The Mothball Fleet and the Mighty Mo
Near Bremerton, Washington
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, if you stood on the Bremerton waterfront and looked toward the shipyard, you would have seen something remarkable: an armada of sleeping giants.
After every major war, the United States Navy faced the same practical problem. It had built more ships than it needed for peacetime operations, but it was not willing to scrap them entirely. Wars have a way of returning. So the Navy developed the concept of the reserve fleet, ships maintained in a state of preservation, minimally crewed, ready to be reactivated if called upon. Bremerton, with its deep waters and experienced shipyard workforce, became one of the principal homes of the Pacific Reserve Fleet.
The most famous tenant arrived in February of nineteen fifty-five. The battleship USS Missouri, the ship on whose deck Japan had signed the instruments of surrender in Tokyo Bay on September second, nineteen forty-five, was decommissioned and assigned to Bremerton. For thirty years she sat here, a tourist attraction drawing roughly two hundred fifty thousand visitors per year. People came to stand on the surrender deck, to touch the spot where the Second World War officially ended.
Missouri was reactivated in nineteen eighty-four, modernized, and served into the Gulf War before her final decommissioning in nineteen ninety-two. She returned to Bremerton one last time before being transferred to the USS Missouri Memorial Association. In May of nineteen ninety-eight, she left Puget Sound for the last time, bound for Pearl Harbor, where she now sits five hundred yards from the USS Arizona Memorial, positioned so that visitors can stand between the place where the war began and the place where it ended.
Bremerton has also, more recently, housed the aircraft carriers Independence, Constellation, Kitty Hawk, and Ranger at various times. The Kitty Hawk remained until twenty twenty-two, when she was towed away for scrapping. The reserve fleet is smaller now. The sleeping giants are fewer.
