Happy National Siblings Day! This 1954 family portrait is from a rare occasion when all four sister Iowa-class battleships were together. From front to back is USS Iowa, USS Wisconsin, USS Missouri and USS New Jersey. All the ships are now museums.
Yesterday we went to go see the USS New Jersey in Camden before it goes to drydock in March for repairs for the first time since 2001. It's an Iowa-class battleship, which was the longest non-carrier ship ever constructed at 887 ft long and had a crew of over 1,900. When I asked a tour guide if it was the same length as the other ships in the class (only three others were ever built, the Iowa, the Missouri, and the Wisconsin), and he said "Big J" was "a couple inches longer".
It takes 18 gallons of fuel to move it one foot in the water, and when they move it to the Philadelphia Navy Yard they'll need to wait until low tide to get under the Walt Whitman Bridge. There will only be two feet of vertical clearance between the top of the ship and the bottom of the bridge structure.
Overall very cool (and claustrophobic) experience, and it's wild to think that modern aircraft carriers are even bigger than this.
Cuirassé USS New Jersey (BB-62) en cours de remise en service au Bayonne Naval Drydock pour intervenir en Corée – Bayonne – Etats-Unis – 3 novembre 1950