In the early morning hours of 5 April 1946, the American battleship Missouri (BB-63) headed eastward across the Sea of Marmara, accompanied by the cruiser Providence (CL-82) and the destroyer Power (DD-839). Behind her lay the Dardanelles Strait, the Aegean Sea, the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Atlantic, and her point of departure, Bayonne, New Jersey. Ahead lay unfamiliar waters, rarely navigated by ships of the U.S. Navy in the nearly two centuries since its founding.
This great battleship, whose guns had thundered across the Pacific just months before, whose main deck was the scene of the surrender of the Japanese Empire and the end of World War II, was on a different kind of mission now—a diplomatic one that would also serve as the opening scene in a new kind of war.
Joined by three Turkish destroyers, the American ships continued on into the narrow waters of the Bosporus, where they dropped anchor at the very nexus of Europe and Asia, surrounded by the exotic spires of the great city of Istanbul that straddles the strait. The Missouri's ostensible primary mission was to return the remains of a former Turkish ambassador who had died while representing his nation in the United States.
Once the honors and ceremonies associated with the ambassador's return had been carried out with appropriate pomp and solemnity, a more festive mood took hold as the Turks embraced (both figuratively and literally) the visiting Americans as potential allies and friends. A large sign with the words "Welcome Missouri" appeared on a prominent harbor lighthouse, and soon souvenirs with images of the battleship were being sold in the marketplaces. Sightseeing Americans were greeted with much amity, and several banquets were held—complete with after-dinner bouts of belly-dancing performed to the "Missouri Waltz"!
Of greater interest to many members of the ships' crews—and a stark example of how times have changed—the Turkish government ordered several blocks in the city's red-light district cleaned and renovated, and Turkish medical personnel checked the "workers" there to ensure they were unencumbered by consequential maladies. As Paul Stillwell describes it in his landmark book Battleship Missouri, "it was something akin to the Good Housekeeping seal of approval." In an even more appreciated gesture of friendship, the visiting customers were not charged for services rendered! Further, Turkish military personnel and American shore patrolmen were authorized to turn away all local would-be patrons so that the Americans would have exclusive use of the attractions.
Lest there be concern that all of this frivolity had no greater purpose than recreation, Missouri's visit coincided with threatened Soviet interloping in Greece, Turkey, and Iran and was seen as a tangible manifestation of American power that served as a countermove to those threats. This powerful warship's showing of the flag in that troubled part of the world—previously a British rather than American sphere of influence—has since been viewed as the U.S. Navy's official entry into the Cold War and as a fledgling step toward the creation of the powerful Sixth Fleet that would stand toe-to-toe with the Soviet navy in decades to come. Her visit was an early tactical move in an overall strategy of containment that ultimately lifted the Iron Curtain and ended the tyranny of Soviet communism.