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02:37And from the 30,000 crewmen who served in her during her finest and most dangerous hours.
02:42She was my world at sea, my home and port, a fighting lady and with a heavy punch.
02:52This is the story of that magnificent fighting lady.
02:58America's Iraqi enemies in the 1991 Persian Gulf War might have thought they were being hammered
03:25by a ghost.
03:29Hadn't the massive striking power of the USS Missouri vanished from the oceans in 1945?
03:35Weren't battleships antiques of World War II the last time big gun navies fought for the
03:41sea?
03:42But now she appeared in the Persian Gulf.
03:45Her 16-inch guns hurling automobile-sized shells, 20 miles with pinpoint accuracy.
03:51The next biggest gun in the fleet was a puny five-incher.
03:55The Missouri's power was literally risen from the dead.
03:59Missouri was really a mix of the historic and modern.
04:05Back when she was originally commissioned, the reach of her guns at 23 to 26 miles was an incredible
04:14technical feat.
04:18But when Missouri was brought back, she was brought back with some modern upgrades.
04:25They saved the big guns.
04:27They saved a few of the five-inch guns.
04:30But they put aboard Tomahawk missiles.
04:33And here you had the old platform capable of striking a target 500 to 700 miles inland.
04:43An incredible change of technology.
04:47You had the ability to launch a very, very, very precise weapon.
04:54You could pick the window of a building, and you could launch it from 500 miles away, and
05:00you could hit your target.
05:02That was the modern Missouri.
05:07Like her crews, the Missouri had changed with the times, but never in the mission of
05:13keeping her country safe.
05:16The old giant, firing gun and missile support in the Persian Gulf, had sailed tens of thousands
05:23of sea miles over five decades of service since her keel had been laid in Brooklyn a half-century
05:28before.
05:29USS Missouri began life in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on January 6, 1941.
05:46Although the strike on Pearl Harbor was 11 months ahead, the winds of war with an increasingly
05:50aggressive Japan lent urgency to her building.
05:57The Japanese Navy was huge and modern, with a backbone of swift new battleships.
06:05The Missouri was one of four new super battleships being built rapidly to counter the threat.
06:18Her hull number was BB-63, indicating that she was the 63rd battleship built since the formation
06:24of the U.S. Navy.
06:26She would be the last battleship completed, and the last to survive.
06:41The mighty Missouri was lying only half-built in Brooklyn when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor
06:46on December 7, 1941.
06:48With the heart of America's big gun fleet lying on the bottom, she was still three years away
06:54from launching.
06:55But she would be heard from yet.
06:59The Missouri was a technological marvel of the day, requiring 175 tons of blueprint paper
07:06and three million man days in building.
07:09Into her went 300 miles of wiring, 90 miles of piping, 15,000 valves, 900 electric motors,
07:17844 doors, 852 manholes, and 161 hatches.
07:24Displacing 58,000 tons, she was a monster, stretching 887 feet long and 102 feet across the beam,
07:33just wide enough to slip through the Panama Canal.
07:36Her power plant was four giant turbine engines, developing 212,000 shaft horsepower
07:43and able to drive her at 33 knots.
07:46She would cost 2 billion in today's dollars.
07:49A huge crew of 134 officers and 2,400 enlisted men would serve her.
07:57Her main battery of nine 16-inch guns and three triple-mount turrets was radar-directed,
08:03as were the 20 dual-purpose 5-inch guns in twin mounts in the secondary battery.
08:08Elsewhere, the ship bristled with 80 40-millimeter and 49 20-millimeter anti-aircraft guns.
08:23On January 29, 1944, after three years of top speed building, the Missouri was ready for launching.
08:30Although her sister ship, the Wisconsin, had begun building after the mighty Moe,
08:36the Missouri was the last completed and so became the last battleship.
08:41One of the luckiest breaks ever handed to the Missouri occurred in the choice of the all but unknown woman
08:47who would christen the ship at her Brooklyn launching on January 29, 1944.
08:53Margaret Truman was the feisty daughter of a feisty senator named Harry Truman,
08:58who happened to represent both Missouri and a key committee involved in defense expenditures.
09:04That he would in less than a year become President of the United States was undreamed.
09:08...on behalf of the people of the United States to maintain the peace which will follow our total victory.
09:15I thank you.
09:17Margaret's ceremonial duties did not go smoothly.
09:24She smashed the bottle of champagne against the bow of the ship.
