In the spring of 1984, USS Iowa (BB-61) was reactivated from the Navy’s reserve fleet at Bremerton, Washington, and returned to service. She had been in mothballs since 1958 — twenty-six years. She was brought back at the direction of the Reagan administration, which believed that the 600-ship Navy required battleships, and which understood that nothing in the fleet could do what a battleship could do: put sixteen-inch shells on a target twenty miles away, deliver enough naval gunfire to support amphibious landings on a scale the Navy had no other way to replicate. Iowa was recommissioned on April 28, 1984. She was, at that moment, the most powerful surface combatant afloat.
The Ship
USS Iowa (BB-61) is an Iowa-class battleship, commissioned on February 22, 1943. She served in World War II and Korea before being decommissioned in 1958. The Iowa class was the most powerful class of surface warships ever completed — nine 16-inch/50-caliber guns in three turrets, capable of firing 2,700-pound armor-piercing shells or 1,900-pound high-capacity shells at targets up to 23 miles away. When the Navy brought Iowa back, it modernized her with Tomahawk cruise missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and Phalanx close-in weapon systems, creating a hybrid of World War II firepower and Cold War precision.
Recommissioning and Modernization
The recommissioning of Iowa was not simply a matter of waking up a sleeping ship. The vessel required extensive work: boilers overhauled, systems updated, new weapons integrated. The new Iowa retained her original 16-inch main battery — no modern weapon could replace the raw destructive power of those guns — but she gained the ability to strike targets hundreds of miles away with Tomahawks. She was assigned to the Surface Action Group concept, operating as the centerpiece of a small, powerful surface force rather than as an escort for a carrier.
Iowa’s first deployments after recommissioning took her to the Atlantic and into waters where her presence sent an unmistakable message. She operated in the Caribbean during a period of heightened attention to Central America, and she deployed to the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic as part of the Reagan-era maritime strategy of taking the fight to Soviet home waters. The strategy held that American naval forces should be aggressive and forward — and Iowa, with her combination of old guns and new missiles, embodied that posture.
The Turret II Explosion
On April 19, 1989, during a gunnery exercise in the Atlantic, the center gun of Iowa’s Turret II exploded during a powder charge ramming operation. Forty-seven sailors were killed — the entire turret crew. It was the worst peacetime loss of life for the Navy in decades. The investigation that followed was painful and contentious: initial findings pointing to a deliberate act were later retracted, and subsequent investigations concluded that the most likely cause was an accidental powder ignition during the ramming process. The turret crew were casualties of an accident, not a crime. Iowa was decommissioned in 1990, partly as a result of the tragedy, partly because the Cold War was ending and the budget pressures that had driven the recommissioning were reversing.
Life Aboard
The recommissioned Iowa brought back a style of ship life that had largely disappeared from the Navy. The battleship’s spaces were enormous by the standards of 1980s surface combatants — passageways wide enough to drive a truck through, machinery spaces that dwarfed anything on a cruiser or destroyer. Operating the 16-inch guns required gun crews of dozens of men; the seamanship required to handle a 58,000-ton ship in close quarters was its own art form. The sailors who came aboard Iowa in 1984 and after were joining a ship that had lived a history they could read in every compartment.
If you served aboard USS Iowa or want to honor someone who did, browse the full Iowa collection — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.
Legacy
Iowa was decommissioned a second time on October 26, 1990. She is now a museum ship in Los Angeles, moored at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. The second career of the Iowa class — brought back from mothballs to fill a role that no other ship could fill — is remembered as one of the more interesting chapters of Reagan-era naval policy. Whether the battleships were worth the cost has been debated ever since. What is not debated is that the men who served aboard them were part of something that will not happen again: the last American battleships in active service.