USS Missouri (BB-63)

By the time the United States laid down the Iowa class, American naval architects had been designing battleships under treaty restrictions for two decades — and the Iowas were the magnificent culmination of all that experience. Conceived in the late 1930s as the treaty system collapsed, they were intended above all to be fast: quick enough to run with the new fast aircraft carriers and to chase down any battleship or commerce raider afloat.

USS Missouri, third ship of the class, was built at the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn and commissioned in June 1944. She would be the last battleship the United States ever commissioned — and, by accident of timing, a ship destined to be remembered less for any battle she fought than for the moment of history that would be staged upon her decks.

The Iowas were among the finest battleships ever built. Missouri carried nine 16-inch (406mm) guns in three triple turrets, firing heavy armour-piercing shells with the help of advanced radar fire control, and bristled with one of the heaviest anti-aircraft batteries ever mounted afloat — a recognition that, by 1944, the gravest threat to any warship came from the air.

What truly set the class apart was speed. A very long, fine hull and machinery developing some 212,000 shaft horsepower drove these 57,000-ton ships at over 33 knots, making them the fastest battleships ever built and ideal escorts for the fast carrier task forces that now formed the heart of American sea power.

Well protected, superbly equipped and tremendously fast, Missouri embodied the battleship at the very peak of its development — arriving, like so many great capital ships, just as the aircraft carrier was rendering her type obsolete. Her role would not be to fight enemy battle lines, but to screen the carriers and to hurl her enormous shells against the shore.

Four sisters were completed: Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri and Wisconsin (two further ships were cancelled). Together they were the only American fast battleships fast enough to keep permanent station with the carriers, and they served as anti-aircraft escorts and shore-bombardment ships across the Pacific in the war's final year.

Uniquely among the world's battleships, the Iowa class would enjoy an astonishingly long afterlife. Too valuable to scrap, the four ships were repeatedly recalled to service — in Korea, in the Cold War, and finally in the 1980s, when they were modernised with cruise missiles and returned to the fleet, soldiering on into the 1990s as the last operational battleships on earth.

Missouri reached the Pacific in time for the war's climactic battles. As part of the Fast Carrier Task Force she screened the carriers with her guns during the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, pouring 16-inch fire onto enemy positions ashore and throwing up a wall of flak against the swarming kamikazes.

Off Okinawa in April 1945 she was herself struck by a kamikaze, which caused only minor damage. In an act that became famous, her captain ordered the remains of the young Japanese pilot to be given a formal burial at sea with full military honours — a gesture of chivalry amid a brutal war. In the closing weeks of the conflict Missouri joined the fleet bombarding the Japanese home islands directly, her great guns firing on the enemy's coast.

Missouri's place in history was sealed not by battle but by ceremony. On 2 September 1945, in Tokyo Bay, the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed aboard her deck, formally ending the Second World War. She had been chosen for the honour in part because she bore the name of President Harry Truman's home state, and had been christened by his daughter.

Before a gathering of Allied commanders presided over by General Douglas MacArthur, Japanese officials signed the documents that ended six years of global war. It was one of the most photographed moments of the twentieth century, and it made Missouri — the last American battleship — the ship on which the war was finally laid to rest.

That the conflict began for the United States with the destruction of a battleship row at Pearl Harbor and ended on the deck of a battleship in Tokyo Bay gave the moment a profound symmetry, closing the circle of the Pacific war.

USS Missouri arrived too late to fight the great surface actions for which her kind had been built, and in truth the carrier had already supplanted her before she fired her first shell. Yet few warships are so deeply woven into history. As the stage for the Japanese surrender she became the symbol of the war's end, and her extraordinarily long career — through Korea, the Cold War and the Gulf War of 1991, where her 16-inch guns spoke in anger for the last time — made her a living link between the age of the battleship and the modern navy.

Decommissioned for good in 1992, the “Mighty Mo” is preserved today as a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, moored within sight of the sunken USS Arizona. There the two ships stand together as bookends of the American experience of the war — Arizona marking its violent beginning, Missouri its triumphant end.

• Paul Stillwell, Battleship Missouri: An Illustrated History (Naval Institute Press).
• Malcolm Muir, The Iowa Class Battleships (Blandford).
• William H. Garzke & Robert O. Dulin, Battleships: United States Battleships in World War II (Naval Institute Press).