Powerful. It’s a single word describing a naval vessel known as a battleship. The USS Alabama (BB-60) was the last of four South Dakota Class Battleships built for World War Two. The famed ship has been guarding the Gulf Coast and Mobile Bay for many years and has become one of the states most beloved, and visited, tourist attractions.
The new book, USS Alabama (BB60), by Kent Whitaker offers a wonder pictorial hsitory of the "Lucky A." She is well armored and designed to survive an attack while continuing to fight. Her main battery, known as “Big Guns”, consists of nine 16-inch guns. Each could launch a projectile weighing as much as a small car hitting a target twenty one miles away.
With a crew of 2,332 men, none of which were lost to enemy fire, earned her the nickname “Lucky A.” More than just a battleship, she carried troops, supplies, seaplanes and also served in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. She was the wartime home for a major league ball player as well as a movie setting for many Hollywood films. Finally in 1965, with the help of school children, she traveled home to the state of Alabama.
Author Kent Whitaker and Bill Tunnell, Executive Director of the USS ALABAMA Battleship Memorial Park, visually chart the course of the USS Alabama from the day her keel was laid to her present service as a museum ship and memorial in Mobile, Alabama.
- She was called the Lucky A because, during World War II, she lost no American lives aboard her due to enemy fire. She was also known as the “Mighty A”.
- Coffee in the morning took 4 big 80 gallon pots to make 320 Gallons of coffee. How’d you like to have that last cup of joe?
- Each 16 inch Big Gun could shoot a 2,700-pound shell up to 21 miles and still hit a dime, but you never could find the dime.
- School children across Alabama donated pocket change to the fundraising efforts.
- ALABAMA’s first Captain, George Barry Wilson, went on to help plan the D-Day invasion.
- Today she weighs about 40,000 tons, or 80 MILLION POUNDS! When she was loaded in World War II, she weighed more than 90 million pounds, in excess of 45,000 tons.
- She has a direct connection to the warship of the same name that served during the Civil War.
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