USS Alabama: The Ship That Never Lost a Man in Combat
Near Mobile, Alabama
She weighs thirty-five thousand tons and is six hundred eighty feet long, and she has been sitting in Mobile Bay since nineteen sixty-four. The United States Ship Alabama is a South Dakota-class battleship, commissioned in August of nineteen forty-two, and she served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of the Second World War without losing a single crew member to enemy fire. Nine battle stars. Zero combat fatalities.
The Alabama fought in the Atlantic during the North Africa campaign, helped protect Allied convoys from German U-boat and surface-ship attack, then transferred to the Pacific in nineteen forty-three where she participated in operations across the central Pacific, from the Gilbert Islands to the Philippines to the Okinawa campaign. She was in Tokyo Bay when Japan formally surrendered in September of nineteen forty-five.
After the war, she was decommissioned and slated for scrapping, which is the ordinary end for warships that have outlived their naval utility. What saved her was the children of Alabama. In the early nineteen sixties, Alabama schoolchildren contributed pennies, nickels, and dimes to a statewide fundraising campaign that eventually raised about eight hundred thousand dollars to bring the ship home, with the children's share accounting for roughly one eighth of that total. She was towed to Mobile Bay in nineteen sixty-four and opened to the public early the following year. She has been there since.
The ship is now the anchor of the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park in Mobile, alongside a submarine and a collection of military aircraft. She is a physical record of what a large naval vessel of that era looked like, felt like, required in terms of crew and maintenance and endurance. She is also a monument built by children, which is not the most common origin story for a national memorial.
