None of the usual excitement and cheering thousands typical at the launching of a Navy ship ever spiced the existence of the second battleship Kentucky, which would have been the last of the celebrated Iowa class of World War II fast battleships. Instead, a select group of dignitaries gathered quietly along with workers at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, on 7 March 1942. A few weeks after the exciting launch of the new battleship Alabama (BB-60), they witnessed the emplacement of the Kentucky's first bottom plates, initiating construction and affirming once again the possibility—and to some the apparent miracle—of teaching thousands of tons of steel eventually how to float.
Born Too Late
Like her predecessor of the same name, the Iowa-class battleship Kentucky was built during wartime and also was late for her intended conflict. The naval war for which the Iowa class was nominally designed had itself evolved, prompting a reconsideration of the battleship's role in naval warfare. And while her original classmates—the Iowa, New Jersey (BB-62), Missouri (BB-63), and Wisconsin (BB-64)—entered the fleet by late 1944 to widespread acclaim, the two "kid sisters"—the Illinois (BB-65) and Kentucky—were delayed and little more than notional by that time. In July 1945, the U.S. Navy estimated that the Kentucky would be ready for service by September 1946; the Illinois, on the other hand, would not approach completion until June 1947. The Illinois and Kentucky differed from their older sister ships in having better underwater protection, but their all-welded steel construction slowed their progress.
This second flight of the Iowa class had its wings clipped in several ways. The Illinois was scheduled to begin construction in late 1942 at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, but lack of an available shipway in the midst of wartime prevented any building start until January 1945. And the estimated progress of only 22% toward completion by war's end prompted the Navy to cancel the project and leave the Illinois on the ways for later demolition. The Kentucky, on the other hand, began as planned at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in March 1942, but an acute need for landing ships and amphibious craft interrupted progress after only three months. With the workforce diverted, the first job was to clear the much-needed shipway, so the barge-like bottom was sealed for flotation, skidded into the water in an unceremonious first launching on 10 June 1942, and towed off to wait more than two years for another round of construction.
A Battleship That Almost Was
Impeded as she was by construction of amphibious vessels, the Kentucky was just as certainly jeopardized by the ascendancy of naval aviation. The signal triumphs in the air throughout the war quickly made obsolete clashes between opposing naval forces in much-hoped-for "decisive battles." This star continued its rise in the postwar years, outshining the surface Navy's traditional power base and, in time, attracting increased funding for its favored building projects: aircraft carriers. Accordingly, beginning as far back as 1945, conversion plans for the still-building Kentucky began emerging. This indicated clearly that the surface warfare community was willing to "think outside the box" regarding the strategic makeover of what otherwise could become a colossal white elephant. This heralded a decade that contrasted exciting new ideas and proposals for the Kentucky with long periods of stasis. In August 1946, work was suspended on the ship while the Navy awaited assessments of damage to the target ships in the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini atoll. Studies of the data and reports led to a September announcement that the Kentucky and the unfinished large cruiser Hawaii (CB-3) both would be completed as "atomic-age missile ships."
Lying in Wait
None of the proposed metamorphoses of the Kentucky—into an antiaircraft battleship, a "battle weapon carrier," an all-missile arsenal ship, or a hybrid missile battleship, retaining some traditional 16-inch "big guns"—ever materialized. But the seemingly little that did happen in or around the mammoth hull illustrates aspects of the planning and execution of a large naval building project that became, over time, a monumental storage problem. After the Kentucky's bottom section was retrieved from a shallow holding area of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard—known by then as "Kentucky Flats"—the battleship was laid down a second time on 6 December 1944 in a drydock, anticipating the standard practice in building the next generation of modern capital ships, the "supercarriers" of the 1950s and beyond. Construction resumed in earnest, claiming materials earmarked for the Kentucky from storage in warehouses around the yard. Even during the 30-month hiatus in building, work had continued separately on the propulsion machinery, the armor, and certain hull subassemblies, while components such as turbines, propellers, turret training pinions, anchor windlasses, pumps, movie projectors, mess furniture, and even radio transmitters with spare vacuum tubes kept flowing into Norfolk Naval Shipyard for storage. Two kinds of decking wood were set aside, as the Kentucky was slated to be a test bed for a quantity of African iroko, to be installed alongside the traditional teak. By the time of the 1946 work suspension the hull stretched 880 feet in length, amassing some 30,000 tons of steel, components, and fittings. The boilers and turbines were in place, as was much of the armor, and the ship's internal compartmentation had been accomplished up to the second deck. Though no 16-inch turrets ever arrived, the blunt shafts of the three supporting barbettes awaited them anyway.
