http://news.yahoo.com/historic-battleship-becoming-naval-museum-socal-150141738.html
The USS Iowa is on its way to become a floating museum, an honorable end to this modern day ship of the line.
The ship of the line was the main warship from the 17th through 19th centuries, the biggest men of war who fought others like her in the line of battle. In the twentieth century, this role was taken over by the battleship, the biggest guns, the heaviest armor, the largest crews. She had only one major mission, defeating other battleships.
Nuclear weapons, naval aviation and modern submersibles eventually made the battleship obsolete; too big, too expensive, and too vulnerable to attack by essentially expendable opponents and cheap weapons. By World War II, the aircraft carrier had taken its place as the capital ship with the missile submarine soon to follow.
Pathetic attempts were made by nostalgic admirals to convert them to other missions, and even as late as the Iraq War, hastily demothballed specimens were pressed into service for routine work like shore bombardment, but they were too big and too expensive to be risked on the modern ocean battlefield. Today, the same missions are done by more numerous, but no less deadly cruisers and destroyers, inheritors of the roles of the frigates and corvettes of the days of fighting sail.
There were no more ships of the line, just escorts and scouts, pickets and patrol vessels. The line of battle was replaced by the carrier task force, engaging their enemies not from a “pistol shot away”, but far over the horizon.
There is no longer any use for 16 inch guns and foot thick armor, or even 30 knot flank speeds any more. By the time I was in the service, the few battlewagons recalled for their last hurrah were firing on the shore, and even then, using their 5″ secondary batteries. The big guns were just too expensive to operate, and the Vietnamese had no fortifications requiring such firepower.
But I have been aboard one of the greatest BB’s ever built, the USS Alabama, now a floating museum in Mobile Bay. If you’re ever there, or now, in Southern California where Iowa is headed, it’s worth spending an extra day in town just to pass a day on those ladders and passageways, and on those vast decks.
The battleship does not have its poet, but the ship of the line did, so he will have to do.
—John Ruskin, 1851
For one thing this century will in after ages be considered to have done in a superb manner and one thing I think only. . . it will always be said of us, with unabated reverence,`They built ships of the Line.’ Take it all in all, a ship of the Line is the most honorable thing that man as a gregarious animal has ever produced. By himself, unhelped, he can do better things than ships of the line; he can make poems and pictures, and other such concentrations of what is best in him. But as a being living in flocks, and hammering out, with alternate strokes and mutual agreement, what is necessary for him in those flocks to get or produce the ship of the line is his first work. Into that he has put as much of his human patience, common sense, forethought, experimental philosophy, self control, habits of order and obedience, thoroughly wrought handwork, defiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful patriotism, and calm expectation of the judgement of God, as can well be put into a space of 300 feet long by 80 broad. And I am thankful to have lived in an age when I could see this thing so done.
