USS Missouri Poster

On her deck, the most destructive war in human history came to an end. USS Missouri — "Mighty Mo" — was one of the great Iowa-class battleships, a 45,000-ton giant armed with nine 16-inch guns, and she holds a unique and honoured place in history as the ship on which Japan formally surrendered, bringing the Second World War to a close. Commissioned in 1944, Missouri reached the Pacific in time for the war's final, brutal battles. Her enormous guns bombarded Iwo Jima and Okinawa, softening the islands for the Marines, and she screened the carriers against the kamikaze storm — on one famous occasion absorbing a suicide plane that struck her side, after which her captain ordered a respectful burial at sea for the dead Japanese pilot, a remarkable moment of humanity amid the carnage that has never been forgotten. Her immortal moment came on 2 September 1945. In Tokyo Bay, surrounded by the assembled might of the Allied fleet, the Japanese delegation came aboard Missouri to sign the Instrument of Surrender before General Douglas MacArthur and representatives of the Allied powers. With those signatures, on Missouri's deck, the Second World War was formally over. A small bronze plaque marks the exact spot to this day, and the surrender ceremony aboard "Mighty Mo" became one of the defining images of the twentieth century. But the great battleship's career was far from finished. She fought in the Korean War, her 16-inch guns once more pounding enemy positions ashore. Then, like her sisters, she was modernised in the 1980s, fitted with cruise missiles and modern electronics for a final tour in the Cold War navy. And in 1991, during the Gulf War, she fired her 16-inch guns in anger one last time, bombarding targets in Kuwait — the last battleship in history ever to fire its main guns in combat, closing the age of the battleship almost exactly where its relevance had peaked. Retired at last, Missouri was preserved as a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where she is moored near the sunken hull of USS Arizona. The two ships now face one another across the harbour, and together they bracket America's war: Arizona marking its violent beginning on 7 December 1941, Missouri marking its end in Tokyo Bay in September 1945. To stand between them is to stand between the war's first day and its last. To reconstruct USS Missouri is to capture both a mighty fighting ship and a place where history turned — the last battleship to fire her guns in war, and the very deck on which the Second World War ended. She is among the most significant warships ever built, not only for her power, but for the peace that was signed upon her, and she remains one of the most visited and revered of all preserved warships.