On January 17, 1991, as the first salvos of Desert Storm lit up the night over Baghdad, USS Missouri (BB-62) was in the Red Sea, her 16-inch guns silent — but not for long. The battleship had been reactivated from mothballs just five years earlier, brought back from the reserve fleet in the belief that nothing quite replaced the presence of a ship that could put a one-ton projectile on a target twenty miles away. Desert Storm proved that belief correct. Missouri would fire her guns in anger for the first time since the Korean War, and in doing so, write a final chapter in the history of the battleship that no one who witnessed it will forget.
The Ship
USS Missouri (BB-62) is an Iowa-class battleship, commissioned on June 11, 1944, and famous as the site where Japan signed the instruments of surrender on September 2, 1945, ending World War II. She served through Korea, was decommissioned in 1955, reactivated in 1986 as part of the Reagan administration's 600-ship Navy initiative, and modernized with Tomahawk cruise missiles and Harpoon anti-ship missiles alongside her original armament. The new Missouri was a hybrid: a World War II-era ship with Cold War weapons, capable of both the blunt trauma of 16-inch gunfire and the surgical precision of Tomahawk strikes.
By late 1990, as Saddam Hussein's forces dug into Kuwait, Missouri was ordered to the Persian Gulf region. She joined USS Wisconsin (BB-64), the only other Iowa-class battleship then in service, making it the first time two U.S. battleships had operated together in combat since Korea.
The Deployment
Missouri departed her homeport of Long Beach, California, in November 1990 and transited to the Persian Gulf theater as part of the massive coalition buildup known as Operation Desert Shield. She joined the naval forces assembling for what would become the largest amphibious threat since Inchon — a force designed partly to make Iraq believe an amphibious landing was coming, pinning Saddam's coastal forces in place while the main attack came by land.
When Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991, Missouri launched Tomahawks in the opening bombardment. The missiles ran out of her vertical launch cells and over-the-horizon strike magazines, joining the coordinated first-night strikes that targeted Iraqi command and control infrastructure. It was the first time Tomahawk missiles had been fired in combat from a battleship, and the weapons performed exactly as designed.
Gunfire Support
The signature moment came in February 1991, when Missouri turned her 16-inch guns on Iraqi positions along the Kuwaiti coast. The shells — each weighing nearly a ton, each carrying enough energy to level a city block — arced toward their targets with a sound that sailors described as freight trains passing overhead. Iraqi troops who survived the bombardment later told of the psychological effect: the earth shaking, the incomprehensible sound, the impossibility of hiding from something that big. Missouri fired 759 16-inch rounds during the Gulf War.
The gunfire had an additional effect that wasn't purely kinetic. Iraqi troops surrendered to a drone that Missouri had launched to spot gunfire — not to coalition soldiers, but to an unmanned aircraft. The battleship's presence along the Kuwaiti coast was so overwhelming that enemy soldiers were giving up to machines rather than face more of it.
Life Aboard
Missouri's crew in 1991 numbered around 1,500 — enormous by the standards of modern surface combatants, but typical for a ship designed in the 1940s. Life aboard a battleship had its own rhythms: the machinery spaces were vast, the gun turrets each required dozens of men to operate, and the passageways ran for what seemed like miles. For the crew, the deployment carried a particular weight — they were aboard the ship where the last war had ended, now fighting a new one. The symbolism wasn't lost on them.
If you served aboard USS Missouri or want to honor someone who did, browse the full Missouri collection — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.
Legacy
Missouri was decommissioned for the final time on March 31, 1992, just over a year after Desert Storm. She is now a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, moored near the site where the war she bookended began. The battleship era is over — no nation operates gun battleships in combat today — but Missouri's Desert Storm cruise stands as the last chapter of a story that stretched from Jutland to the Persian Gulf. For the men who served aboard her, it was the chance to be part of something that would never happen again.