Mr. Allen:
Re salvaged battleship armament from Pearl Harbor battleships - the two
after triple 14 in main battery turrets from ARIZONA were removed, along
with handling gear and magazine hoists and reconstructed as Battery ARIZONA
and Battery Pennsylvania overlooking Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii on the opposite end
of Oahu during WW II. Both turrets were laid into concrete barbettes with
all internal magazine hoists and handling gear salvaged from inside those
two particular turrets. This was built into a combination two-turret
battery with magaizines, generators, a CP, maintenance shops and a small
sick bay all below ground in the mountainous terrain the batteries were
constructed on.
All of this is still there, except the turrets and guns which were
dismantled and scrapped shortly after their test firing on VJ Day 1945. I
have been inside the complex a number of years ago which is located on the
rifle range at Kaneohe Bay and is inside a protected bird sanctuary which is
off limits to the public and even to the Marines stationed there. It is
quite a chore to get permission to get in there to see, but I did, taking
plenty of pictures.
I do not know what happened to the 22 5 in guns in the secondary battery of
ARIZONA, some were undoubtably destroyed, the others were probably
refurbished and redistributed throughout the fleet on other "FLOATING
MILITARY VEHICLES."
Semper Fi,
Stew Rayfield
Major USMC (Ret)
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven P. Allen [mailto:spallen@rolemail.ccis.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2000 12:57 PM
To: mil-veh@skylee.com
Subject: Re: [MV] USS Arizona and the Belgrano
At 11:11 AM 7/2/00 -0700, Gary Pavone wrote:
>The Arizona's superstructure was removed because it was a hazard. The deck
>guns were removed because it was thought that they could be used as shore
>defense weapons. This was never done.
Not quite true; the new batteries made up of salvaged guns were in fact test
fired right at the end of the war. My question is: what happened to them?
Steve Allen
BTW, all of the completed Iowa class were laid down BEFORE Pearl Harbor,
having been funded two years previously.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Aug 07 2000 - 22:15:55 PDT