USS Tennessee, hull number BB-43, was the lead ship of the of dreadnought battleships built for the United States Navy in the 1910s. The Tennessee class was part of the standard series of twelve battleships built in the 1910s and 1920s, and were developments of the preceding . They were armed with a battery of twelve guns in four three-gun turrets. Tennessee served in the Pacific Fleet for duration of her peacetime career. She spent the 1920s and 1930s participating in routine fleet training exercises, including the annual Fleet Problems, and cruises around the Americas and further abroad, such as a goodwill visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1925.
Tennessee was moored in Battleship Row when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, which brought the United States into World War II. She was not seriously damaged, and after being repaired she operated off the West Coast of the US in 1942. In 1943, Tennessee and many of the older battleships were thoroughly rebuilt to prepare them for operations in the Pacific War and in June–August, she took part in the Aleutian Islands Campaign, providing gunfire support to troops fighting to retake the islands. The Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign followed from November 1943 to February 1944, including the Battles of Tarawa, Kwajalein, and Eniwetok. In March, she raided Kavieng to distract Japanese forces during the landing on Emirau, and from June through September, she fought in the Mariana and Palau Islands campaign, bombarding Japanese forces during the Battles of Saipan, Guam, Tinian, and Angaur.
The Philippines campaign followed in September, during which the ship operated as part of the bombardment group at the Battle of Leyte. The Japanese launched a major naval counterattack that resulted in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a series of four naval engagements. During the Battle of Surigao Strait, Tennessee formed part of the US line of battle that defeated a Japanese squadron; this was the last battleship engagement in history. Tennessee shelled Japanese forces during the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945 and the Battle of Okinawa from March to June. During the latter action, she was hit by a kamikaze but was not seriously damaged. In the final months of the war, she operated primarily in the East China Sea, and after Japan's surrender in August, she participated in the occupation of Japan before returning to the US late in the year. In the postwar reduction of naval forces, Tennessee was placed in the reserve fleet in 1946 and retained, out of service, until 1959, when the Navy decided to discard her. The ship was sold to Bethlehem Steel in July and broken up for scrap.
Design
The two Tennessee-class battleships were authorized on 3 March 1915, and they were in most respects repeats of the earlier s, the primary differences being enlarged bridges, greater elevation for the main battery turrets, and relocation of the secondary battery to the upper deck.
Tennessee was long overall and had a beam of and a draft of . She displaced as designed and up to at full combat load. The ship was powered by four-shaft Westinghouse turbo-electric transmission and eight oil-fired Babcock & Wilcox boilers rated at , generating a top speed of . The ship had a cruising range of at a speed of . Her crew numbered 57 officers and 1,026 enlisted men. As built, she was fitted with two lattice masts with spotting tops for the main battery. Tennessee was the first American battleship designed for electric drive.
The ship was armed with a main battery of twelve /50 caliber guns/50 caliber refers to the length of the gun in terms of caliber. The length of a /50 caliber gun is 50 times its bore diameter. in four, three-gun turrets on the centerline, placed in two superfiring pairs forward and aft of the superstructure. Unlike earlier American battleships with triple turrets, these mounts allowed each barrel to elevate independently. Since Tennessee had been completed after the Battle of Jutland, which demonstrated the value of very long-range fire, her main battery turrets were modified while still under construction to allow elevation to 30 degrees. The secondary battery consisted of fourteen /51 caliber guns mounted in individual casemates clustered in the superstructure amidships. Initially, the ship was to have been fitted with twenty-two of the guns, but experiences in the North Sea during World War I demonstrated that the additional guns, which would have been placed in the hull, would have been unusable in anything but calm seas. As a result, the casemates were plated over to prevent flooding. The secondary battery was augmented with four /50 caliber guns. In addition to her gun armament, Tennessee was also fitted with two torpedo tubes, mounted submerged in the hull, one on each broadside.
Tennessees main armored belt was thick, while the main armored deck was up to thick. The main battery gun turrets had thick faces on barbettes. Her conning tower had thick sides.
Service history
Construction and trials
The keel for Tennessee was laid down on 14 May 1917 at the New York Naval Shipyard, that step having been delayed by the necessary construction ways being occupied by . By this time American entry into World War I had taken place and priority was given to building cargo ships; little progress was made on Tennessee until after the war ended in November 1918.
Her completed hull was launched on 30 April 1919. Even then there were many parts of the ship that were unfinished; fitting-out work commenced, and on 3 June 1920, the completed ship was commissioned into the fleet. Captain Richard H. Leigh served as the ship's first commanding officer. Faced with a manpower shortage, US Navy recruiters sought to find native Tennesseans who would join the navy to serve on "their" ship; the campaign proved very successful, with close to 2,000 applicants, of whom 565 were enlisted.
