Missouri (BB 63) - Naval Cruise Book

Page 44 text:

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Page 43 text:

and ecreation A Fifth top gunnery man was Lt. Comdr. James C. Bidwell, 1939 Naval cademy graduate, lire control officer, whose job it was to see that few eggs were wasted before they landed on the target. With these men drilling excellent gun crews the ship's com an had v P Y cpnliildegci that the Missouri would come through admirably in any test t . o e g ting job that lay ahead. The men learned that a salvo of armor-piercing shells from the nine 16-inch guns of the Missouri was equivalent to nine Ford automobiles b . h . . . eing urled into the air at a speed of 200 miles an hour, thundering along several miles, and then hitting a target 20 miles away and setting off a ton of explosive. The gunnery departmentis job was to deliver the nine Ford automo- biles-or their equivalent in weight-smack at the right destination. A diflicult job, when it is considered that the Missouri might be steaminff at 30 knots an hour in a high sea and the target might be doing the samdjl To find th ' b. ' e range, earing, speed and other data about a target is a complicated job but the Missourigs gunnery ofiicers knew how to operate their instruments and the men they were commanding knew these jobs, too. Besides those huge main batteries, the Miss.ouri's secondary batteries of five-inch gun required similar plotting and directing devices. These live- inch guns were meant originally for use against surface targets but the all-out lighting in World War II required that they serve a double pur- pose-they were mounted as anti-aircraft defenses as well. In addition, the ship bristled with anti-aircraft 20 and 40 millimeters. The ship's gunnery department was clicking like a well-ordered ship7s clock when the big vessel nosed its way into San Francisco bay in early December of the year of its launching. At that port, it was groomed for its trip westward into the Pacific. Christmas mail was loaded aboard, and as the expectant crew counted the sacks it looked as though every man aboard would average about three Christmas packages. Where they would be when Santa Claus passed those packages out to them, the crew could only speculate.

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HIHT aunehing aircraft MA ll1lY 1944 and... rw YEAR nn 1945 FFICERS AND MEN of the Missouri were getting the breaks. The fieet operations schedule brought the ship into Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, 1944. Thousands of bluejackets at the Hawaii base hailed the arrival of the Missouri, not only as a new, powerful addition to naval strength in the Pacific but, more gratefully, they hailed the Missouri as Santa Claus. By way of demonstrating that the Navy at war does everything possible to rush mail tobluejackets away from home, the Missouri and the Fleet Postofiice at San Francisco collaborated as the big battlewagon was about to lift