In The Aftermath: the US Navy, the Americas, and US foreign Policy in the post Confederate World
Part 1: 1944-1960
Battleship USS Missouri is paraded through San Francisco on her way to retirement, 1985.
The Last of the "Mahanian Philosophy" Battleships built for the US Navy, with their successors, the
Montana-class, cancelled following the End of the Second Great war, the "Mighty Mo" and her three sisters of the
Ohio-class (Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconson) formed the core of the "New Model Navy" constructed to supplement Aircraft carrier operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific, with the speed needed for fast-response operations and to keep up with carrier groups, as well as provide close-in Anti-Aircraft support.
Of the Four, only
Ohio and
Missouri were completed in time to see service in the War, bombarding Confederate coastal positions in Virginia and South Carolina in support of Irving Morrell's "Drive to the Sea" and, in what would turn out to be the last Battleship vs. Battleship engagement in the Western Hemisphere,
Missouri engaged CSS
Louisiana off the Hampton Roads in early 1944 as she tried to break out of Newport News with a small squadron of CSN warships.
Not far from where USS
Monitor and CSS
Virginia had fought their historic duel in March 1862, in what some regarded as the first battle between the USN and CSN, the LAST battle between the two navies would be fought, as the punishing 16-inch guns of the Mighty Mo pounded the "King Louie" and her escorts, aided by Y-range fire control systems that allowed for great accuracy.
Within 4 hours,
Louisiana was limping back towards port, trailing smoke from over a dozen fires on board, while the cruisers CSS
Charleston and CSS
Norfolk were settling to the bottom of the harbor.
Missouri, for her part, had taken several hits, including a torpedo to her starboard side that, depending on who you ask, came from a CSN destroyer or a coastal torpedo battery. However, despite her damage she was still in fighting shape, and was back to bombarding Confederate positions within 3 hours.
With the End of the War,
Missouri was part of the task force ordered to guard the remainder of the Confederate Fleet that had been gathered in Narragansett Bay, the few ships of the CSN Atlantic squadrons that were not scuttled or caught in the Superbombing of Newport News. Among these is the incomplete hull of the CSS
Florida, a Confederate response to the
Ohio-class that the needs of the war prevented from being finished, as well as the near-complete hull of the CSS
Douglas Corrigan, the CSA's first and only Aircraft Carrier. The
Florida would later be sunk in Superbomb tests in the Pacific, while the "Wrong Way" as it was so nicknamed after its namesake, would be completed by the USN and sold to Brazil to help maintain a pro-US force in South America.
Following the war and the completion of her two remaining sisters,
Missouri and
Wisconsin would eventually be assigned to the Pacific Fleet, with their first mission being to oversee the ceremonies commemorating the opening of construction on the "Columbia Canal" cut through the isthmus of Panama, which had, finally, been organized by US diplomats, such efforts long stymied by the USA and CSA threatening war if the other began such an effort. From there, They would be posted to Pearl Harbor, where as part of the USS
Wilbur Wright Carrier force would lock eyes with the Japanese Navy, with whom tensions had almost immediately upon the end of the war begun flaring again. With some proclaiming "Unfinished Business" with the Japanese for the quasi-war in the Pacific before the rise of the Freedom Party in the CSA, the "Double-W" force would regularly close distance with their counterparts from the Imperial Japanese Navy, sometimes close enough for sailors on both sides to wave to one another.
Missouri would regularly square off with the Japanese battleship
Shinanao, one of the 18-inch armed "Super Battleships" that the IJN had constructed in an effort to match firepower against their numerical inferiority to the USN.
Heading into the 1950's, as the USN began to streamline its forces to reduce costs in the post-war world, the Ohio's were among the only wartime Capitol Ships to remain in active service, with much of the USN's pre-war or wartime forces being decommissioned, mothballed or, in the case of most of the battleships, scrapped. Aside from the memorialized USS
Dakota, which was officially proclaimed as the USN's "Heritage Emissary" ship and docked alongside USS
Constitution in Boston Harbor, and several other other vessels purchased by veterans groups to be preserved as private museums, the "Mahanian Fleet" of the pre-Great Wars era was for the most part reduced to scrap iron and recycled. With the fleets of the Allied powers such as the Royal Navy being reduced to near-impotence by Armistice regulation, the only fleets in the Atlantic region that posed a conspicuous threat to the USN were those of her allies, and of these only the Kaiserliche Marine of Germany could hope to face them in Open Battle. While Japan remained adversarial, they seemed content to consolidate their holdings in the Western Pacific.
it was during this period that the question of Superbomb warfare emerged to the fore of Military planning, with the subsequent question as to whether such massive navies served a practical purpose when superbombs could sink an entire task force in one blow. This philosophy was made all the more prominent following the joint US-German Midway tests, wherein several ex-Allied vessels and surplus USN and KM assets were subjected to a sequence of Superbombings, both from the air and from underwater. The results spoke for themselves: while the ships proved reluctant to sink outright, they were badly damaged, and the radiation contamination would have rendered them effectively inoperable as there would be no chance of their crews surviving.
Following these operations, the Close-knit task forces the Ohio's had been built for were reorganized to prioritize destroyers and cruisers as fast escorts, leaving the battleships at something of a loss of purpose: with no enemy battleships to fight and the carriers now dashing about with lighter vessels to support them, the quartet of battleships faced a period of shuffling about duties, including a hitherto unheard-of moment when all four were stationed in the San Diego Navy Yard.
L-R: Wisconson, Kentucky and Ohio in San Diego, 1954
Salvation came with the beginning of the "Peruvian War" of 1957 between Chile and Peru, where the vessels, in league with their allies in the Chilean Navy, lent their heavy guns to shore bombardment duties in support of the Chilean Advance. A Neo-Freedomite government had taken over Peru, with intelligence indicating that ex-FPG officers who had fled to the country being behind the coup, and this was compounded by the Peruvian forces being equipped with weaponry, particularly barrels and aircraft, that bore remarkable resemblances to that used by the CSA during the 2nd Great War.
USS Missouri bombarding the Peruvian coast, 1957
President David Ironhewer was hesitant about Committing US ground forces to the fight, but knew he could not allow a pro-Freedomite regime to stand in the Americas, as rumblings of similar attitudes had emerged in Bolivia and Ecuador, and Argentina, always pro-British from the start and serving as a hidey-hole for ex-Silvershirt officials, would likely throw its weight behind such an effort. In league with the Chilean government, as well as those of Columbia and Brazil, the United States deployed an expeditionary force of 47,000 men, augmented by Barrels, aircraft and logistical support, to back up the Anti-Freedomite Coalition of the Americas, or AFCA, which would subsequently become a permanent alliance organization, with Venezuela, Uraguay and Paraguay later joining.
After three and a half years of hard fighting through the Andes, more than half of Peru was in the hands of AFCA forces, and Bolivian intervention had been curtailed by a combination of economic incentives and the veiled threat of superbombing. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, who had succeeded Ironhewer as president, sought a diplomatic end to the fighting, especially as tensions were beginning to heat up in Europe as Austria-Hungary was wracked by a series of internal crises and Germany cracked down on a rebellion in her West African Colonies through a series of bloody reprisals that were revealed to have been carried out by ex-Confederates serving in the German Foreign Legion.
With the Freedomite government of Peru not being forthcoming, Kennedy instead threw his backing behind the creation of a North and South Peru, with a pro-US government taking over the south, backed by Chile and Brazil.