A plaque designates the site on the deck where that historic event took place. From the “day which will live in infamy” – the Pearl Harbor raid by Japanese planes on Decemthat sank the Arizona – until the signing of the surrender on the deck of Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, the two great ships provide emotional bookends to the greatest conflict the world has known. After an astounding active service career of almost half a century, the Missouri was finally placed into position behind the poignant Arizona memorial on January 29, 1999, and opened to visitors. Previously, Steven Segal and Cher (If I Could Turn Back Time) had also been filmed on board the ship. Interestingly, several authentic veterans made cameo appearances and the ship was actually put to sea again, albeit with a little help from tugboats. Apart from battle honours, the ship was again recruited to appear in the 2012 Hollywood action film Battleship, where the museum ship, playing itself, was hurriedly reactivated to fight an alien menace. Unlike so many historic warships that were either sunk or scrapped, the “Mighty Mo” was pressed back into service again and again, performing front-line duties in World War II, Korea and even the Gulf War, where the latest Tomahawk missiles were fired alongside the blockbuster 16-inch guns. Its thickest armour is half a metre on the turrets and, in the days before computers, designing the Missouri used 160 tonnes of blueprint paper and it took three years to build, requiring more than three million man-days. To give you some idea of that firepower, if moored in Sydney Harbour, this ship – based at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center in Hawaii – could lob shells the weight of a Toyota Corolla into the heart of Penrith. Q: What weighs 45,000 tons, is 270m long and spits 1.2 tonne iron shells almost 40km?Ī: The world’s last fully-fledged battleship, the former USS Missouri.
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