USS North Carolina Poster

She was the first of America's modern fast battleships, and the Japanese reported her sunk so many times that her own crew embraced the nickname "the Showboat" — because, no matter what the enemy claimed, she just kept showing up. USS North Carolina was a powerful new design, mounting nine 16-inch guns and fast enough to keep pace with the aircraft carriers she was built to protect. When she arrived in the Pacific in 1942, she was living proof that American industrial might was finally beginning to turn the tide of the war. North Carolina quickly became one of the hardest-working ships in the fleet. Her primary role was to shield the precious, vulnerable carriers from air attack, and her dense batteries of anti-aircraft guns threw up such a wall of fire that, during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons in August 1942, lookouts on the carrier Enterprise reportedly signalled to ask whether the battleship was on fire — so intense and continuous was her shooting. She was a floating fortress of anti-aircraft firepower at a moment when the carriers desperately needed exactly that protection. Soon after, she proved she could take a blow as well as deliver one. In September 1942 a torpedo from a Japanese submarine struck North Carolina on her port side, blowing a huge hole below the waterline. A lesser or older ship might well have been lost — but her modern, well-compartmented construction and the swift, disciplined work of her damage-control teams kept her afloat, on an even keel, and even able to keep station with the fleet. Repaired, she was soon back in the thick of the fighting. For the rest of the war North Carolina seemed to be everywhere, earning fifteen battle stars — among the most of any United States battleship — across nearly every major Pacific campaign. From Guadalcanal to the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, the Marianas, the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, she screened the carriers, bombarded enemy shores, and added her great guns to the relentless American advance toward Japan. She survived the war intact — the "Showboat" the enemy could never actually sink, no matter how often they claimed it. After the war, when she faced the scrapyard, the people of her namesake state rallied to save her, raising funds (famously including donations from schoolchildren) to bring her home. Since 1961 she has been preserved as a museum ship and memorial at Wilmington, North Carolina, where she still stands proud today, honouring the state's war dead. To reconstruct USS North Carolina is to capture the first of America's new generation of fast battleships — heavily armed, hard to kill, and seemingly always in the fight — and a ship beloved enough that her own state refused to let her die. She is both a formidable warship and a cherished memorial, the "Showboat" preserved for the generations who came after.