Tennessee then began sea trials in Long Island Sound, which lasted from 15 to 23 October. On 30 October, while moored in New York, one of her electric generators exploded and destroyed the turbine, wounding two men. Repair work was completed and problems with her propulsion system that were identified during trials were corrected, and on 26 February 1921, Tennessee got underway for further trials off Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She then steamed north, headed for Hampton Roads, Virginia, arriving on 19 March. She proceeded to Dahlgren, Virginia for shooting training to calibrate her guns. Maintenance in Boston followed, and two of her 5-inch guns were removed, before the ship moved to Rockland, Maine for full-power trials. With her working up now complete, she stopped in New York before steaming south, transiting the Panama Canal, and joining the Battleship Force, Pacific Fleet, in San Pedro, Los Angeles on 17 June.
Interwar period Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the ships of the Pacific Fleet (re-designated as the Battle Fleet in 1922 and again as the Battle Force in 1931) conducted a routine of training exercises, the annual Fleet Problems, and periodic maintenance. The Fleet Problems began in 1923 and typically involved most major units of the US Navy and involved a variety of tactical and strategic war games, and they were conducted in many different locations, including in the Caribbean Sea, the area around the Panama Canal Zone, the Pacific, and the Atlantic. In early 1922, she took part in fleet maneuvers in the Caribbean that saw the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets combine for large-scale training exercises. The maneuvers included elements of the fleets simulating attacks and defenses of the Canal Zone, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The Pacific Fleet returned home in April. Tennessee placed first in 1922 and 1923 for accurate shooting among units of the Battle Fleet, and she earned the Battle "E" award in 1923 and 1924; during this period, her commander was Captain Luke McNamee.
The Fleet Problems laid the ground work for the US Navy's campaigns during the Pacific War; among the lessons learned by the fleet's officers was the importance of the developing aircraft carrier force, which proved to be more than a simple scouting element. Combined operations also revealed that the slow 21-knot battleships were a significant hindrance to the much faster carriers and led to the development of the fast battleships of the , , and es. The Battle Fleet conducted joint Army-Navy exercises to evaluate the defenses of Pearl Harbor in 1925 as part of Fleet Problem V, which also included maneuvers off the coast of California. Later that year the fleet steamed across the Pacific to visit Australia and New Zealand on a goodwill tour. The fleet returned to San Pedro in September. A three-month visit to Hawaii began in April 1927. In 1928, she had a crane and an aircraft catapult on her fantail to accommodate reconnaissance floatplanes.
Her original 3-inch antiaircraft (AA) battery was replaced by eight /25 caliber guns during 1929–1930. Fleet Problems X and XI were held together in the Caribbean in March and April 1930, and following their conclusion Tennessee visited New York for a month before departing for home on 19 May. In June, she embarked on a tour of the Hawaiian islands that lasted for fourteen months, finally returning to California in February 1932. She thereafter conducted routine operations off the west coast for the next year and a half until October 1934, when she crossed back to the Atlantic for further training there. The rest of the 1930s followed the usual routine. In around 1935, the ship received eight .50-cal. M2 Browning machine-guns. In 1940, two 3-inch guns were re-installed, one on either side of the forward superstructure.
Fleet Problem XXI, the last iteration of the series, was held in early 1940; afterward, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that the Battle Force transfer its homeport from San Pedro to Pearl Harbor in response to rising tension with Japan over the latter's waging of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Roosevelt hoped the move would deter further Japanese expansionism. Tennessee steamed to the Puget Sound Navy Yard for repairs before moving to Pearl Harbor, arriving there on 12 August. Fleet Problem XXII was scheduled for early 1941, but it was cancelled due to World War II. Tennessee spent the rest of 1941 with small-scale training operations in the Pacific; by December, she was at anchor in Pearl Harbor with the rest of the fleet.
World War II
Pearl Harbor
Tennessee was moored along Battleship Row, to the southeast of Ford Island, on the morning of 7 December when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The battleship was tied up alongside, was ahead with abreast, and was astern. The first Japanese attack arrived at about 07:55, prompting Tennessees crew to go to general quarters; it took some five minutes for the men to get the ship's anti-aircraft guns into action. The ship received orders to get underway to respond to the attack, but before the crew got steam up in her boilers, she was trapped as the other battleships around her received crippling damage. West Virginia was torpedoed and sunk and Oklahoma capsized after being torpedoed. Shortly thereafter, dive bombers arrived overhead and fighters strafed the ships' anti-aircraft batteries. Arizona exploded after being hit by an armor-piercing bomb that detonated her magazines, spilling burning fuel oil into the water. The explosion also showered burning oil over Tennessees stern, and she was quickly surrounded by fire, which was augmented by oil leaking from West Virginia.