How To Tell Which Iowa Class Battleship Is Which

Hi, I'm Ryan Szymanski, curator for Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial, and today we've got another video about how you can tell the Iowa-class battleships apart. This is one of the most common questions I get from people as they shoot me a picture and they're like, which one is this? And I love playing that game, I do, but it's kind of easy, especially in the 1980s. By the 1980s, the ships have so many differences that have been introduced over their careers that it gets real tough to have a picture of the ship that doesn't show enough information to tell exactly which one she is. One of the most noticeable differences, and one that I don't think we've talked about before, is the rubber matting that's back around the fantail. Each of the Iowas had a different pattern of this applied, and essentially what it is, these ships were recommissioned kind of quick and dirty with their original teak decks, and in many instances there was a lot of rot, especially on the fantail where you have such a broad expanse, and just the way that these ships sat unloaded in mothballs for decades had water kind of pulling back there, so that part of the ship kind of rotted faster than other parts. What's more, you kind of need a flat, smooth surface back there, because that's where you're doing a lot of your unwrap, and you're rolling those around on carts. That's where you've got your ship's boats parked on rolling carts that have to be moved from one side to the other, depending on where your guns are firing. That's where your helicopters are being parked, and they have to be able to roll around the deck to get off of the flight deck to the deck park, and then back again. So you need a flat surface that doesn't have a bunch of pits and divots that these wheels are going to get caught in that's going to make it difficult to move around. So the solution that the Navy used is actually something that the Coast Guard started using in the late 70s on their 327 class cutters. They had redecked those ships about halfway through their life, and removed the original teak, and redecked them with Douglas fir, and the Douglas fir was rotting away, and they knew these the ships that were still in service only had a few years left. So they applied what I would call a band-aid solution. They basically poured rubber over the entire wooden deck, like a rubber roofing compound, and then they poured non-skid in it, and they painted it deck gray. It's good because it is a band-aid. It does buy you an extra five or ten years of service without having to spend millions of dollars to replace the teak deck, and then having a 20-year teak deck on a five-year Coast Guard cutter. It's bad because it is trapping moisture under that rubber layer, and the wood underneath rots even quicker. It's not getting ventilated. It's not allowing that water to evaporate. So it's not only causing the wood to rot, it's causing the steel under that wood to rot. So this is very much a last-ditch solution for a ship that you're not expecting to be around a whole terribly long time. So the Navy does this starting in 82 with New Jersey, and each of the Iowa-class battleships gets a different application of this back on the Fantail until you get to Wisconsin, and they do pay the money to have her reactivated with a whole new wood deck. And so she never has that rubber coating, and she has the wood deck all the way back out. It's worth pointing out that the Iowa-class battleships were modified with the metal flight deck, kind of a square, all the way at the Fantail, and that flight deck had two legs that came off of it for deck parking. And those are also metal, and they're a little bit ramped up to get to the flight deck, but the section in between them is wood. So unfortunately, I was trying to find pictures of the Iowas that were all more or less similar of them firing, and I couldn't find a Wisconsin picture like that. So here's a picture of Wisconsin from the bow, but you can see towards the Fantail that the beautiful blonde wood deck goes all the way back to those helicopter ramps on the flight deck. She never had the rubber roofing compound, and if you see an Iowa with a beautiful clean wood deck and none of the rubber at the Fantail, you know that that's Wisconsin, and it's specifically in the 80s. This rubber coating only applies to the 1980s time period. So Wisconsin's the easiest because she has none. Missouri's the second easiest because they just rubbered the whole thing. So here's a picture of Missouri firing her guns. This is 1988, so it's roughly the same year as the Wisconsin picture, and you can see that basically everything aft of the superstructure is black. It's that deck gray color. It is not any wood visible at all, and on that ship they just covered the whole thing with the rubber roofing compound. They weren't worried about what's rotten, what isn't rotten. I suspect that they found that a large part of it was rotten, so they did the whole thing, and that probably contributed to on Wisconsin them saying, no, it's just too rotten. We have to spend the extra money to re-teak the decks. So if you ever see an Iowa that looks like there's no visible wood aft of the superstructure in the 1980s, that's Missouri. Iowa is probably the most difficult because she's actually got two different applications. She's reactivated in 1984, so here's a picture of her in 1984, and you can see the flight deck, the steel ramps leading to the flight deck, and there are small rubber extensions coming off of that steel deck. But if you look at this picture of Iowa in 1988, the same year Wisconsin is brought back, you see that that rubber has been removed. My suspicion here is that some Atlantic Fleet admiral liked the bare wood and didn't like the rubber, and so he had the two Atlantic Fleet battleships have their bare wood decks. Makes sense with Wisconsin with her fresh one. Doesn't make sense with Iowa. As far as I know, she had repairs to her teak deck, but not major replacements of those areas in the 1980s. Also in this picture, you get a really good view of ship's boats back on the fantail and things like that, some of the objects that need to be rolled around. New Jersey, of course, is the first one brought back, and she's got the most complicated layout. And if you look at it, you can see that she's got like the square rubber extension that comes off of the flight deck, but then it continues towards the superstructure similar to Missouri, but not all the way. It's just like paths, like they have these paths for rolling the boat carts or the helicopters. But then there are also strips, like look at that real thin strip on each side that's still wood along the gunwales. So they did like a really complex series of geometric shapes for New Jersey, and that's how I can always tell her from the other ones if you're just seeing like a top view towards the fantail. She seems to have this the entire time. She's the only one that has this. Oftentimes you look at pictures like this and you assume that they have ripped up that wood down to bare steel. That is not the case. It is a rubber coating over the wood. My recommendation when you're buying like the faux wood decks for your models, don't buy the one for New Jersey that is missing the wood around those cutouts at the fantail. Buy one of the wood decks for one of the other ships that has the complete wood, and then paint that strip over it to show that it is rubber on top of the wood and not bare metal. But that's just how I would do it. When New Jersey first came to Camden, the rubber was still on it. She had it throughout all of mothballs, and it had completely destroyed the decking on the fantail. So the museum tore it all up, and basically everything after the superstructure was bare metal for the first 20 some odd years of the museum's career. When we redecked the ship, we had an internal debate on whether we were going to replace the rubber coating over the teak at the fantail, because that matches our period of interpretation, or if we weren't going to do that. And ultimately we decided there are other places on the ship where we have added stuff that doesn't match the period of interpretation. The rubber coating would be detrimental to the long-term survival of the teak. We're hoping to get 40 years out of this teak since we're not rolling boats and shells and things like that over it. And if we put that rubber down, we would probably only get 10 or 15 years out of it before the teak underneath started to get real squishy and we started to have issues with the deck under that. So we decided for the long-term preservation of the ship, this was an area where we were going to deviate from the period of interpretation. Of course, all of the previous commissions, the ship just had bare wood decks, so it kind of works out like that. But let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below. Do you think we should have been more militant about maintaining the period of interpretation, or do you think the bare teak deck is justifiable from a curatorial and preservation point of view? Let us know down below. What are some of the things you use to tell the difference between the Iowa-class battleships? If we haven't talked about it before, we might include in a future video. Battleship New Jersey receives operating support from the New Jersey Department of State, as well as from a number of other businesses and private individuals like yourselves. We really appreciate your support. There's a link in the description below for ways you can donate to support the museum. You can also support us by liking, sharing, and subscribing, so more people find out about the museum and our channel. Thanks for watching!