By Mark Carlson
Some of the 64 battleships built by the U.S. Navy in the 20th century, such as the iconic Maine, Arizona, and Missouri, have earned a place in history while most have long since faded into obscurity for all but their crews.
The USS South Dakota (BB-57) is part of this latter group—a ship that never made headlines, but whose sailors and officers did their duty from 1942 until the end of the war, adding to the collective effort that eventually brought victory for the Allies.
In 1936, upon hearing of Japan withdrawing from the terms of the 1931 Naval Limitation Treaty, the Navy decided to use the expansion clause in the treaty and design three new classes of battleship averaging 45,000 tons. This resulted in the North Carolina-class, the South Dakota-class, and the Iowa-class.
South Dakota, the lead ship in her class, was built at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation and launched on June 7, 1941. At 45,000 tons displacement fully loaded and 680 feet long, she wasn’t the largest of the new battleships, but her main armament of nine 16-inch, .45-caliber Mark 6 guns in three turrets was formidable. She could fire nine tons of heavy shells at a target 37,000 yards away, far beyond the visible horizon. She was built for speed and long-distance hitting power.
South Dakota was fitted with SK air search and SD surface search radar, giving her a big advantage over Japanese battleships, which did not yet have radar. In addition, she carried the Mark 3 fire control system for her main batteries and the Mark 4 for her secondary guns.
The new fast battleships were considered “a tremendous leap forward in technology, orders of magnitude over the old battleships, even those that had been modernized.” In addition to their speed and modern fire control, they used a third less fuel than the pre-war battleships.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King ordered the new ship to the Pacific to support the navy and Marines on Guadalcanal on August 14, 1942. Rear Adm. Willis “Ching” Lee commanded Battleship Division 6 (BatDiv 6), which consisted of his flagship South Dakota and the USS Washington. In concert with the antiaircraft light cruiser USS Juneau, South Dakota arrived at Tongatabu on the morning of September 6. Bound for the Solomons, the ships weighed anchor and left port, passing the cruiser USS Atlanta, sister of Juneau, escorting the carrier USS Saratoga, damaged by the Japanese submarine I-26 on August 31.
But the new battleship was back at Tongatabu in less than four hours. Relying on outdated charts, Gatch had run aground on a coral reef, tearing an 18-inch gash the length of her hull. She was ordered back to Pearl Harbor with the Atlanta and Saratoga for repairs. South Dakota would be out of action for at least three weeks, a serious blow to the navy’s plans for the fast battleships.
She finally arrived off Guadalcanal in October as part of Task Force 16 under Adm. William F. Halsey. South Dakota’s first fight against the Japanese was at the savage Battle of Santa Cruz on October 26. While her main guns did not participate, the dense forest of South Dakota’s antiaircraft guns dealt heavy losses to Japanese dive and torpedo bombers attacking the carrier Enterprise. Kate torpedo bombers missed South Dakota, but Val dive bombers put one bomb on the ship’s forward turret which failed to penetrate. Gatch was wounded while directing the ship. The bomb tore deep gouges into two of the guns of Number 2 turret, making them unusable until replaced.
Another destroyer, the Smith, was struck on her foredeck by a damaged Kate, starting a huge blaze. Her skipper, Lt.-Com. Hunter Wood, directed his burning ship in behind South Dakota, then moving at full speed toward the Enterprise. The spray from the big battleship’s wake doused the flames.
The Enterprise was damaged and the Hornet, beyond repair, was intentionally sunk. While en route to Nouméa, New Caledonia, with the rest of TF 16, a Japanese submarine caused several ships to take evasive action on October 27 and, in the confusion, South Dakota and the destroyer Mahan collided. While the Mahan had to return to Hawaii for a new bow, South Dakota’s repairs at Nouméa were completed on November 6.