For more than six months in 1947 correspondence between Norfolk Naval Shipyard and the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships (BuShips) regarding the Kentucky concentrated on both the preservation and the seaworthiness of her hull. The below-decks area—particularly the engineering spaces—underwent an exhaustive zoned dehumidification, and the exposed second deck was waterproofed, while a thorough sealing of the outer hull and sea chests ensured a watertight ship if and when the time came to quit the drydock. In September 1947, BuShips's plan for the snoozing Kentucky had devolved to pursuing "a program of preservation involving minimum expenditure." The bureau reasoned that "possibly the skeleton in the dry dock will be less of a headache than if the slightly more closed skeleton is removed and placed in the reserve ship pile." By late 1949 many of the Kentucky's components and spares, including four 16-inch guns held at the Naval Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, had been distributed for other use in order to free up warehouse space. Since Norfolk Naval Shipyard wished to reclaim the ship's building dock, tentative plans were made to relinquish Drydock No. 8 by the middle of 1950. The work to tighten ship for that eventuality, however, kicked into overdrive in January 1950. The Kentucky's illustrious sister ship, the Missouri, had run hard aground on nearby Thimble Shoal (in full view of amused U.S. soldiers at Fort Monroe) and was in urgent need of inspection and repair when she finally was dragged off the offending shelf. In an exercise that combined the expedient relocation of a stalled missile ship project with the Navy's face-saving zeal, the Kentucky was buttoned up hurriedly and eased out of Drydock No. 8 to a temporary berth in the shipyard on 20 January 1950. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, somehow forgetting that long-ago first "launching" in 1942, noted the event: "The Battleship Kentucky, or what there is of her, was floated out of drydock today in what was probably the first premature launching of a battleship in naval history."
Afloat at last, the Kentucky was towed across Hampton Roads in late 1950 and laid up at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock, where the earlier Kentucky had been built. The huge, clipper-bowed hull passed several years in relative obscurity there until October 1954, when Hurricane Hazel blew it nearly perpendicular to the pier and into the exaggerated headlines of The Washington Post for 16 October 1954: "Battleship Cast Aground at Norfolk" and the more alarming "Battleship Aground; 10 Dead Listed." The unfortunate dead, however, had nothing to do with the Kentucky. A more measured update two days later in The Baltimore Sun reported on tugs easing the stem back to the pier, and that the bow had been stuck in shallow mud for more than a year. On the advice of late1954 maintenance reports, which noted various hull leaks and a colony of eels living in the bilges, the Kentucky in March 1955 was towed over to her birthplace in Portsmouth for drydock inspection and repairs. A close look revealed to her handlers how heavily rusted and fouled with crusty marine life a large, unattended hull could become in just five years.
With the Navy's missile conversion proposals came a need to assess the ship's level of completion. Reported estimates from 50% to 80% in the press and U.S. Navy sources had given rise to some confusion over the years, especially when the hull-only Kentucky was compared to the 84%-realized Hawaii, which had a nearly complete superstructure, and already mounted her main battery. The most-repeated estimate of 73.1% had been set forth as early as 1947 by the Bureau of Ships, and actually represented the aggregate accumulation of materiel meant for the construction of the Kentucky—whether or not it was actually fitted. After a searching round of correspondence among BuShips and Norfolk Naval Shipyard principals in 1955, the completion level of the would-be battleship was more accurately placed at 45%, though figures of either 55% or 73.1% persisted in the lore and the various marginalia that constitute much of the Kentucky's "historical record."
May 1956 brought another sister ship looking for a favor: the Wisconsin had rammed escorting destroyer Eaton (DDE-510) in the fog off Norfolk, badly disfiguring her trademark clipper bow. The destroyer—in a seeming miracle—survived, serving until 1969, attesting to the integrity of the Fletcher (DD-445) class. Because the Wisconsin was due in July to host a midshipman cruise, a quick repair was critical, and BuShips turned its collective eye toward the dormant Kentucky. A bow graft saved both time and money, making use of a 68-foot section of the Kentucky's bow.
Bells and Whistles
Because the Kentucky hull had lain dormant for so long, this last possible new battleship was a blank canvas of enormous dimensions for visionaries—naval and otherwise. As early as 1945 the Navy's Ships Characteristics Board (SCB) unveiled its plans for an antiaircraft conversion, which challenged the battleship canon by proposing a main armament no larger than automatic 8-inch guns, plus a clutch of smaller calibers bolstered by rocket launchers.21 Another decade on, guns of any sort virtually disappeared from two of the more radical missile ship conceptions, festooned with multiple launchers and sensors. The Navy's 1955 Long-Range Objectives Group study resulted in a proposal for a $115-million missile battleship (BBG) conversion of the Kentucky. She would be armed with Redstone or Jupiter ballistic missiles in Rube Goldberg-like launching contraptions, the huge Regulus II cruise missile for pinpoint surface-to-surface attack, and an antiaircraft suite featuring various combinations of Talos, Terrier, and Tartar emplacements. Despite the tremendous strides made by the naval aviation community in directing ship planning "futures," and the distant spectre of ballistic-missile submarines, the Navy's surface warfare investments held their own for a time. Interest grew in converting the Kentucky and Hawaii into unique and unprecedented large missile ships of great power and speed. No less an advocate than Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke declared in March 1956 that funding these conversion projects would be a priority in the fiscal year 1958 budget.