09:29The bottle hadn't been prepared properly, so the champagne came cascading down on her and the Admiral next to her.
09:36And he was complaining. She said, don't complain, Admiral. It got me too.
09:41Then she said for years afterwards, she still had that smell of champagne in her coat.
09:46USS Missouri slid into the waves she would rule for four fighting decades.
09:56Floating, she would be rushed to completion and her crew assembled.
10:00The crew was the pivotal component.
10:03From across the country, awed and often overwhelmed young men came to their new home and the waiting adventures.
10:18We started walking down the pier with our sea bags and so forth and we saw the bows sticking up in the air this way.
10:26So we started walking down to the gate and the farther we walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and I said there's no way this thing can be floating.
10:34You know, because it was so far to get down to the stern to get aboard the ship.
10:41The first sight was the length of it.
10:45And then going aboard that thing and trying to find my bunk room and trying to find where I work, it took me about two weeks to get acclimated.
10:54The green kids that the Missouri first sailed to war in the spring of 1944 would be the first of a long line of heroes who would do the classic battleship proud as they met every challenge from typhoon waves to waves of kamikazes.
11:16By the early months of 1945, the Missouri was done with her sea trials and shaked down crews and it sailed to join the fleet where it was leapfrogging victoriously across the Pacific toward the Japanese mainland.
11:39The mighty Moe's, she was known by this time, supported aircraft carrier strikes against Tokyo and Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands.
11:49Her 16-inch and 5-inch guns went toward pounding the shores of Okinawa to soften them up for the biggest Pacific invasion yet.
11:57The giant shells were able to pierce both heavily built bunkers and deliver high explosives in 2,000-pound doses.
12:06It's like the roar of a freight train going past.
12:11It's enormously frightening to those on the receiving end.
12:15Then when it gets to the end of its trajectory, there's a cataclysmic explosion and it creates a crater that's 30 feet in diameter.
12:23The huge shells were in the air for an amazing 50 seconds during their 23-mile flight,
12:31which meant that a second salvo could be in flight before the first one had hit.
12:38Operating the enormous guns required an intricate ballet inside each of the main battery turrets.
12:45When you talk about a turret on board the battleship, all you think about is that top portion that turns with the guns in.
12:52But that whole firing mechanism goes down five, six decks into the ship itself.
13:02The shell comes up on an elevator, gets laid down in a large carrying tray.
13:09You have someone who gives a signal to load it, and you have a guy operating the device that just pushes it up into the breach and into the barrel of the gun.
13:26Then you have a side elevator that rolls up and rolls up your different bags of powder.
13:32It takes 660 pounds of powder to fire one round.
13:37Of course, we load the projectile first, and then the powder goes in behind the projectile.
13:43Each gun has its own gun crew and gun captain, and five men in a turret each gun.
13:51Each gun, they could be fired level, all three at the same elevation, or you could fire, if need be, different elevations.
14:03It can be fired from the mount itself, but it can also be fired from the plot down in the main part of the ship,
14:12down in the hull of the ship, where they're actually doing the plotting and, you know, aiming the weapons for the target.
14:20On April 1, 1945, the U.S. invaded the island of Okinawa, south of Japan.
14:45The Missouri quickly found herself in the center of the most costly battle the Navy had ever fought.
14:54The desperate and cornered Japanese turned on the American fleet with a terrible new weapon.
14:59They had begun to use at Iwo Jima and off the Philippines, the kamikaze, or divine wind.
15:06On Easter Sunday, we shelled Okinawa, and that's the time when we started getting kamikazes all over the place.
15:31We had terrific anti-aircraft batteries. We had 20mm, 40mm, 5-inch for anti-aircraft guns all over the ship. Oodles of them.
15:45One of the things in any aircraft you have to be careful about is that the Japanese or the enemy try to get in on the water level.
15:54So that when they're coming in at you, you're actually firing it at your own ship when you're firing at them.
16:03You have five men to man each 20mm, and you have a gun captain stands over it, usually a gunner's mate.
16:13The rest are just crewmen shooting the gun. The gun stops firing. The gunner mate is a guy that gets in there, clears the jam.
16:23When a kamikaze is diving and coming right in, the only thing that can stop them is a five inch, usually.
16:40And they have to hit them and hit them solid, just like a punch in the nose.
16:45Even a 40mm going out won't stop a kamikaze coming straight at you.
16:51Now, I was in Mount 7 when this kamikaze came in, and there's a picture you will see, it's probably publicized all over the world more than any other picture, this kamikaze plane coming in.
