North Carolina-class battleship

The North Carolina class was a class of two fast battleships built for the United States Navy in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Navy was originally uncertain whether the ships should be fast enough to counter the Japanese Kongō-class battlecruiser. The 1936 Second London Naval Treaty’s requirement that all capital ships have a standard displacement of under 35,000 LT prevented the desired objectives from being fully realized. Both North Carolina and Washington saw extensive service during the Second World War in a variety of roles. The vessels were laid up in the reserve fleet until the early 1960s, when North Carolina was sold to the state of North Carolina as a museum ship.

About North Carolina-class battleship in brief

The North Carolina class was a class of two fast battleships built for the United States Navy in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Navy was originally uncertain whether the ships should be fast enough to counter the Japanese Kongō-class battlecruiser. The 1936 Second London Naval Treaty’s requirement that all capital ships have a standard displacement of under 35,000 LT prevented the desired objectives from being fully realized. Both North Carolina and Washington saw extensive service during the Second World War in a variety of roles, primarily in the Pacific Theater where they escorted fast carrier task forces and conducted shore bombardments. The vessels were laid up in the reserve fleet until the early 1960s, when North Carolina was sold to the state of North Carolina as a museum ship, and Washington was broken up for scrap. The class’ main armament was increased to nine 16-inch 45 caliber Mark 6 guns from the original twelve 14-inch guns. The United States became concerned over Japan’s refusal to commit to the caliber limit of the Second London naval Treaty, so they invoked the \”escalator clause\” of that pact and increased the class’ armament to 16-inches 45-caliber Mark 6. The ships were laid down in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a naval race between the U.S. and the United Kingdom, which was expanding its fleet after the end of the First World War. The Second London Treaty superseded the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, which limited all future battleships to a maximum of 35,,000 tons and a maximum gun caliber of 16- inches.

It also decreed that the five countries could not construct another capital ship for ten years and could not replace any ship that survived the treaty until it was at least twenty years old, while superseding the 1922 agreement, while keeping many of the same requirements on gun size on the new warships, though it kept the same many provisions on the same ship as the 1922 treaty. In the early 1950s, the North Carolina-class battleships were sold to North Carolina, where they were used as museum ships until the mid-1960s. They were later sold to a private company, which used them as a training ship and museum ship until they were scrapped in the 1990s. Their final resting place was in San Diego, California, where the shipyard is still operating as a naval museum. The North Carolina Class was decommissioned in the early 1990s and replaced by a new, much smaller, class of battleship, the USS North Carolina. The shipyard still operates as a military museum, but has no plans to build a new battleship of its own. It is now owned by the University of South Carolina, which also has a museum museum in Charlotte, North Carolina and a private museum in Asheville, North Cleveland and Duke of Gloucester, Scandinavia, Tennessee, S.C. It was also the home port of the United States Navy’s 7th Fleet.

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