The Showboat: USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial

Across the Cape Fear River from downtown, moored where the Eagle Island marshes begin, sits one of the most decorated warships in American naval history.

The battleship North Carolina was commissioned in April nineteen forty-one, before the United States had entered the Second World War. At that moment she was described as the world's greatest sea weapon. She carried nine sixteen-inch guns, twenty five-inch guns, and a crew of more than two thousand one hundred officers and enlisted men.

Over the next four years she participated in every major naval campaign in the Pacific theater, earning fifteen battle stars, the most of any American battleship in the war. Ten of her crew were killed in action. Sixty-seven were wounded.

After the war, the ship was decommissioned and left in the Reserve Fleet in New Jersey. By the late nineteen fifties it was announced she would be scrapped. That announcement triggered what became known as the Save Our Ship campaign, a grassroots effort by North Carolinians: school children collected spare change, civic groups raised funds, state officials lobbied, and the movement worked. In nineteen sixty-one the ship made the voyage down the East Coast and up the Cape Fear River to her permanent berth here in Wilmington.

She opened as a memorial on April twenty-ninth, nineteen sixty-two, honoring the more than eleven thousand North Carolinians who died in World War Two. Locals call her the Showboat, a nickname she earned in the Pacific for her size and firepower.

You can tour the ship today, walking the gun turrets and the crew quarters and the engine spaces where men lived for years at a time. The scale of the vessel, four and a half acres of steel, tends to reset your sense of what war actually required.