The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: Argentina Battleship Moreno

Laid down on July 9, 1910, launched on June 28, 1911 and commissioned in December 1914, Moreno carried a main armament of twelve 12 inch main guns mounted two per turret. Two superfiring turrets were on the centerline both fore and aft and there was one wing turret per side that could fire both fore and aft and to both sides. Moreno was a member of the three-ship Rivadavia battleship class, of which only two ships were built and both were built in response to the mini naval arms race occurring in South America at this time. Both the British and Germans had tried for the contracts on these ships and they were shocked when the United States got the orders, especially since elements of the designs they had submitted were incorporated in the finished ships. Both ships would undoubtedly have been confiscated on the outbreak of the Great War had they been in British or German yards. Built in American shipyards, these two ships had a signature American cage-type foremast but were the only capital ships ever built in the U. S. A. with wing turrets and they were propelled by coal-fired turbines. The Moreno was named to honor Dr. Francisco P. Moreno (1852–1919) a Patagonian explorer and founder of the Argentinean Boy Scouts. The Moreno had an uneventful career, as Argentina avoided both World Wars (Argentina did declare war on Germany and Japan in March 1945 but, by then, this meant little) and the South American naval arms race, in the end, never amounted to anything. The ship was modernized in the United States in 1924 where she was converted to oil-fired turbines and had modern fire control equipment installed. Moreno sailed on a good will visit to Europe in 1937, where she participated in the Spithead Review. Moreno remained in service into the 1940s and was finally sold to wreckers in Japan in 1957.

See other South American battleships: Sao Paulo, Canada, Introduction