Encyclopedia > United States battleships

Article Content

United States battleships

The first United States battleships (though they were not called such at the time) were the heavy-armored cruisers USS Maine (ACR-1) and USS Texas. The first ship of the United States Navy actually classified as a battleship and given a "BB" hull classification symbol was USS Indiana (BB-1). In total, the United States has commissioned 64 "BB" battleships. They may be grouped as the pre-Dreadnoughts, BB-25 and earlier; the dreadnoughts, BB-26 through BB-54; and the fast battleships, BB-55 and later.

Indiana class:

USS Iowa (BB-4) was unique.

Kearsarge class[?]:

Illinois class[?]:

Maine class[?]:

Virginia class[?]:

Connecticut class[?] (note out-of-sequence numbering):

Mississippi class[?]:

South Carolina class:

Pennsylvania class:

New Mexico class[?]:

Tennessee class (two of the "Big Five"):

Colorado class[?] (the other three of the "Big Five"):

USS Colorado (BB-45)
USS Maryland (BB-46)
USS Washington (BB-47) (launched but cancelled before commissioning)
USS West Virginia (BB-48)

Senator Benjamin Tillman instructed the Navy to design "maximum battleships." While those plans never progressed beyond the study phase, they did influence later designs.

South Dakota class (keels laid down for the but the entire class was cancelled before they were launched):

North Carolina class[?]

South Dakota class (commissioned):

Iowa class[?]:

The Montana class was authorized and then cancelled before any of the keels were laid down. They were to have been:

Except for Kearsarge, named by an act of Congress, all American battleships have been named for states, and every state has had at least one battleship named for it except Alaska and Hawaii (recall that these did not become states until 1959). Two battleships have been authorized to be named for Montana, but both were cancelled before commissioning. The pre-dreadnoughts USS Zrinyi (formerly SMS Zrinyi), USS Radetzky[?] (formerly SMS Radetzky[?]), and USS Ostfriesland (formerly SMS Ostfriesland[?]), taken as prizes of war after World War I, were commissioned in the US Navy, but were not assigned hull classification symbols.

No American battleship has ever been lost at sea, though some have been sunk in port and others sunk as targets.

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!