Halsey ordered South Dakota to join Washington, the heavy cruiser Northampton, and nine destroyers to stay with Enterprise, now the lone carrier in the southwest Pacific. They steamed toward Guadalcanal to head off a predicted bombardment of Henderson Field. Lee was going to face Adm. Nobutake Kondo’s force comprising the battleship Kirishima, two heavy cruisers, and a destroyer screen. Japanese search planes spotted the task group but identified them as cruisers and destroyers. Kondo, who was expecting battleships, was confused until the two fleets discovered each other that night off Savo Island.
Washington and South Dakota had little experience with their main batteries and almost no training for night fighting. Washington fired at 2317 hours on November 14, using her fire control radar. South Dakota followed suit, targeting two of Kondo’s destroyers. The battleship’s gunners claimed to have sunk both enemy ships, but neither was seriously hit. In the early part of the action, South Dakota was hampered because two of her forward guns were still out of commission. At 2330, her luck took a turn for the worst. A short in her main electrical panel cut off the radar and most of her fire control, leaving her virtually blind. She was silhouetted by two burning American destroyers, making her visible to Kondo’s heavy ships.
At 2340 hours, she fired her aft main guns at two of Kondo’s destroyers. The first three-gun salvo set fire to the Kingfisher search planes on the quarterdeck. The second salvo blew the blazing planes overboard. Again her electrical system was disabled by shock, leaving her gunners blind for five minutes. Just before midnight, the repaired radar picked up the approaching Kirishima and two cruisers.
Following Japanese night doctrine, Kondo fired several torpedoes at the battleship, but they all missed. South Dakota was closely engaged with the Japanese, only 5,000 yards away. She received 26 hits from the cruisers’ 8-inch guns and one 14-inch hit from Kirishima.
While South Dakota acted as Kondo’s whipping boy, Washington was unmolested. She concentrated salvos on Kirishima. South Dakota, despite having only part of her main battery functioning and a balky radar, managed to hit one Japanese cruiser and hit Kirishima.
Kirishima was fatally damaged by the 16-inch shells, and Kondo withdrew after firing more torpedoes. Lee ordered Gatch to retire at high speed. The battleship had sustained heavy damage. Forty crewmen were dead and 140 were wounded. South Dakota received the Navy Unit Commendation for the Second Battle of Guadalcanal. Japanese destroyers sank Kirishima.
At Nouméa, South Dakota tied up alongside the repair ship Prometheus, but she wouldn’t return to the Solomons. By November 29, she was bound for the Panama Canal and New York for Atlantic deployment. At Brooklyn Navy Yard, she went into drydock for repairs and refit. Interestingly, she was lauded in the press as the ship that won the naval battle of Guadalcanal. This was when she was given the code name “Battleship X” as a security measure.
In early 1943, Captain Gatch was relieved by Captain Lyndee McCormick. South Dakota was sent to the North Atlantic along with her sister, Alabama, and the carrier Ranger to protect arctic convoys queuing to Murmansk.
For three months, in concert with Royal Navy warships, South Dakota provided escort for Murmansk convoys. In August, she returned to Norfolk. As part of Battleship Division 9 under Admiral Edward Hanson, South Dakota again sailed for the Pacific, arriving at Fiji in November. She took part in the pre-invasion bombardment of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. After Tarawa fell, South Dakota and BatDiv 9 were again under Admiral Lee. With four other battleships, she bombarded Nauru, which fell with little opposition. Then it was on to the Marshall Islands for Operation Flintlock, the largest combined amphibious, naval, and air assault in history.
The United States’ Fifth and Third Fleets under Adm. Raymond Spruance boasted four task groups consisting of 12 fleet and light carriers, eight battleships, 20 cruisers, 100 destroyers, almost 1,000 planes, one Marine division, and one army division. The objectives were the islands of Kwajalein, Roi-Namur, Majuro, Enewetak, Jaluit, and Mili.
South Dakota was at last part of a major campaign, and her crew was determined to put the bad luck behind them.
