943, she sailed for the Aleutians, where Japan had occupied American soil since June 1942. She joined a bombardment force on July 22 and spent hours shelling Kiska, hitting Japanese positions across the island in preparation for the American landings.
Six days later, on the night of July 28-29, Japanese Rear Adm. Masatomi Kimura slipped two cruisers and ten destroyers through the American blockade under dense fog and evacuated over 5,000 troops in under an hour. When Allied forces landed on Aug. 15, they found the island was empty.
Bombarding the Enemy
On Nov. 20, 1943, Mississippi was providing naval gunfire support off Makin Island in the Gilbert Islands when smoke emerged from the rangefinder ports of the No. 2 turret. A sudden explosion then erupted, causing extensive damage to the Mississippi.
The explosion had come from the center barrel, the same gun responsible for the 1924 disaster. Burning debris from the previous round had ignited the propellant charge during loading, the exact mechanism the Bureau of Ordnance had identified nearly two decades earlier and declared corrected.
Forty-three men died. No. 2 turret was knocked out for the remainder of the operation.
Mississippi's three remaining turrets kept firing until the shore bombardment mission was complete. The Bureau of Ordnance investigated and reached the same conclusion it had reached in 1924.
After repairs, she went straight back to work. She hit Kwajalein on Jan. 31, 1944, bombarded Taroa and Wotje in February, then shelled Kavieng on New Ireland in March.
Following a summer refit at Puget Sound, she arrived off Peleliu on Sept. 12, 1944, to support the Marine and Army assault on the Palau Islands, spending a week in continuous shore bombardment before moving on to Leyte, Philippines, arriving Oct. 19.
Five days later, the Japanese fleet made its move to intercept the American landings. The Mississippi would find itself in the midst of the largest naval battle in history.
Surigao Strait: The Last Battleship Engagement
Vice Adm. Shoji Nishimura commanded the Japanese Southern Force moving north through Surigao Strait on the night of Oct. 24-25, 1944. His force was built around battleships Yamashiro and Fuso, sister ships of the same class, along with a heavy cruiser and four destroyers.
His orders were to break through to the Leyte Gulf landing beaches and add his firepower to the larger Japanese force coming from the north. The intelligence provided to him made it clear the mission had almost no chance of success. He pressed on anyway.
American PT boats and destroyers hit his column repeatedly as he drove north. Fuso took numerous torpedo hits and sank before reaching the battleship line, taking most of her 1,630-man crew with her. Two destroyers sank as well. Nishimura pressed on with what remained, a burning, battered column that had lost half its ships before any American battleship fired a round.
Rear Adm. Jesse Oldendorf's six battleships were arrayed across the strait's exit with cruisers on both flanks. In almost textbook fashion, the U.S. force had crossed the T and intercepted a Japanese fleet heading straight for them.
Three of the battleships, West Virginia, California and Tennessee, had been refitted after Pearl Harbor with the Navy's advanced Mark 8 fire control radar, which could track a target at long range even in complete darkness. West Virginia opened fire first and put 93 rounds into the Yamashiro.
California and Tennessee added 63 and 69 rounds, respectively. American destroyers on both flanks continued pressing torpedo attacks throughout the engagement.
Maryland, equipped with the older Mark 3 radar, tracked the enemy vessels by watching West Virginia's shell splashes and managed six salvos and 48 rounds against them. Pennsylvania, also with the Mark 3, failed to acquire any targets at all and never fired a single shot during the engagement.
Mississippi Ends the Age of Battleships
Mississippi also carried a Mark 3. Her gunnery team worked to acquire the Yamashiro while the rest of the battleline was already tearing the Japanese ship apart. By the time she locked on, Yamashiro had been under sustained fire for more than 15 minutes and had been struck by multiple torpedoes.
At 4:08 a.m., she fired a single 12-gun salvo at a range of 19,790 yards. Oldendorf had issued the cease-fire order only moments earlier, though the Mississippi had not yet received it. However, the rounds had come too late as the Japanese ship was already ablaze and sinking.
Even as she began slipping under, the Yamashiro struck back. The Japanese battleship's secondary battery found the American destroyer Albert W. Grant and badly damaged her before the end.
