![]() ![]() Japanese kamikaze planes, loaded with gasoline and explosives, have smashed against the 6-inch armored deck of Iowa-class ships to inflict nothing more than patches of scorched paint. The solid steel walls of the command turret on the ship's bridge are 17.2 inches thick.The door to the captain's room in the turret looks as if it were taken from a bank vault. It was built to take whatever punishment it can dish out, including direct hits from 16-inch shells. warship ever built - a sea-going tank of Brobdingnagian dimensions. The Iowa, along with its three sister ships, is the most heavily armored U.S. The explosive shells, with a range of 23 miles, can penetrate 60 feet of rock, blast craters more than 400 feet in diameter and cut tanks to pieces with jagged 20-pound chunks of shrapnel that whirl at three times the speed of sound. ![]() ![]() The Iowa's nine 16-inch guns, with their 68-foot-long barrels, fire shells that weight as much as Volkswagens. It weighs nearly as much as the RCA Building in New York and has a top speed of 38 miles an hour. It is more than one and a half times longer than the Washington Monument is high. Of all the mean-looking, don't-mess-with-me hardware ever devised there's nothing quite like a battleship.Ĭonsider the battleship U.S.S. By Blaine Harden Blaine Harden is a staff writer for The Magazine May 31, 1981 ![]()
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