17:06And I was there. Just when that picture was taken, the plane was hit, and it just blew apart.
17:16The landing gear and the wing bounced off of our gun mount. It was on fire.
17:22And there was skid marks from the tires right across the top of the gun mount.
17:27Our gun captain says to me, he says, you know, he says, what kind of tires were on those planes?
17:34I said, what? He said, those were Firestone tires that they bought before the war from the United States.
17:41We cleaned up the mess. We buried the Japanese pilot. Regular ceremony, they had a Japanese flag on them.
17:48They had a six gun salute from the Marines, and they dropped them over the side of the ship.
17:54The Missouri would be hit on the fan tail by a second kamikaze.
17:59But the crew's luck would hold. No sailor was killed, and there was little damage.
18:04The ship's guns drove off her attackers repeatedly and fired an umbrella of anti-aircraft shells for the fleet.
18:13The Missouri did shoot down, without doubt, 11 planes, and I think it was five or six bombardments.
18:21We have three bronze stars during the time that I served on the ship, and that was for Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Japan.
18:34The mighty Mo may have come late to the Pacific War, but she was making up for lost time, and now she was closing in for the death blow on Japan.
18:56The enemy's final surrender would play out on the deck of the Missouri in one of America's most enduring historical moments.
19:16The battle wasn't the only terror that the Missouri faced off Okinawa in the summer of 1944.
19:22The fleet ran into a legendary typhoon that would sink three destroyers and wreak terrible damage.
19:29We would look out, and the waves were so great that you could look down, and it would be like a channel.
19:35An aircraft carrier would be down there, and the next roll, he would be up on a crest, and you would be down in the channel.
19:43So we knew how rough it was.
19:52After the fall of Okinawa, the Missouri moved swiftly to within gun range of the Japanese homeland,
19:58and on July 15, 1945, prepared for firing missions on industrial and military targets.
20:05Our job that day was to go in between Honshu and Hokkaido and bomb mills on Hokkaido.
20:14And we went in, and we slowed down, and the men on topside said it was so quiet that you could hear the water slicing against the side of the ship.
20:28It was so foggy, you couldn't see, and they had trouble getting the range of where they were to be firing to.
20:35So they decided to fire one salvo, and let it explode, and maybe the flash of that would give them the range, which it did.
20:43And the destroyers were firing, and they were closest to the bank.
20:49They were firing, the cruisers were firing over them, and we were firing over the cruisers.
20:56So they were all hitting at the same time.
20:59We leveled the Hitachi Steelworks, and a couple other places.
21:04The Japanese didn't even realize we were there, because the bombers were, you know, raking the country with the bombs,
21:13but they didn't even bother looking.
21:29In early August of 1945, with the Missouri readying to join in the dangerous invasion of Japan planned for the autumn,
21:38two atomic bombs hit Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
21:44Tens of thousands died, and the Japanese government met to consider the unthinkable, unconditional surrender.
21:52On August 14th, they announced acceptance of Allied terms.
21:59We got word, someone, during my watch, that the Japanese had accepted our terms of surrender.
22:07I had men going wild.
22:10They were swinging from line to line in the boiler room, screaming and yelling and hollering.
22:15And it was a great thing for us to know that the war was going to be over with.
22:24The Missouri was chosen to be the site of the surrender.
22:28Because she was a comparative newcomer to a war that many of the Navy's ships had been fighting with longer and greater sacrifice,
22:35the decision was not entirely popular in the fleet, with some questioning the choice.
22:39The reason it was chosen is because it had been christened by President Truman's daughter,
22:49and that President Truman was from Missouri and spent his life in Missouri,
22:56and that's the reason they chose our ship.
22:58On August 29th, the Missouri entered Tokyo Bay for the first time.
23:09Sailing close to what had been the capital city of a die-hard enemy provided tense moments.
23:15We were worried that it was trick.
23:19From Admiral Halsey that was on the ship on down,
23:23and I guess every ship was like that.
23:24We didn't believe that they would accept our terms and what have you.
23:29The Japanese sent a delegation out on a destroyer that were going to transfer aboard the Missouri,
23:38and it was pilots and officials of theirs.
23:43They had charts of the minefields that we were to go through.
23:48Our gun crews went to the quarters and pointed all of their guns at this ship,
23:52and they were all loaded.
23:55In case there wasn't any trickery, that it would be all over with them in a hurry.
