USS New Jersey

On a visit to the USA in 2007 we stayed in Riverton in New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia, and made a couple of visits there during the holiday. The River Line light rail system which passes through Riverton links Trenton with Camden on the opposite bank of the Delaware River to Philadelphia and we used that on both our visits. On the Camden side of the river the Iowa class battleship the USS New Jersey is moored as a museum ship and I took these photographs, mostly from the ferry from Camden to Philadelphia, on one of our visits.

Work on the USS New Jersey started on 16 September 1940, she was launched on 7 December 1942, and commissioned 23 May 1943. The initial crew training took place in the Western Atlantic and Caribbean before being transferred to the Pacific Theatre in advance of the planned assault on the Marshall Islands, where she screened the U.S. fleet of aircraft carriers from enemy air raids. She later took part in a naval bombardment of Iwo Jima and Okinawa prior to invasion by United States troops.

During the Korean War the ship pounded targets on the East coast of North Korea, and following the Armistice the USS New Jersey conducted training and operation cruises until she was decommissioned on August 21, 1957.

She was briefly reactivated in 1968 and sent to Vietnam to support US troops before returning to the mothball fleet in 1969. Reactivated again in 1982 USS New Jersey was sent to Lebanon to protect U.S. interests and U.S. Marines, firing her main guns at Druze and Syrian positions in the Beqaa Valley east of Beirut.

Decommissioned for the last time on 8 February 1991, USS New Jersey was briefly retained on the Naval Vessel Register before being donated to the Home Port Alliance of Camden, New Jersey for use as a museum ship in October 2001.

The USS New Jersey's sister Iowa class battleship USS Missouri was the ship on which General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2nd September 1945.

While on the ferry crossing the Delaware River I noticed two familiar looking funnels further down the river:

It's the SS United States that was built for United States Lines in 1950/51 as a Transatlantic liner but with some assistance from the US government which, remembering the recent World War, envisaged it as being able to transport large numbers of troops should the need arise in the future. She was the fastest Transatlantic liner ever built, and on her maiden voyage she won the Blue Riband by completing both the eastbound and westbound journeys in record times. By the late 1960s transatlantic travel by ship had dwindled so much that it was no longer profitable and the SS United States was withdrawn from service. Ownership passed through various hands with no-one being able to put the ship to profitable use, and since 1996 she has been moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia.