Twenty-four Tomahawk land-attack missiles and 528 rounds from her 16-inch guns: that was USS Wisconsin’s account in the 1991 Gulf War. Seven months after the fighting ended, the Iowa-class battleship was decommissioned at Norfolk Naval Station, Pier 11, on Sept. 30, 1991.
The ship that went quiet that day had been in commission, on and off, across 47 years and three wars. Her final deployment put a hull launched in 1943 and cruise missiles of the 1980s on the same firing line.
The Navy’s official record, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships entry for Wisconsin (BB-64) kept by the Naval History and Heritage Command, sums up her Gulf War this way: she “fired 24 Tomahawk land-attack missiles, fired 528 16-inch rounds in 36 different naval gunfire support missions.” The same entry closes that chapter with the line: “Having served with distinction in three wars, Wisconsin was decommissioned at Norfolk Naval Station, Pier 11, on 30 September 1991.”
From Philadelphia to the Pacific
DANFS records that Wisconsin was laid down on Jan. 25, 1941, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and launched on Dec. 7, 1943, the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor. She was commissioned on April 16, 1944, with Capt. Earl E. Stone in command. Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources, in its register entry for the ship, notes that the Iowa class was “the largest class of battleships the U.S. ever built” and gives her length as 887 feet.
Her World War II service ran through the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and the final bombardments of the Japanese home islands, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Navy’s photo history of the ship. DANFS credits her with five battle stars for World War II and one for Korea. She was placed out of commission in reserve on July 1, 1948, recommissioned on March 3, 1951, for the Korean War, and decommissioned again at Bayonne, New Jersey, on March 8, 1958, where she joined the mothball fleet.
Recommissioned for one more war
Wisconsin spent three decades in reserve. DANFS records that she was towed to Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans for dry-dock work, modernized at Ingalls Shipyard, and recommissioned at Pascagoula, Mississippi, on Oct. 22, 1988, with Capt. Jerry M. Blesch commanding.
Early on Jan. 17, 1991, DANFS states, Wisconsin, “acting as Tomahawk Strike Warfare Commander for the Persian Gulf, directed the sequence of Tomahawk launches that initiated the opening of hostilities in Operation Desert Storm.” On Feb. 6 she relieved her sister ship Missouri on the gunline near the Kuwaiti border. Her first fire mission there was called in by a Marine Corps OV-10 Bronco observation aircraft.
The battleship also flew remotely piloted vehicles to spot for her guns. DANFS records that one of those flights, over Faylaka Island on March 1, 1991, “observed hundreds of Iraqis waving white flags, the first recorded instance of surrender to an unmanned aircraft.” Nauticus, the maritime museum that now sits beside the ship, dates her Desert Storm service from Jan. 15 to Feb. 27, 1991, and states on its page about the battleship that it “marked the last time that a United States battleship ever actively participated in a foreign war.”
Pier 11 to a museum berth
After Sept. 30, 1991, the record moves slowly. DANFS states that Wisconsin was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on March 17, 2006, and that on Dec. 14, 2009, “the Navy officially transferred the battleship to the city of Norfolk.” The Virginia Department of Historic Resources register entry lists her on the Virginia Landmarks Register as of Dec. 15, 2011, and on the National Register of Historic Places as of March 28, 2012.
Nauticus lists her displacement at 45,000 tons, or 58,000 tons loaded, her armament as nine 16-inch guns, twenty 5-inch guns, eighty 40 mm and forty-nine 20 mm guns, and her complement at 1,600. The City of Norfolk has taken over stewardship of the ship, and she is included in regular Nauticus admission, according to the museum.
Thirty-five years after she was decommissioned at Pier 11, Wisconsin remains berthed beside Nauticus in Norfolk, the same city where the Navy took her out of commission for the last time.
Top image: USS Wisconsin (BB-64) in her berth beside Nauticus in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2005. Image Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Teresa J. Donnelly — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.