The huge Japanese anchorage at Truk in the Carolines was the next U.S. Navy target. Battleships and naval aviation bombarded the islands and ships at Truk, sinking and damaging a large portion of the Japanese support fleet. South Dakota and two other battleships were tasked with bombarding the island of Pohnpei in late April. Now part of a task group of nine battleships and four heavy cruisers, South Dakota escorted aircraft carriers during the invasion of the Marianas.
After Admirals Lee and Marc Mitscher, who commanded the carrier task force, conferred, they had the battleships stay with the carriers and add their radar and antiaircraft support to protect against air attack. On June 19, Lee’s battleships were circling in the Philippine Sea, awaiting a Japanese air strike. South Dakota’s radar was the first to spot the incoming force. She received one bomb hit, tearing a 12-foot hole in the steel deck. Through the next day, Lee’s ships handled the air attacks while Mitscher’s carrier planes mauled the Japanese.
After raids on Formosa to Okinawa, South Dakota joined Task Force 34 under Rear Adm. Forrest Sherman. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the fleet supported landings on the Philippine island of Leyte. South Dakota was directed northward, away from the landing beaches where Japanese surface forces threatened to disrupt operations, to protect carriers chasing a Japanese decoy force.
South Dakota provided fire for the troops on Leyte on November 4 and on Luzon the next week. While most of her non-combat time was spent refueling destroyers, more was in store for Battleship X. When Spruance took command of the Fifth Fleet, the fast carriers and battleships still under Lee were designated Task Force 58.
During the landings on Iwo Jima, the battleships were sent north to bombard targets in the home islands of Japan, but bad weather canceled numerous operations. South Dakota supported strikes and bombardments on southern Kyushu and the naval base at Kure, destroying airfields and ships.
South Dakota and the other battleships refueled at Ulithi and sortied to begin the first bombardments of Okinawa for landings in April. The war was creeping ever closer to Japan. South Dakota’s run of bad luck seemed to have been left behind, but there would be little argument that her career had more than its share of bad luck. But luck can change. It did on a day in May 1945.
Captain Charles Bowers “Swede” Momsen was best known as a submarine driver, but his restless drive had earned him a special command, USS South Dakota.
During the Okinawa campaign, the was cycling from bombardment assignments on southern Okinawa and replenishment offshore. On May 6, Momsen watched from his bridge while South Dakota’s nine 16-inch rifles rained shells on the Japanese defenders. When ammunition was low, he ordered the ship offshore to replenish. He waited as the ammunition ship Rangle tied up alongside and began hoisting shells and powder canisters into chutes that led deep into the ship’s magazines. All was going well when suddenly a cloud of dirty yellow smoke erupted from the vents at the base of Turret Number 2. Suddenly, there was a deep roar and a single muffled boom. South Dakota’s 45,000-ton hull shook.
Momsen realized the magazines were exploding. Hundreds of tons of high-explosive were potentially turning his ship into a crematorium. Without a moment’s pause, he slapped the 1/MC intercom to the damage control station. “Flood the magazines for number two turret!”
All Momsen could do was wait. Every other vessel nearby was running as far as possible from the doomed battlewagon. The ship shuddered as a second explosion shook her sturdy hull, followed by three more. It was terrifying to feel the heavy battleship rock violently with each muffled boom deep in the hull.
Just then, Lee reached the bridge, his eyes wide. “For Christ’s sake, Swede,” he roared. “What in the hell is happening?”
A quartermaster at his post at the helm recalled the exchange. Momsen did not take his eyes off the clouds of yellow smoke pulsing from the fore turret as he replied, “Admiral, I believe the forward magazines are exploding.”
No stranger to danger in combat, Lee stared at the tall captain. “Good God, man, what are you doing about it?”
“I have ordered the magazines flooded.” Momsen’s voice was calm, level, and clear.
“Well, is it being done?” Lee asked.
