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If you don’t know the history of the Navy’s battleships, they started with the War of Independence and Oliver Hazard Perry’s attempts in the early 19th century to get the British Navy’s ships out of the Great Lakes, and just went from there. The last wooden-hulled battleship afloat is Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution.<\/p>\n
The first steel hulled battleship was the USS Texas in 1892, but the first designated steel-hulled modern battleship was the USS Indiana BB-1,\u00a0 officially started in 1890 and commissioned in 1895.\u00a0\u00a0USS\u00a0Maine<\/i> (ACR-1) was a United States Navy ship that sank in Havana Harbor in 1898, contributing to the outbreak of the Spanish\u2013American War in 1898. These were of the pre-dreadnought class.<\/p>\n
The dreadnoughts were those giant ships with 16-inch guns that were built prior to World War II, effectively replacing the pre-dreadnoughts. \u00a0These new ships were the so-called fast battleship. They began with North Carolina<\/i> BB-55 and the last ship\u00a0laid down<\/a> was Kentucky <\/i>BB-66, while the last completed ship was Wisconsin <\/i>BB-64<\/p>\n USS Missouri BB-63 was one of them. The Missouri was ordered in 1940 and commissioned in June 1944. She fought in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and even shelled the Japanese home islands. She was the ship on whose deck the government of Japan’s representative signed the peace treaty, ending the War in the Pacific.<\/p>\n