24:11General MacArthur came out of the captain's cabin.
24:13Initially he saw that the Japanese were not in place yet, so he immediately darted back in,
24:22because he wanted them to wait for him, not vice versa.
24:26So he made a second coming out at 9.02 in the morning of Sunday, September 2, 1945.
24:32General MacArthur had two famous repatriated prisoners of war with him.
24:39General Percival from Singapore, General Skinny Wainwright from the Philippines,
24:44and symbolically they represented all the POWs who the Japanese had captured.
24:50They stood with him during the surrender ceremony.
24:54It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind,
25:06that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past.
25:16An aide named Kase was with Minister Shigemitsu.
25:24He looked up at the bridge of the Missouri, where there were Japanese flags painted on,
25:30signifying 11 airplanes that the Missouri had shot down during the war.
25:35He said he felt hundreds of eyes piercing down beyond him, felt such a sense of apprehension.
25:41Here, literally, on board a ship of the enemy.
25:46And then he brought out a fountain pen and Shigemitsu signed at 9.04 in the morning.
25:53Kase, who had been educated in America, it was a surprise,
26:00because he had expected a vindictive victor.
26:03Instead, General MacArthur was magnanimous, talked about sowing the seeds of peace
26:08and bringing nations together, and Kase felt an enormous sense of relief.
26:15I pray that peace be now restored to the world,
26:21and that God will preserve it always.
26:27These proceedings are closed.
26:31After the ceremony was over, General MacArthur put his arm around Admiral Bull Halsey's shoulder and said,
26:43start them now.
26:45And with that, a huge armada of American warplanes came over the Missouri.
26:51Army Air Forces planes, Navy fighter planes, and to those on board the deck of the Missouri,
26:56they were so loud and so low, they thought they would clip the top of the Missouri's mast.
27:06And just as the Japanese were leaving the Missouri, the clouds opened up.
27:11It had been an overcast day, and rays of sun came down through the clouds
27:16and played on the surface of Tokyo Bay.
27:20And to those who had seen the rising sun flag of the Japanese,
27:25this was amazingly symbolic.
27:27Somehow this was a setting sun on the Japanese Empire.
27:36The war was over for the Missouri.
27:38But she wasn't ready to follow the fleet's other battleships into retirement.
27:43Fate had bigger plans for the mighty Mo.
27:51Her next battlefield, ironically,
27:54waited just a few hundred miles away across the sea of Japan in Korea.
28:09When the Missouri returned home from World War II, rich with battle honors,
28:16to her birthplace in New York City,
28:18it was likely she was living her last moment of glory.
28:24On October 27, 1945, Navy Day was celebrated in New York Harbor.
28:30There was a parade of the victorious warships moored in the Hudson River
28:35to the west of Manhattan.
28:38Thousands of people poured out, both in New York and on the New Jersey coast,
28:43to look and see this armada.
28:50Still, despite her feats, the Missouri seemed doomed.
28:54She was part of a huge wartime Navy whose expensive battleships
28:59seemed to have no hope of surviving peacetime.
29:00In the wake of World War II, the Navy demobilized very rapidly,
29:06losing a great many men.
29:08A lot of ships were either scrapped or put in mothballs.
29:16The size of the Navy sank dramatically as budgets went down in the post-war era.
29:21The Missouri was targeted by the Navy to be decommissioned,
29:25but President Truman, because of his ties to the ship,
29:30decreed that it would remain in commission as long as he was president.
29:34By 1950, the Missouri was known around the world as a representative of United States power.
29:42But she had a humbling moment.
29:48On the morning of January 15, 1950, off Hampton Roads, Virginia,
29:54channel marker buoys were misread, and she ran so hard into a muddy bottom
29:59that it took fully two weeks to pull her off.
30:01Her wounds consisted of minor damage to fuel tanks and a bad fouling by mud and debris of crucial intakes,
30:09feeding water supplying the boilers.
30:12The repairs cost only $50,000, but the weeks of grueling unloading of ammunition and fuel
30:18to lighten the ship before tugs pulled her off had high human cost.
30:22The men of the proudest ship in the fleet felt the first humiliation the Big Mo had ever known.
30:32The Missouri's next crisis was not long in coming as an unexpected war roared down on the United States Navy.
30:39At the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea,
30:49and during the succeeding weeks, North Korean troops pushed farther and farther south
30:56until eventually the Allied forces were contracted to what was called the Pusan Perimeter.
