 Today history was made in Chesapeake Bay, amid the crash of exploding bombs, obsolete battleships were sunk by airplanes for the first time. Veteran Army pilot General Billy Mitchell did what he said he would do. American battleships which once sailed proudly round the world with a great white fleet and only yesterday were detaining America from her enemies are at the bottom of the sea. The nations have agreed to build no more battleships for 15 years, probably forever. The shipyards are empty. The scrapyards are thundering to the sounds of destruction of whole squadrons of battleships. Does this mean the end of the Dreadnought battleship? This is what General Billy Mitchell claimed today. And that's what people will be saying all over the world. More than four decades have passed. Men have fought and died on land and in the air. On the sea too, a new generation of battleships have fired their guns in anger again and again, have triumphed and then disappeared from the oceans. This is a battleship grave, a memorial to an era of magnificence. The silence that hangs like a pole over these Dreadnoughts holds many memories of combat. At present the big guns are silent and this symbol of fearsome, stately power lies still. She was built because men wanted her. She fought magnificently and with the end of her era she was forgotten. Here lie three of the last and greatest of this super breed of fighting ship, waiting for perhaps one more call to duty. Their names are Iowa, Wisconsin and New Jersey. Their home through these lost years, a remote pier in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The ancestry of these sleeping men of war stems from the first Dreadnought ever. It is a fearsome name in naval history. Dear God and Dreadnought, the family motto of the English Admiral Lord Fisher, who created the first all big gun battleship early in this century as a challenge to anyone who might dare to dispute England's rule of the world's oceans. Now these American Dreadnoughts look back on the honorable record of their ancestors with names like Valiant and Warspite, Michigan, Texas and Tennessee. The nations of the world built 175 of them at a cost of countless billions. They met their ends in various ways, in combat blasting the pieces each other's steel hulls, or was sent to the bottom by mine, torpedo or bomb, or they were broken up in times of peace and national economy. Their rusting, mud shrouded skeletons litter the bed to the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the North Sea. In less than the lifetime of a sailor, they had all gone, all but these few kept in reserve, or as mammoth and melancholy memorials to their former greatness, and to a vanished age before missiles and jets deprived the world's armories of nobility. In the years of uneasy peace and depression, the United States Navy had still kept its faith in the older battleship she had built from 1910 to the 20s. Linked now with the new carriers, they were the nation's first line of defense, and their omnipotence brought reassurance to a troubled generation. In a stately line of steel towers and artillery, they signaled to the world their power to deter any future enemy. The funeral pyre of Pearl Harbor changed all that. More brought together the old veterans with a new generation of bigger-than-ever dreadnoughts, graceful, swift, invulnerable. The big gun was still needed. There were ten new ships in all, the greatest concentration of artillery the world had ever seen. One of these giants was destined time and again to etch her name in black gunsmoke and white wake across the battle-contested Pacific Ocean. Maybe with us who follow his leadership that our loyal team may never be slack and our courage never wanting, especially in the day of battle be close to us. We do not pray for easy lives, but we do pray to be stronger men. We do not pray for tasks equal to our powers, but we pray for powers equal to our tasks. Amen. The commandant is authorized to place in commission the United States ship New Jersey, the Navy Yard Philadelphia, May 23rd, in accordance with the foregoing authority and now direct to New Jersey be placed in commission. The year was 1943 and the New Jersey, a steel miracle of speed and firepower, was ready to join the United States Navy for Pacific War service. Her gun crews were behind armor 16 inches thick. There was 17-inch steel over other vital parts of the New Jersey. Her 16-inch guns could hurl 2,700-pound shells 23 miles with unerring accuracy. More than 100 lighter guns could blast any raider out of the skies and she was strong enough to resist the worst the enemy could throw at her. Wither, oh splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, Leaning across the bosom of the urgent west, That fierce nor sea rising nor sky clouding, Wither away, fair rover, and what thy quest. Robert Bridge's white sails had given way to 212,000 horsepower turbines and the quest of the New Jersey and her sisters Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri was victory in the Pacific. There was no pause after her shakedown training before the New Jersey's baptism of fire. She steamed into the full fury of the battle for the Marshall Islands at the end of January 1944 and the fiercely defended Japanese fleet base at truck. Her great guns created devastation to shore. Her 5-inch 40 and 20-millimeter artillery stamped the sky with hectic patterns of dark puffs and streaked it with arching tracers. Day by