The Budget Sinks a Battleship

While two sister battleships unlimbered their 16-inch guns in the Persian Gulf War, the venerable U.S. battleship New Jersey--the most decorated in the Navy--was decommissioned Friday in Long Beach for “budgetary reasons.”

The 887-foot Iowa-class ship--the fastest, most heavily armed of U.S. battleships--will be maintained at the Long Beach Naval Station until it is towed to Bremerton, Wash., where it will join the Navy’s mothballed fleet.

The aging ship, which costs about $37 million a year to maintain, was commissioned on May 23, 1943. The list of its battle operations during World War II reads like a history of war in the Pacific: Marshall Islands, New Guinea, the Marianas.

The row of campaign ribbons displayed on its bridge wing is longer than that of any other Navy ship.

Since World War II, the New Jersey has been mothballed and recommissioned four times, seeing action in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

“It’s a shame to put it out of commission, especially at this time,” said retired Navy Cmdr. William Brown, who served on the New Jersey for four years in the early 1950s. “But times change.”

The New Jersey, he said, is the “most beautiful ship in the Navy.”