31:01The Missouri was, in the Atlantic Fleet, was the only battleship then in commission
31:10because President Truman had saved her from decommissioning.
31:14The Missouri sailed on August 19, 1950, with orders to run for Korea at top speed via the Panama Canal
31:22to provide urgently needed gunfire support to General MacArthur's troops.
31:25She carried the same basic armament as she had in World War II five years before.
31:32On September 15th, one month, one day, one tough typhoon and 11,000 miles later,
31:39she arrived off Korea and entered her second war, beginning with a bombardment at Samchuk on the East Coast.
31:47Korea was unique in that its geography is such that the industrial facilities of the North
31:54had to be along the sea. They had to run their railroads along the sea.
32:00They couldn't very well run them through the mountains.
32:03Therefore, they were very vulnerable to naval gunfire than the 16-inch naval rifle.
32:15In late November of 1950, with the North Koreans routed and Allied forces advancing toward the Manchurian border,
32:22Chinese troops intervened massively.
32:25They cut off U.S. Marines around the Chosin reservoir, forcing them to fight their way through sub-zero cold and heavy attacks toward the evacuation port of Hongnam.
32:35One of the things that's most memorable to me of being over in Korea is on Christmas Eve of 1950,
32:41we were 50 miles from the Manchurian border at Hongnam.
32:46Participated in the evacuation of the 1st Marine Division and the army forces that were trapped in the Chonzin reservoir when the Chinese communists entered the conflict.
32:57We provided shore bombardment for support of the troops. They were really running a gauntlet down through there. The Chinese communists, you could see them up on the side mountains. It was just like anthills.
33:12No Marine who walked out of the Chosin reservoir and made it to the port of Hongnam will ever meet a battleship sailor without giving him a big round of drinks and a big hug.
33:26Because it was that ship that personified the protection that the U.S. Navy and the 7th Fleet could provide, particularly the mighty Moe, the Missouri.
33:40On July 27th 1953, the Korean War ended in an armistice signed by UN and Communist representatives.
33:52The terms established a demilitarized zone roughly along the 38th parallel, the pre-war border between North and South Korea.
34:00In her Korean deployment, the Missouri had fired a staggering 2,895 16-inch rounds and 8,043 rounds of 5-inch.
34:11It would have taken dozens of aircraft squadrons and sorties to deliver such firepower from the sky.
34:17In early 1955, she was decommissioned. Many believed that this was the end of the battleship era in the United States Navy.
34:26But for the moment at least, she escaped the junk heap, being assigned on February 26th 1955 to what was called the Mothball Fleet.
34:39One by one, compartments are cleaned out. Dehumidification machines are installed to suck the moisture out of the air so that she won't rust.
34:49And the sailors and officers who are going through this process feel a sense of sadness because to them the ship is a living thing and the life is coming out of her.
35:05The soul is being drained away. It's a sad task, but that's the order that's been given and so you follow it.
35:12For over 30 years, the heroic Missouri floated forlornly at Bremerton, Washington, a zombie of a ship seemingly bypassed by the times.
35:24None could conceive that this sleeping giant would be back in dazzling new fighting trim to fight a big new war in the Persian Gulf.
35:33The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 opened a dangerous phase of the military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.
35:47The Soviets went into Afghanistan. The United States was widely perceived to be weak.
35:54And along with that came a very activist Secretary of the Navy in John Lehman.
36:02He really wanted the battleships back, not only as a symbol of rearmament, but for the real power they could bring.
36:08Against all odds, the mighty Moe was going to come back bigger and stronger than ever.
36:18Four of the ten five-inch turrets were removed and replaced with eight quadruple Tomahawk sea-to-land cruise missile launchers.
36:26Four quadruple launchers for Harpoon anti-ship missiles and four 20-millimeter Vulcan Phalanx close-in weapon systems came aboard.
36:33New radar systems were hooked into global positioning satellites and were specialized to surface search, air search, and navigation duties.
36:43Pilotless drone spotter vehicles had TV downlinks to search for targets and direct gunfire.
36:50All of the 16-inch guns remained, but 16-inch ammunition was long out of production.
36:56Fortunately, 20,000 rounds remained from World War II and Korean War stocks and had been stored and well maintained.
37:11It took eight months and $475 million to get the ship ready for modern warfare.
37:17But on May 10, 1986, 42 years after her launching, she was recommissioned and ready to go.
37:25The Missouri soon found its next war.
37:29On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi armies knifed into the oil kingdom of Kuwait, threatening the West's fuel supply.