At 4:09 a.m., with his ship ablaze and listing hard, Nishimura transmitted his final message to the fleet, "We proceed till totally annihilated. I have definitely accomplished my mission."
Yamashiro finally capsized at 4:19 a.m. Vice Adm. Nishimura and nearly all of her 1,636 officers and men went down with her. Only 10 survived.
The Mississippi had contributed to the destruction and sinking of the Yamashiro. While the other ships scored direct hits, Mississippi’s quick salvo became the final time in history that a battleship fired shots in anger at another.
Kamikazes and Okinawa
Mississippi continued shore bombardment support at Leyte until Nov. 16, then staged from the Admiralty Islands before returning to San Pedro Bay on Dec. 28 to prepare for the next operation.
On Jan. 6, 1945, she opened fire in Lingayen Gulf as the invasion force approached Luzon. Three days later, a Japanese kamikaze struck her port side while she was standing by for fire support near the landing beaches.
The impact killed 26 sailors and wounded 70 others. She stayed on station and kept firing for 32 more days before withdrawing to Pearl Harbor for repairs.
She returned to combat in time to join the Okinawa invasion fleet, arriving off Nakagusuku Wan on May 6, 1945. The land battle had stalled against the Shuri Line, a fortified network of ridges, tunnels and caves anchored by Shuri Castle, the ancient seat of the Ryukyu Kingdom.
Mississippi fired 1,300 14-inch shells at the castle and its surrounding defensive network over the course of three days. The concentrated naval bombardment, combined with sustained Army and Marine assaults, broke the Japanese hold on the Shuri Line. The castle fell on May 29, 1945.
On June 5, a second kamikaze approached the Mississippi. The men mistook the plane for a friendly one before it struck her starboard side, killing one sailor. She kept firing at enemy positions until June 16.
Following the end of hostilities, she anchored in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2 as Japanese officials signed surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri. She then briefly participated in the Occupation of Japan.
Mississippi’s Later Years
Following the war, Mississippi transited the Panama Canal and entered the Mississippi River. On Oct. 16, 1945, she steamed through to New Orleans for Navy Day celebrations.
The Navy eventually stripped three of her four main battery turrets in 1946, redesignated her AG-128 and assigned her to the Operational Development Force in the Atlantic as a test platform. For a decade, she carried prototype radar systems, experimental guns and new fire control equipment.
On Jan. 28-29, 1953, off Cape Cod, the new test platform launched the RIM-2 Terrier, a new surface-to-air weapon that became the foundation of American ship-based air defense through the Cold War.
The ship that fired the last battleship salvo against an enemy battleship in history also fired the first guided missile launched from a surface warship in Navy history. She had closed one era of naval warfare and opened another.
The Navy decommissioned the Mississippi on Sept. 17, 1956, and sold her for scrapping two months later. She had earned eight battle stars for her WWII service.
Naval historian Rear Adm. Samuel Eliot Morison described what Mississippi had done that October night in his official history of U.S. Navy operations in World War II.
"When Mississippi discharged her twelve 14-inch guns at Yamashiro at a range of 19,790 yards, at 0408 October 25, 1944," Morison wrote, "she was not only giving that battleship the coup de grâce, but firing a funeral salute to a finished era of naval warfare."
In her 39 years of service, she survived two catastrophic turret explosions, absorbed two kamikaze hits and fought across the entire Pacific from the Aleutians to Tokyo Bay. She participated in the largest naval battle in history, fired the final battleship salvo against an enemy battleship and fired the first guided-missile from a surface vessel in naval history. The USS Mississippi remains one of the most storied and legendary ships to have ever served in the U.S. Navy.
Sources: Naval History and Heritage Command, DANFS, USS Mississippi (BB-41); Naval Institute Proceedings, December 1958, "The Battle of Surigao Strait"; Naval History Magazine, October 2018, "Terror and Triumph at Lingayen Gulf" (James M. Scott, USNI); Battle of Okinawa, NHHC; NavSource, BB-41 War Diary; South Bay History/Daily Breeze, Oct. 19, 2011; Daily Press (Newport News), Nov. 16, 1989; Morison, Samuel Eliot, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. 12, "Leyte, June 1944-January 1945."