day in the tumult of battle, the men became more skillful and the guns synchronized with the rhythm of destruction and the enemy planes tumbled down in awful balls of fire to a hissing death in the ocean. From Quageline to truck, from Panapay across the Equator to New Guinea, from the damp chill of a north wind to the feverish heat of the southern Philippines, the officers of the New Jersey once lived off duty in this ward room, talking of the routine problems of the day, or maybe that big shoot when the brown stain of their shell bursts at all but screamed off the island of Guam before the invasion craft went in, or what the captain had said when that kamikaze grazed the four mast and exploded 50 yards off the port bow. Through the tedium, the discomfort, the frequent sharp dangers, there was the talk and from it grew the bonds which secure the friendships of fighting men. And the captain himself, alone with his responsibilities, obiter of 3,000 lives, at once warrior, chieftain, patriarch, and judge, as well as commander of one of the most powerful vessels of war ever devised by man. The price of the battle stars earned by the New Jersey and her sister battleships was paid in the lives and injuries of good American sailors and the sorrowing of wives and families. The tide had flowed in every combated sea since Actium. Only the nature of war at sea had changed and the role of the battleship with it. Billy Mitchell, like so many prophets, had been only half right. The battleship was no longer the ship of the line whose war was to pound the enemy fleet in a slamming duel. The aerial bomb and torpedo had finished all that. It was a near impregnable steel fortress with great guns to strike with weighty high explosives at land targets and small guns to clear the skies for the new queens of the Navy. Those floating airfields, the carriers upon whom the battleship depended for her own survival. Now the battleship was the fleet's armed bodyguard, sharp of eye and quick on the trigger. Bull Halsey himself hoisted his flag on the New Jersey, wove his webs of strategical genius and leapt on the flies as they flew into trap after trap. The battles did not cease with the end of the day. For when the sun went down and the stars came out far over the summer sea and never a moment ceased. Ship after ship the whole night long with her battle thunder and flame. God of battles was ever a battle like this in the world before. It was the summer of 1945. The end was near. Under the masterly command of Bull Halsey, the New Jersey had fought at the Marianas, the Philippine islands at Iwo Jima. Like Sir Francis Drake on Plymouth Ho, awaiting the Spanish armada, Fleet Admiral Halsey had time for a game before the final and decisive trial. The enemy was crumbling fast. The New Jersey was steaming at flank speed to participate in her final annihilating battle, Okinawa. Down here on that day the smell of danger was as acute and penetrating as the scent of the hot bearings and racing turbines. No less because it was the last battle. And the courage of the men was of a very special kind as they exercised their subterranean skills. Learning of the battle above only from the sounds and shocks, knowing that if the outcome was defeat, their chances of survival were the slimmest of all. Man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man. But these brave men of the New Jersey survived. And after that last battle they raced up from the darkness of war into the dazzling light of victory to join those who had worked the guns. Yes, at last it was all over. The hot days of war turned to the cold days of peace. Old enemies became new allies. Old allies became less friendly. In the troubled air of the late 1940s, many an American battleship went to the breakers. But some of the greatest were kept just in case. Even in this new missile and jet in nuclear age there might still be a place. You never knew, not with a dreadnought. Invincible dreadnought. Suddenly the New Jersey's big guns were needed again. They had not lost their power. Off the Korean coast in 1951, the shells span out explosively from the barrels, in salvos and broad sides, the pinpoint shore installations, and the new enemy and foxholes among the Quezon Hills. On July 26, 1953, a decade after she was first commissioned, the New Jersey fired her guns in anger and many thought it was for the last time. It seemed right and proper that this great battleship should be the last in the world to fight. Again, the old warrior was retired with affection and deep respect, but without ceremony. One more decade passed in the life of the New Jersey. She lay forlorn between two of her sisters, a threesome of forgotten men of war. Through winter snows and gales, the unfulfilled promise of every spring, the heat of summer and the renewed melancholy of autumn, the New Jersey still floated. Her guns trained fore and aft in the posture of peace. When you mounted the gangway and stood on those muscular decks, looking up in awe at the towering superstructure, the cacophony of war was as distant in time as the ship's history. Now there was only the cry of wheeling gulls and the squabble of pigeons about their nests in the funnel tops. With the touch of a late fallen leaf, a fragment of peeled paint falls to the scarred deck. And yet, here was where sweating gunners beat each other's backs and cried joyful obscenities when that kamikaze had hit the sea just forward of midships. And here, aft on the port