In the fall of 1983, the United States sent the most powerful surface warship in the world to the coast of Lebanon. USS New Jersey (BB-62) — an Iowa-class battleship, 887 feet of steel displacing 58,000 tons at full load, armed with nine sixteen-inch guns capable of throwing a 2,700-pound projectile twenty-three miles — arrived in the eastern Mediterranean as the Reagan administration struggled to find a response to the deepening chaos of the Lebanese civil war. Her guns would speak that winter in the heaviest battleship bombardment since the Korean War, and the debate over that decision would outlast the deployment itself.
The Ship
USS New Jersey (BB-62) is an Iowa-class battleship, laid down in 1940, commissioned in May 1943, and called back from mothballs three times over her long life because no other weapon in the American arsenal could do exactly what she could do. Her sixteen-inch guns — three turrets, three guns each — fired shells weighing more than a small car to distances that dwarfed any other naval gun system afloat. In 1982, the Reagan administration reactivated her as part of a broader naval buildup, updating her electronics and adding Tomahawk cruise missiles and Harpoon anti-ship missiles to her armament. When she arrived in the Mediterranean in the fall of 1983, she was the most capable gun platform the Navy had ever put to sea.
Lebanon, 1983
Lebanon in 1983 was a country in the middle of a multi-sided civil war that had been running since 1975. The Palestine Liberation Organization had used southern Lebanon as a base until Israel invaded in 1982; the Israelis had withdrawn from Beirut but remained in the south; Syrian forces occupied the Bekaa Valley and the north; various Lebanese factions — Christian, Druze, Shia, Sunni — were fighting each other with shifting alliances. The United States, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom had deployed a Multinational Force (MNF) to Beirut in an attempt to stabilize the situation and support the Lebanese government of Amine Gemayel.
The fragile situation became catastrophic on October 23, 1983. At 6:22 in the morning, a truck bomb driven by a suicide bomber detonated beneath the four-story headquarters building of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines at Beirut International Airport, collapsing the building and killing 241 American servicemen — the deadliest single-day loss for the U.S. military since the Battle of Iwo Jima. Almost simultaneously, a second truck bomb killed 58 French paratroopers at their headquarters. New Jersey had arrived on station less than a month before.
The Bombardment
In December 1983 and into February 1984, New Jersey fired in support of Lebanese government forces and in retaliation against Syrian and Druze militia positions in the Chouf Mountains overlooking Beirut. The December firings were limited. The February 8, 1984 bombardment was not. That day, New Jersey fired more than 280 sixteen-inch rounds at Syrian artillery positions and command centers in the mountains above the capital — the largest battleship bombardment in decades, the sound of which could be heard across the city and deep into the hills.
The military effectiveness of the bombardment was disputed from the beginning. Sixteen-inch shells designed to penetrate the armor of enemy battleships were imprecise instruments for the kind of pinpoint targeting that the Lebanese political environment required. The massive explosions made an impression, but Syrian and Druze forces quickly adapted by dispersing and moving their equipment. Critics argued that the bombardment made the United States appear to be a combatant rather than a peacekeeper, accelerating the deterioration of the mission's political rationale.
Withdrawal
President Reagan ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon in February 1984. The Multinational Force departed in stages; New Jersey remained on station through the withdrawal and then departed the eastern Mediterranean. The Lebanon deployment had lasted roughly five months. It had included the worst terrorist attack on U.S. military personnel in decades and had ended with the force it was meant to support pulling out of the country. New Jersey's guns had fired in anger for the last time. The Navy decommissioned her again in 1991.
For the crew of New Jersey, the deployment was unlike anything the peacetime Cold War Navy typically produced — a genuine combat environment, a political situation that defied military solutions, and the constant awareness that the men who had died in the barracks bombing were their countrymen. They had been sent to do a job that the political situation made very difficult to define. They did their jobs anyway.
If you served aboard USS New Jersey or want to honor someone who did, browse the New Jersey 1983-84 collection or the Beirut Peacekeeping collection. The full New Jersey collection covers her entire career.
Legacy
The Lebanon deployment remains one of the most discussed episodes in the late Cold War history of the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps. The arguments about what the battleship's guns could and could not accomplish in a complex political-military environment foreshadowed debates that would recur in later interventions. What is not debated is the professionalism of the crew, or the weight of what they witnessed on October 23, 1983. USS New Jersey carried that weight home.