Momsen never stopped looking at the hulking turret. “I hope so, Admiral. But I’m not going to call them now to find out. Anyway, we’ll know soon enough.” Then he looked up and pointed his finger to the sky. “If they are not, that’s where we will be in about 30 seconds.”
Actually, several minutes after the first explosion, the rumbling subsided. The battleship stopped shuddering. Soon the normal routine of running the ship took over again. But it had been close.
When all was again quiet, Momsen pondered the cause. How could the routine loading of ammunition lead to the annihilation of a powerful battleship? Three men were dead, and eight more fatally wounded from fire and severe concussion. Another 24 were injured.
Momsen, with his intuitive engineer’s mind, examined the possible causes. He was aware that nitrocellulose propellant was susceptible to ignition by spark. But the silk bags that tightly bound the cordite were supposedly immune from generating a spark. He wondered about the stainless steel canisters. They were 16 inches in diameter, a foot long, and contained one propellant bag. Normally used only for transporting the propellant, they were opened and discarded when the powder bags were sent up the hoist to the turret.
One possibility entered Momsen’s mind. The silk bags could shift inside the canisters, making them easier to remove before putting them on the hoist. Momsen was also an experienced chemist, having worked with exotic gases during his trials with early breathing and diving tests. Heat and friction could generate a static charge. This seemed plausible as he wrote up his report and opinions on the accident. He theorized that the transport of the canisters from man to man shifted the silk bags, creating friction and generating static electricity. But how to prove it? Momsen knew he had a hard fight ahead of him to convince the Navy Department, and specifically the Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd), that the battleships were floating powder kegs.
Now, armed with this evidence, Momsen inquired about other incidents of accidental explosions on other battleships. He did not concern himself with destroyers or cruisers since, in most cases, they utilized shells with larger brass cartridges rather than silk powder bags of nitrocellulose cordite propellant. He was determined to find out how the accident happened and, more importantly, how to prevent it from happening again.
In late May, Lee was sent to the East Coast to head an investigation to find and test defenses against kamikaze attacks. Momsen waited until a reply arrived from BuOrd. They had considered his theories and flatly refuted them. Thousands of powder bags had been used in the fleet for years. It was impossible for a spark to be generated, and it certainly couldn’t ignite an explosion. In short, Momsen was out of his mind.
Undeterred, Swede pressed on. He gathered support from sympathetic officers and forced BuOrd to reconsider. He was on familiar ground. This was not the first time he had encountered BuOrd’s intransigence. Problems with the Mark 14 torpedo had come first. It had been Momsen’s tenacity and brilliance that helped favorably resolve that issue, but the experience had earned him no friends at BuOrd. Now, 18 months later, the audacious former submariner was again backing BuOrd into a corner. There is little doubt that they were still smarting from the Mark 14 debacle, and having the unconventional Momsen come up with a “crackpot” theory of the silk powder bags exploding from friction and static electricity was absurd and insulting.
But true to his nature, the redoubtable Momsen did not give up. He gathered enough clout, in the form of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J. King, to force BuOrd to conduct a month-long series of tests to find out if his theory had any validity. At the Pearl Harbor Ammunition Depot, officers and engineers ran several tests in which the metal canisters containing the silk powder bags were moved and transported. Days and weeks went by, and with each test no spark was created. The smug smiles on the faces of the BuOrd officials widened. Then, on the very last day, when it appeared Momsen had been wrong, one canister was being moved in accordance with conditions in a battleship’s magazine. A spark suddenly ignited the test powder. It happened exactly as Swede Momsen predicted.
BuOrd had no choice but to accept the truth. It was determined that the friction between the metal canister and the bag could generate a charge of static electricity strong enough to cause the powder to burn.
The temptation to say “I told you so” had to have boiled in Momsen, but that was not in his nature. Having helped avert more deaths and potential disasters, he resumed his duties.