side, was where that North Korean shell hit and killed. And this is where Bull Hallsy played his last game of deck tennis. I'll bet he won that too. It was so old a ship, who knows, who knows, and yet so beautiful. I watched in vain to see the mast burst open with a rose and the whole deck put on its leaves again. It is the summer of 1967 and the air is full of new national anxieties. The New Jersey is suddenly alive again, throbbing to the activity of duckyard workers who have come to prepare the old warrior for sea. Yet again, the battleship has to be called back to active duty. In August, the New Jersey is detached from her old consorts and drawn in slow dignity from her birth into dry dock. Neglected for ten years, she is again the center of attention. The men that work on her in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard are another special breed, as tough in their own way as those who man a battleship in action. They are all weathermen who can work high above the deck in winter like a mariner furling a windjammer's topsel or deepen the chilled bowels where it's as dark and claustrophobic as a Pennsylvania coal mine. They are men who may have worked on the New Jersey back in 1950, or even when she was first built in the early 1940s. They all know her and now with their expertise and strength they come on board again to graft their wondrous computers, sophisticated communications, modern lighting and air conditioning to the complex structure and organs of the battleship. As the seasons turn and the low autumn mists over the Delaware give way to the chill and damp of a dockyard in winter, the complex organism is reawakened, stage by delicate stage. New life comes to the ship as her crew gathers, some fresh to battleship service, others who've known it all before. This man and this ship may be rich in memories, but today is when history starts again, yet still chained with the past by links of men and links of steel. On the New Jersey men like this fought and saw others fall 24 years ago and 17 years ago and now perhaps they may endure it all again. For this ship which has experienced the forces of nature and man will soon be echoing again to the feet of men who have tasted action and others who thought that war was something out of history books. The New Jersey's guns are exercised. The massive turbines turn over once more, paint work is cleaned down, and steel that was chipped with age is turned first red, then a clean purposeful gray. A year's work is over. For so long the graveyard memorial, she will soon be a pulsating reality. Man control stand by to answer all bells, take in all lines. That is clear to shift, sir. On the way. It's the first time I've seen that fan tail clear four months. Surely the old ship knows that a new dawn is breaking for her. That again after such a long, long silence, the crisp orders of our new commander are ringing out from her bridge. That is stern, sir. Very well. Starboard engine ahead one third. Starboard engine ahead one third. This is a testing time when a hundred specialists must check a thousand minute perfections. Main control, bridge, engine seem to be answering nicely. So the New Jersey is off on her trials at first slowly and gently downriver. One long blast on a whistle. Then she feels again the heady sensation of speed and the swift caress of the 33 knot water sweeping along her hull. In a few days time the Navy and the people will come to pay their homage and the band will strike up in joyful unison with the cheers at her recommissioning. And so this is the day of days. Senior officials, important guests, gold braid. Today we recommission the battleship. New Jersey is most welcome. A touch of the formality, the pump and the color the New Jersey deserves to celebrate the start of a new life. Philadelphia, May 16, 1968. A cold steel gray dawn. Just a quarter of a century since the New Jersey first sailed away to war. The last act has been played. There remains only the finale. Her stage is the boundless ocean, her true element where all the great roles in her long and dramatic life have been enacted. Released at last, she seems to cry out in triumph I am going to see again, to see, to see. And from across the water comes the anguished echo from the dreadnought's forgotten sisters. As she slips majestically down the waters of this river which is known the shape of her keel for so long heading for deep water and freshening winds she bears the inheritance of every dreadnought that ever fought on the oceans. Of the invincible that once annihilated a whole squadron and was later blown to pieces at Jutland the Bismarck that once destroyed the greatest dreadnought in the world and went to the bottom 48 hours later the Nevada sunk at Pearl Harbor yet lived to fight again. The New York Admiral Rodman's flagship in World War I the Tennessee, Texas and California the Dunkirk from France the Vittorio Veneto, Italy's greatest Washington, Wisconsin, Prince of Wales Colossus and Conqueror, Revenge and Royal Oak Maryland, Mississippi and Missouri Oklahoma and Arizona The New Jersey is the last in a long line of a still unvanquished breed of fighting ship New Jersey, noble American dreadnought born on American soil bred in a century of combat at sea sail then New Jersey sail again out to the seas that have missed you for so long may your tasks be honorable and peaceful may your destiny be as proud as it always has been sail away great ship Godspeed and safe return