37:37A UN coalition of forces sped to Iraq to turn back the threat.
37:44The Persian Gulf War would be fought in two phases.
37:48A six weeks air campaign to soften the Iraqi defenses, to be followed by a ground defensive supported from air and sea.
37:55On the morning of January 17th, the 47-year-old Missouri was preparing to fire her missiles as part of the first strike of the coalition attack.
38:06We were getting ready for this to go, and the little warning horn sounded to make sure everybody stood clear of the launcher.
38:14Then, all of a sudden, the missile ignited, and this first tomahawk went right out of the tube.
38:19And everybody went, wow, I mean, for most people on a ship, it was the first time we'd ever seen a tomahawk fire.
38:32We fired a total of 28 tomahawks, and we were the first ship in the Persian Gulf to fire a tomahawk missile in the Gulf War.
38:40The ground campaign into Kuwait prepared to launch on February 24th.
38:50The aim was to convince the Iraqis that there would be a landing behind their lines.
38:55To support the deception, the Navy sent its most potent bombardment weapon, the Missouri, to lure away main front defenses by firing support for an invasion that wasn't going to happen.
39:05On February 23rd, the Missouri's big guns opened fire.
39:20And in just under a two-hour period, we fired between 110 and 120 16-inch rounds on the beach, saying, hey, look at us. We're coming to get you.
39:32We fired over 600 rounds, 600 16-inch rounds, during a three-day period. And by that time, the ground campaign went so fast that they had outrun us, that we had no more range than the guns to fire.
39:53So we were told, thank you for your service. You can detach and get off station.
40:00With the successful close of the Persian Gulf War, at last the bell tolled for the fighting career of the mighty Moe.
40:15The collapse of the Soviet Union and its Navy, and the rise of the nuclear carrier had finally eclipsed the age of battleships that had grown too old and expensive.
40:26We knew as we came home that the ship was not long for the world, that it was going to be decommissioned, but we were given one last mission.
40:45Missouri was assigned to go over and be the centerpiece of the 50th anniversary celebrations marking Pearl Harbor.
40:54In December 1991, I was fortunate to be on board the Battleship Missouri for her last cruise as she pulled into Pearl Harbor to celebrate the 50th anniversary.
41:09We turned into the entrance channel just as the sun was popping up over Diamond Head in the distance.
41:16In my mind's eye, I could see the films of the burning battleships, the smoke ascending to the sky.
41:24Off to the port side, I could see the Arizona Memorial.
41:28And it was truly an emotional moment to be on board the ship where the war ended and look a few thousand yards away and see where the war started.
41:38Emotions at the decommissioning are kind of difficult for me to explain because I was very emotional at the decommissioning.
41:50There were people there that had served on Missouri in World War II.
41:55There were people there that were on board during the surrender.
41:58There were people there that had served on border during Korea.
42:01And about half of the Marines that were assigned to the ship paid their own way back to come to the decommissioning to be able to be the color bearers at that particular ceremony.
42:16I don't think there was a dry eye in the group. I really don't.
42:20And they went off with the lower rates first, then the chief petty officers.
42:27And the chief petty officers, there were 84 of them.
42:30And they were all sad to see or go.
42:33But they were all proud of what they had done for.
42:35And then the ward room.
42:37And then the very last battleship sailor in the world was me.
42:40I was the last one to leave.
42:42And that was it.
42:44The legend of the USS Missouri was too powerful to let her be taken to the scrapyards.
43:04A long, hard effort by her old sailors and all who cared restored her as a glorious floating museum and memorial in Pearl Harbor.
43:14But the greatest tribute of all to the USS Missouri lives in the hearts of the long line of Blue Jackets who served her so long and so well.
43:44The group on the Missouri, we became so close that even 30 years later, I still remembered all their names, all their hometowns.
43:56It was a great ship, a wonderful experience, and something that will live with me forever.
44:08They're still the same shipmates that they were when I was aboard.
44:19They'd just gotten older and uglier and fatter.
44:22And that's, you know, but they're still brothers to me.
44:27I'm real proud that they put our ship in Pearl Harbor and where they put it.
44:38They have it facing the bow of the Arizona and they call it the bookends, the beginning and the end.
44:45The war started with the Arizona being sunk and it ended on the decks of the Missouri.
44:53And it makes me proud to know that I could be part of that.
44:57I could die.
45:09Transcription by CastingWords
45:39CastingWords
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