There were, of course, more explosions on American battleships, the most famous being the April 1989 explosion in USS Iowa’s Number 2 turret during training exercises. While the navy originally claimed that a disgruntled sailor deliberately set the explosion, a second independent investigation showed that poor training of the turret crews and old powder from the 1930s were the culprits. The old bags had been improperly stored and were highly volatile. It is likely that Swede Momsen, had he been alive, would have recognized the cause far earlier than the first investigative board.
As for USS South Dakota, her narrow brush with annihilation required her to sail to Ulithi for repairs. She entered the Auxiliary Floating Drydock ABSD-3 for inspection, which revealed that her propellor shafts and screws were pitted and required replacement or repair. This was done by May 27, and she was sent for assignment for antiaircraft training and, surprisingly, an anti-submarine drill with two destroyers. After this, she returned to Leyte Gulf as part of Task Group 38.1 as the flagship of Rear Admiral John F. Shafroth. The antiaircraft artillery training was in anticipation of what were sure to be relentless kamikaze attacks during the planned November invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost home island of Japan.
South Dakota, along with battleships Indiana and Massachusetts, two heavy cruisers, and nine destroyers, were to shell the Kamaishi Steel Works on Kyushu. The task group then provided antiaircraft artillery support for the carriers launching air strikes on Honshu and Hokkaido. During late July, she worked in concert with Royal Navy ships, including the old warhorse HMS King George V, to shell Tokyo, sinking several warships and other craft.
This duty continued until August 15, when she was recalled upon hearing of the Japanese surrender. Entering Tokyo Bay on August 27, she hosted Admirals Halsey and Chester Nimitz. As Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), Nimitz remained aboard until the morning of September 2, 1945, when he took a launch over to the USS Missouri for the surrender ceremonies. South Dakota, the hard-working battleship, was there to see the end of the war. Halsey made the ship his flagship while he worked with Douglas MacArthur to oversee the dissolution of the remains of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
South Dakota sailed in company with scores of warships to Okinawa, then on to Pearl Harbor, arriving in San Francisco on October 27, Navy Day. Governor Earl Warren boarded the ship for the double celebration. After transiting the Panama Canal, South Dakota arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on January 20, 1946. For just under a year, she was the flagship of the short-lived Fourth Fleet, a reserve unit. On January 30, she was decommissioned and laid up in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet. For the next 15 years, the battleship was under consideration for modernization to carry Talos guided missiles. But the renovation of South Dakota and her sisters was deemed too costly, and she was ignominiously struck from the navy roll in February 1962.
In November, she was towed to New Jersey for breaking up. Almost exactly 20 years after fighting her first battle at Guadalcanal, USS South Dakota was no more.
South Dakota’s anchor and bell were retained by the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Chamber of Commerce for a memorial. A low concrete wall outlines the full-scale shape of the ship, with mockups of her superstructure and a forward turret on display.
While South Dakota might not have been one of the outstanding battleships of World War II, she did her duty, through bad luck and good. She and her crew deserve to be honored.
Mark Carlson a student and researcher of military history and a resident of Prescott, Arizona.
What about the Battleship USS North Carolina another unsung Battleship? The article should have included this Battleship!
Agreed. There were other BBs that didn’t get the press that the (you should excuse the expression) big guns got. But despite the article’s lede, the “iconic Maine” wasn’t one of either them *or* Navy battleships “built … in the 20th century.” The “iconic” Maine (aka ACR-1) exploded & sank in 1898, which would make it pretty hard to be “built” in the 20th century. 🙂
There *was* a Maine (BB-10) built in the 20th century, but she was laid down in 1899 & commissioned in 1902. While that does make her a 20th-cent ship, she was only in use for less than 18 years, being finally decommissioned** in 1920, & sold for scrap in 1922 (in compliance with the Washington Naval Treaty).
** — The ship had earlier been temporarily decommissioned in 1909, but was recommissioned two years later.
You should write a story about the BB North Carolina. That would be a great story.
This could be a great series of articles.
Then unsung cruisers, aircraft carriers, etc. Endless possibilities!