The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: United States Battleship Utah (BB 31)

Laid down on March 15, 1907, launched on December 23, 1909 and commissioned on August 31, 1911, Utah carried a main armament of ten 12 inch main guns mounted two per turret; two centerline superfiring forward, one centerline aft, one centerline behind that which could fire only aft at an angle and to the sides and a third behind that on a raised deck that enabled it to fire over both of the other aft turrets. Utah was half of the two-ship Florida class and both had the new coal-fired turbine steam engines. All United States dreadnought battleships were named after states and all were assigned a hull number that was normally displayed on the hull. During the War to End All Wars, from September through November 1918, Utah went overseas but patrolled off southern Ireland and never joined the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. With a major overhaul from 1926 to 1928, Utah was part of the Atlantic Fleet until 1930, when she toured Europe. During the 1920s, as a trivia factoid, Seaman John Dillinger (1903–1934), future celebrity bank robber and public enemy, served aboard the Utah. The class was decommissioned in 1930, and Florida went to the breakers. Utah was re-commissioned as a remotely-controlled target vessel (new hull number AG-16) in 1932 and she was also used as a training ship and test vessel for lighter guns (all her big 12 inch guns had been removed). After a trip through the Panama Canal and a refit stop at Puget Sound Navy Yard in the summer of 1941, Utah proceeded to Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. Mistaken for an aircraft carrier because of the expanse of wooden deck laid over the ship for her use as a bombing target, the ship was attacked from the air, capsized and sank on December 7, 1941 with a loss of 58 dead. The hull was later partially righted and moved closer to Ford Island, where Utah remains. Hopes for salvage kept the ship from being formally deleted until November 13, 1944. Although not nearly as well-known as the U. S. S. Arizona memorial, the sunken hull of the Utah remains in Pearl Harbor as an underwater war grave memorial that draws thousands of visitors every year. In fact, now that the U. S. S. Missouri has been made a floating memorial there, the presence of Arizona, Missouri and Utah makes Pearl Harbor the only place where you can visit three battleships, two of them from the era of the dreadnoughts.

See other battleships: South Carolina, Delaware, Introduction