The Late 1980s on Battleship NJ

Hi, I'm Ryan Szymanski, curator for Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial, and today we've got another picture's worth a thousand words for you, and this one is special because it comes very close to the end of the ship's career, and while personal photography was much more prevalent, especially by the late 1980s, like access to cheap and decent color cameras was pretty widespread, we don't have a tremendous amount of it. Those guys just haven't hit the point where they're getting nostalgic and going through their stuff yet and sending it to the ship. That'll happen when those guys start to hit retirement a little bit later on, but this is a really fantastic picture of the fantail of the ship. We're on the port side looking forward, and we're roughly at the flight deck, like the face of turret three or the forward face of the flight deck area, looking forward towards the superstructure, and it's a really great picture of one of the ship's RPV drones and the ship's boats back there. Not only do we have limited photography of the ship during this time period, period, we also have limited photography of the ship's drones. That's one of those things that is added so late in the ship's career that there just isn't that much opportunity to photograph it, and so it's really great that somebody took this picture specifically of the drone, and you would expect to see that. This is the latest and greatest and most modern and technologically advanced thing on the battleship. We don't use battleships anymore, but we're still using drones. This is that modern bit of combat that has been grafted onto this ancient dinosaur of a ship. We don't even really use boats like these anymore. These 1980s-made ship's boats have all been replaced by rigid-hulled inflatables. You can see the five-inch guns on there, another ancient system that's no longer used anymore. That particular five-inch .38, there are still some five-inch guns in the fleet, but in a picture of old things, they've perfectly framed up this very modern thing that is still in many ways contemporary and futuristic. It was certainly futuristic at the time. It's still the future of combat nowadays. Probably the most interesting thing here is you can see the launching cradle that the drone is sitting on. We do not have one of those. The museum would love to acquire one to position our drone on, but if we can't, this is the best picture I've seen so far to be able to manufacture it. I did not realize it. It appears to be on wheels. It's got a little T-handle on the front so you can pull it around. It really is just a simple thing. A little bit of tube stock going down the middle and some risers to have it stand up so that it's pointed in a launch position. It's still got its Remove Before Flight tags on it. You can see how it's tied down to the aircraft tie-down points on the deck. Unfortunately, when the museum got the battleship, the teak deck back aft in particular was so rotten that the Navy put a rubber band-aid over the whole deck. It just caused the teak under there to rot more than it had been previously. It was super squishy. When the museum got the ship, we had to cut that up. The aviation tie-down points are these circles. They're maybe four inches in diameter. They stand about two inches proud off the deck, which would put them level with the top of the teak. When we removed the teak, we had all these things standing up that were tripping hazards. They all got cut off. On New Jersey, they're not there before. I'm pretty sure Missouri had a very similar problem. I can't remember Iowa. Wisconsin definitely still has hers and may well be the last example of these. This is a great picture showing the tie-down points in use. You can see the drone is tied down and you can see that the boats are tied down to these tie-down points as well. Those are also on rolling carts. If the 16-inch turret needs to fire a port side broadside, you can untie them and roll them to the starboard side of the ship or you can untie them and roll them to the boat boom on the aft port face of the superstructure so that you can put them in the water and deploy them. The tie-down points are aviation tie-down points. They're primarily used with the helicopters in addition to this other stuff. Sometimes, you even see cargo tied down to those points and it's just like I said a two-inch recess. It's got a cross welded into it so that you can slide hooks in. You can lash rope around it. You've got all sorts of options for using that to tie things in place and because they're spread out along the deck like that, you can get things tied off to a variety of points. While seeing the drone is the thing in this picture that's the most awesome and it's the coolest thing, it's the least commonly seen thing, seeing how the boats are set up back here is pretty cool as well. You can see that there are three boats here. In the foreground, kind of above the drone on its cart is a 40-foot Liberty launch. The museum has two of these currently, one on board the ship and one over at the marina. You can see how it's got the ship's name on it. It's got the boat's number on it. Then to the right of that, you can see the black and green and white Admiral's launch. That tells us that this picture is 1990. It's probably the ship's last active deployment. It's when Admiral Paul Reason is on board because that is the coloring of his specific Admiral's launch. You might be able to blow this picture up enough to read that but if not, we've got another similar picture in this series that is more focused on that boat. You can very clearly read Comcrude Desgrue 1, Commander Cruisers and Destroyers Group 1, and the Pacific Fleet's surface warfare ships essentially that Admiral Paul Reason was in charge of. Then behind that, you can see another 40-foot Liberty boat. This is interesting because it shows us that this ship likely is carrying seven boats at this time. She'll carry four, two on each side by the davits, usually a captain's gig and a Liberty launch on the lower section, and then 26-foot motor surf boats suspended above them. Then she'll usually have a couple here on the fantail. Here you can see two more 40-foot Liberty launches and the Admiral's launch. You might also see in the 1989 Australia cruise, instead of one of these Admiral's launches, we had a rigid-hulled inflatable boat back here on the fantail which our maritime security guys would have rowed around the boat and to protect the ship while she was in port in Australia. If you look at the Admiral's launch, you can see there's a real spider web of ropes tying it down and that's pretty interesting. I'm not entirely sure why that is, and again you get a better picture of this in the other shot in the series. The other cool thing you can see here is right under the wing, it would be the left wing of the drone but the right side of the photo, kind of under the Admiral's launch, you can see that there's a group of deck crew guys, a couple of them in their dungarees, one guy in the green shirt. Green shirts on the flight deck, of course, are maintenance personnel. They maintain aircraft launch and recovery equipment. On an aircraft carrier that would be things like catapults. Obviously the battleship doesn't have that but I don't know if that would extend to the rockets, the radar rockets that launch these things or the launching platforms for these things. They run a lot of the support equipment. Anyway, you can see that guy in the green shirt which indicates that they're flight deck aviation personnel as opposed to ship's company. You can see that they're working on one of the drones which is not sitting on its cradle, it's actually sitting on its tricycle landing gear right there on the deck. It looks like you've got one guy at the back here working on the motor and it might not even have the tail attached yet. You've got another guy, the green shirt's at the front, they might have it opened up to look at the brains inside. So did you see anything in this picture that I didn't bring up? I think it's a really cool and unique picture just because we have so little from this time period. It's right at the end of the ship's service when she has her most modern equipment on board and this is a fantastic picture of that. I'm super psyched because you'll remember from past videos we had very little evidence that New Jersey herself actually carried the drones and there was some debate for a while whether we actually deployed them. Obviously the other Iowas all have great pictures and we just didn't really and now we're finding more and more information that confirms that yes we did and it also confirms that we got the paint scheme of Admiral's Barge correct which is super exciting that we did that restoration correctly. What's some other stuff you noticed in there? Let us know in the comment section down below. Battleship New Jersey receives operating support from the New Jersey Department of State and private individuals like yourselves. We really appreciate the support. There's a link in the description below if you'd like to donate to support the museum. 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