Feb 23, 2007

USS South Dakota: A Class Of Its Own…Almost
Posted by: Steve Hemmingsen - 02/23/2007 12:00 AM

The Battleship South Dakota Memorial in Sioux Falls gives you an outline of what the real ship looked like. Movies can give you a rough idea of what they did, but neither captures the behemoth scale of the real thing. For that you have to go to Mobile, Alabama.

That’s where the USS Alabama is tied up and standing by for boarding…by tourists. The Alabama is the last of four South Dakota Class battleships built for World War II. While the ships of the South Dakota class were designed smaller than their predecessors they had more 16 inch steel armor weighing in at 90 million pounds with a crew of 25 hundred in battle conditions.

The Battleship Alabama. For a sense of the size, note the guy 
standing next to the 4th gun turret from the right.

I had never seen an actual battleship before, so when I pulled into the parking lot at Mobile’s Battleship Memorial Park I just gaped for a few seconds and then climbed aboard and climbed, and climbed, and climbed. The stairways are called ladders in the Navy vernacular but by the time you get to the top levels of the super structure they are ladders, almost vertical.

Despite its size and questions about why something so heavy can float at all, picture jamming everybody in half a dozen average size South Dakota towns into an area twice the length of a football field and two-thirds as wide.

Six of the Alabama's nine 16 inch guns.  They could shoot a projectile 21 miles.

Yes, there are laundries and kitchens and even a full size soda fountain but personal space is limited to hammocks stacked three deep with about two feet of vertical space between them tucked away in any corner that will accommodate them. Officers and non-coms had a little more elbow room, but not much.

It’s a huge ship that I’ll bet lived “small” during months at sea, but with 16 inch armor it was probably the best place to be if you had to be at war.