Battleship Alabama

Книга на английском языке
Newspapers across the United States carried a brief story in early February 1940. “Keel Laid for 35,000 Ton Battleship,” read the headline in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. In Montgomery, Alabama, he Advertiser ran an especially detailed account, for his battleship was to be named for the state of Alabama itself. It noted that “the Navy has a long estab-lished custom of naming battleships for the states of he Union.” The forthcoming USS Alabama would beleither the first warship, nor the last, to be named for he 22nd state of the Union (see “Alabama-A Great lame in Fighting Ships,” on page 11).
The estimated price at the time for this technological narvel was $69 million. Some later estimates reached 77 million. The staggering cost, the equivalent of at zast $1.2 billion today, would be borne by a nation not fully recovered from the Great Depression. The financial sacrifice revealed the urgency with which the U.S. government was approaching the question of rearmament in the late 1930s. A resurgent Nazi Germany and a menacing Imperial Japan were constructing and commissioning battleships whose weapons, armor, and propulsion systems leapfrogged those of the battleships of the U.S. fleet, which had all been commissioned before, during, or just after World War I—a quarter of a century earlier.
Alabama was one of ten “fast battleships” that the U.S. Navy commissioned between 1941 and 1944 (see the table “U.S. Fast Battleships of World War II” on page 14). They were the latest and most sophisticated in a long line of ships that many scholars of naval warfare trace back to the seventeenth century.

Contents
Introduction
The Long History of the Battleship and Alabama’s Place in It
Alabama
A Great Name in Fighting Ships
Misuse of the Fast Battleship in World War II
The Design and Functioning of the South Dakota Battleships
Sister Ships
The Crew and Life on Board Alabama
Alabama’s Combat Operations and Voyages
Alabama as a Museum
From USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data