Early in 1944 Margaret Truman, daughter of Missouri's Senator Harry S. Truman, christened the battleship Missouri. The "Big Mo," as the ship came to be called, displaced 45,000 tons, had a top speed over 30 knots, a deadly main battery of nine 16-inch rifles. She first fired her guns in anger at Iwo Jima and Okinawa ; before the war ended, she had been hit by a Japanese suicide plane (but suffered no casualties and slight damage). On her broad deck, in 1945, the Japanese signed their surrender. By 1948 the Missouri...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
