The lost future of battleship Kentucky.
On 17 January 1950, the USS Missouri (BB-63) ran aground off Old Point Comfort, Virginia. It was an embarrassing accident for a battleship that hosted the surrender of Imperial Japan only four years before. In jest, newspaper pundit James J. Kilpatrick produced an editorial entitled “The Limicolous Mo.”, the abbreviation for BB-63’s nickname and the first term for a thing that lived in mud. The 45,000-ton Missouri had to be lightened before it could be freed. Her anchors were detached and some four hundred tons of freshwater were pumped out. Floats went under the stern, and with the aid of tugs, winches, wind, and tide, BB-63 eventually slipped into dredged water. Missouri was sent to Norfolk Naval Shipyard where another Iowa-class battleship, Kentucky (BB-66), happened to be floated out of dry dock.
Above, the hull of battleship Kentucky is moved by tugs out of dry dock at Norfolk. (Photo from US Naval History and Heritage Command)
Kentucky was nearly seventy-percent complete at the beginning of 1950. While far from commissioned, the warship shared a predicament with her Iowa-class sisters. The famous four that came out of the yards in Philadelphia and New York, Iowa (BB-61), New Jersey (BB-62), Missouri (BB-63), and Wisconsin (BB-64), had cost more than $100 million apiece. Postwar demands for upkeep and operation, with the conspicuous rise of carrier power over naval artillery, put the battleship in a precarious place. Another in the works at Philadelphia Navy Yard, Illinois (BB-65), was twenty-two-percent complete at the time of her cancellation in August 1945.
Kentucky‘s keel was laid in 1942, but construction stopped in August 1946 as a peacetime country tightened its belt. The ship had potential for a new metamorphosis in September 1946 with the announcement that BB-66, along with battle-cruiser Hawaii (CB-3), might be adapted for guided missiles. From a standpoint of displacement, rockets were but a fraction of the accumulated weight of a battleship’s long rifles, armored turrets, ordnance, and gunnery crews. Yet internal arrangement would have to be thoroughly redesigned.
Kentucky was a candidate for a rocket-corrected shell called the SAM-N-8 Zeus, which would have made the battleship a formidable anti-aircraft platform, but the concept was shelved, and work halted again in February 1947. She was only 69.2-percent complete at the time. The vessel still lacked a superstructure or turrets. Only the machinery of her steam turbine engines could be found within her enormous 880-foot-long hull.
Wayne Scarpaci, a naval artist and the author of US Battleship Conversion Projects, once had the rare opportunity to see Kentucky. His father, Gordon Scarpaci, worked on SCB48, a project to transform the incomplete BB-66 into a guided-missile warship, designated BBG-1. When Wayne was a boy, his father brought the family to see the ship in Norfolk. The father had business aboard, so the others waited on the pier. As the oldest child, Wayne “was the man of the family while he was on the ship.” Even unfinished, the behemoth must have been a breathtaking sight. Drawings and paintings of the BBG-1 were displayed in his father’s office at the Pentagon.
Authorized in 1954, SCB48 mirrored the plans of USS Boston (CAG-1), a heavy cruiser that would be rebuilt to launch supersonic Terrier surface-to-air (SAM) missiles. In Boston‘s “single end” conversion—completed in 1955—the aft turret, deckhouse, and fittings were replaced by two SAM launchers and their radars. Both Boston and Kentucky would keep their forward rifles and retain a traditional array of antiaircraft guns.
Giving Kentucky a breath of new life was important for admirals who couldn’t part with their biggest capital ships. There was also something to be said for the US Marine Corps, which has consistently relied upon, but not always received, adequate naval fire support. More critically, missile technology promised to transform navies forever, and on the future battlefields of the Cold War, the country that failed to keep up was easily checked.
According to Scarpaci’s US Battleship Conversion Projects, the Navy changed its mind on Kentucky by late 1954 and put its money into two converts, Boston (CAG-1) and Canberra (CAG-2). Regardless of BBG-1’s potential, there was no escaping the fact that Uncle Sam could afford two guided-missile cruisers for the price of one battlewagon. Navy veterans interviewed by Scarpaci noted that an Iowa-class battleship would have offered spacious accommodation for all the weaponry, electronics, and equipment needed to sustain the Terrier system. Designing the right-sized ship for the right-sized missile, a problem found with big birds like Jupiter and Typhon, would forever pester naval engineers.
The Kentucky was stricken from the naval register on 9 June 1958. Before her ultimate voyage to the scrapyard, the unfinished ship bestowed the Navy with special gifts. In 1956, Kentucky‘s bow section was donated to Wisconsin (BB-64). In the 1960s, her turbine sets went to a pair of fast combat support ships, Sacramento (AOE-1) and Camden (AOE-2). Reportedly, sailors on the AOEs who had grown familiar with Kentucky’s 1,200-psi boilers were in demand when the Navy began to install high-pressure machinery in their ships, and ironically, after the four Iowas were reactivated.
BB-66 was the second American battleship to bear the name Kentucky. The namesake of the Bluegrass State passed on to the ballistic missile submarine USS Kentucky (SSBN-737), which was commissioned in 1991.
See photographs of the Kentucky at the Naval Historical Center.
Sources
Associated Press. “Rockets May Be Main Batteries For 2 Battleships”. Toledo Blade. September 9, 1946.
Associated Press. “Mighty Mo Freed As Sailors Cheer”. The Southeast Missourian. February 1, 1950.
Associated Press. “Missouri’s Big Guns Get Into Korean Battle”. Sarasota Herald-Tribune. September 15, 1950.
Kilpatrick, James J. “Those Lovely Out-Of-Town Words”. The Deseret News. October 20, 1975.
“Kentucky (BB-66), 1942-1958”. Naval Historical Center, Naval History and Heritage Command.
Photograph No. 80-G-413972, “Hull of battleship Kentucky floated out of dock, January 1950”. Naval Historical Center, Naval History and Heritage Command.
Jane’s Fighting Ships of World War II. (Crescent Books, 1998)
Fahey, James C. The Ships and Aircraft of the United States Fleet. (Sixth edition) Naval Institute Press (Ninth printing), 1996.
Fahey, James C. The Ships and Aircraft of the United States Fleet. (Seventh edition) Naval Institute Press (Ninth printing), 1996.
Polmar, Norman. The Naval Institute Guide to the Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet. (Seventeenth edition) Naval Institute Press, 2001.
Rogers, J. David. “Development of the World’s Fastest Battleships”. American and Military History, Missouri University of Science and Technology.
Scarpaci, Wayne. US Battleship Conversion Projects 1942-1965: An Illustrated Technical Reference. Art by Wayne, 2013.
Leading photo courtesy of Wayne Scarpaci, artbywayne.com.
JEFFREY PROCTOR 
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