Some of the design permutations, though, seemed to constitute the equivalent in naval architecture of betting the farm. The "more is better" effect of one plan, apparently disregarding the mutual interference of so many clustered missile-guidance radars, strayed amusingly close to a precocious child's ship design. But this was still not as far afield as the vision of one citizen from Illinois, who in March 1955 wrote President Dwight D. Eisenhower to urge that the Kentucky be "finished as an Atomic Powered battleship, carrying atomic cannon, guided missiles, antiaircraft devises [sic] etc., and perhaps jet planes, thus making it the fastest and most powerful ship in the world." As innocent and outlandish as it must have seemed, this wish list—substituting nuclear surface-to-surface missiles for the "atomic cannon" and subtracting the aircraft—comprises essential features of the Soviet Navy's Kirov class of large "atomic rocket cruisers" some 25 years later.
The Long-Range Objectives Group in 1956 expanded its plans to include the existing Iowa-class ships and the Kentucky as all-missile or hybrid gun-and-missile BBGs, armed with the new fleet ballistic missile, Polaris, at a conversion cost of $160 million each. Along with attack carriers, ballistic missile cruisers, destroyers, and fast support ships, each BBG would operate in one of five U.S. Navy "striking forces" projected for the 1960s and 1970s. Further development of the Iowa-class Polaris BBG concept in 1959, however, passed the Kentucky by. The burgeoning expense of her conversion and completion—by this time more than $200 million—balanced against the millions already spent on a still-incomplete ship ultimately eroded congressional support. This prompted disposal of the Kentucky and eroded any interest in converting even the nearly-complete Hawaii, consigning her also to the scrapyard.
Postlude
By 1958, naval planners recognized that the window of opportunity for developing the Kentucky into a dramatic new warship had closed, and on 9 June the name was stricken from the Naval Register. Congress had acted just months before to authorize the ship's sale for scrap, despite obstacles set out by Representative William H. Natcher (D-KY), a World War II Navy veteran who warmed easily to championing the rescue of the Kentucky and several other imperiled naval projects. Seven times during 1957 and 1958 Natcher, who never missed a session or a vote, procedurally prevented what he termed "sneak attacks" by colleagues, which would have scuttled his prizes. But in the end he could not prevail against the persuasive powers of the House Armed Services Committee chair, Carl Vinson (D-GA). He accepted the defeat with grace and hope, musing presciently that it would be fitting for a future combatant "like a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or submarine" to be named for the Bluegrass State. The Ohio (SSBN-726)-class submarine Kentucky (SSBN-737) eventually allowed Natcher some belated satisfaction.
In early November 1958 Boston Metals Company of Baltimore acquired the $40 to $55 million hulk from the Navy for less than $1.2 million. While the ship awaited delivery into the breakers' hands, the Chief of Naval Operations received a bizarre eleventh-hour alternate bid from a commercial venture, proposing to convert the Kentucky into a fast "cafeteria type passenger ship." Seeking to obtain the Navy's endorsement for their purchase of the ship from Boston Metals and her subsequent conversion in a foreign shipyard, Ocean Shipping and Trading Corporation's proposal instead piled up on the rocks of U.S. Navy disposal procedures. After "effective demilitarization," Navy-supervised conversion in a U.S. yard was required. In the case of a recently designed combatant like the Kentucky, demilitarization could have been achieved only by dismantling the entire hull. Faced with this deflating naval Catch-22, the corporation did not pursue the notion. In fact, their primary agent in the venture, John T. Koehler, should have known better. He had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Material.
In late June 1958 the Kentucky was towed for the last time from Newport News, where a German freighter crew manned the rail to render honors as the sad giant slid along the James River, bound for Portsmouth. At Norfolk Naval Shipyard, the ship's still-new propulsion machinery—eight Babcock & Wilcox boilers and four General Electric turbines—was removed and stored. In early February 1959 tugs arrived from Baltimore to usher the nearly hollow hull up the Chesapeake Bay to the Boston Metals Company yard, and oblivion.
Mr. Hogg is the editor of The Kentucky Review and director of Library Services in the Special Collections and Archives of the M.I. King Library at the University of Kentucky. This is an adaptation of a paper he delivered at the 14th Ohio Valley History Conference.