WI if the Big E took the place of the Missouri?

Hi there, I'm the new guy. I'm hoping to post some things related to my writing here, to see if they're plausible, interesting, or in need of work.

What if the USS. Enterprise had been the site of the Japanese surrender instead of the Missouri?

I believe I had read somewhere (or perhaps it was on of those Battle 360 episodes) that before the Missouri was selected and after, many high ranking officers and politicians were pushing for a more veteran ship, like the Enterprise for example?

True, she had been badly damaged near the end, there is a precedence for quick repair. The Yorktown was on the verge of sinking when she entered Pearl, but in three days she had almost been fully repaired and sent off to Midway. With the Enterprise's damage not as catashropic and at least two weeks before the ceremony, surely she could at least having external and superficial damage repaired?

Also, what would happen to the Big E now? Would she stay commissioned through Korea and become a museum ship?
 
It certainly would have been a PR bonanza. The Big E had 20 battle stars and was the most decorated ship in the Navy, so that will be played up very well. If the signing took place it would certainly have become a museum ship. It should have had such a fate in our time line as well...:(.
 

CalBear

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1st, Welcome! :D

The problem with this is that the Enterprise ate a Kamikaze on May 14th, 1945 and had not been repaired, having arrived in Bremerton in early June. There is almost no way, short of butterflying away the May 14th hit, for Enterprise to get to Japan in time for the Surrender ceremony.

Even if the carrier wasn't hit, it is unlikely that Enterprise would have been chosen. First she was a carrier, and while warfare had changed, nothing on the Seven Seas looked as impressive and intimidating as an Iowa. She was also not named after the home state of the President of the United States, which was a very powerful part of the argument for using the Missouri as the centerpiece of the Surrender. The only chance of a carrier being used would have been if the Franklin D Roosevelt had been finished with shakedown and was in the Theater.

The Enterprise would, possibly, maybe even probably, have escaped the breaker's yard if the surrender had been signed on board. The Museum aspect of such a ship is obvious. But, as a combat ship, her time was done. The Yorktowns all had serious weaknesses in underwater protection (you could bomb them all day & they would shake it off, torpedoes, well that was a different matter), and were considerably smaller than the Essex class ships (25,000 tons full load vs. 36,000) and absolutely dwarfed by the Midway ships (45,000 tons). That size meant a lot of capacity and survivability.

The Yorktowns (except for Wasp) also lacked the side elevator that was standard on the later classes. The advantages of having an elevator that doesn't disable the ship if it gets stuck in anything but an up, fully flush position are enormous. When you couple that, with the size issue, and the fact that the Enterprise had been built to handle and support biplanes like the BF2C Goshawk and SBC Helldiver (max takeoff weight 7,800 pounds), not the 25,000 pound Skyraider or 51,000 pound AJ-1 Savage or a 25,000 pound FIGHTER like the Banshee you have a Hero Ship that has run its course and needs to be put out to pasture.
 
Also, I don't know if they considered such things, but it might have been considered more fitting that Japan's surrender occurred on the deck of a battleship, since it was their attacks on the US battleships (primarily) at Pearl that precipitated the war.

Another point about Big Mo. Using a battleship allowed her gun turrets to be menacingly pointed at Tokyo in a nice piece of precautionary symbolism that could not be missed by the Japanese signatories. I've even read that the guns were actually ready to fire - but that could have been hyperbole. Staging the surrender ceremony on a carrier deck would render the ship incapable of showing any menace.
 
USS Wasp (CV-7) was not a Yorktown-class carrier, she was a one-off with about the same tonnage as USS Ranger (CV-4), albeit far more combatworthy.
 
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