In California: Out of Mothballs

By Paul A. Witteman

Out in the sea of people on San Francisco's piers 30-32, Dave Graham in his windbreaker resembled a small blue buoy. As BB-63 slowly eased to a berth, Graham was moving his arms briskly and systematically as if conducting an orchestra. Four stories up on the ship's signal deck, Chief Signalman Mike Kennedy took note. While others ogled the U.S.O. dancers on the dock, he broke out a small pair of blue and white pennants, known as papa flags, and returned to the rail. In his hands, the flags began to speak back. Before the final lines were secure, Kennedy had invited retired Senior Chief Signalman Graham and his wife aboard to share a cup of coffee in the cramped signal shelter of the most famous American battleship ever built.

The U.S.S. Missouri, "Mighty Mo," was returning from retirement. In emotional ceremonies on a sun-drenched day in San Francisco Bay, the ship was "brought alive" by her crew of 1,600 before an audience of 12,000 dignitaries and guests. The mere mention of the ship summons echoes from the remembered past. On her bleached teak decks, Supreme Allied Commander General Douglas MacArthur had accepted the unconditional surrender of the Japanese from Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu.

A brass plaque embedded in the wood of what is now known as the surrender deck memorializes that moment in Tokyo Bay: 0908, Sept. 2, 1945. V-J day. The conclusion of World War II. "Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always," MacArthur told Americans huddled around radios in darkness half a world away.

Mike Kennedy was just a tyke in Clarksburg, W. Va., back then. The Navy didn't claim him until 1959, four years after Mighty Mo was mothballed in Bremerton, Wash. In fact, Kennedy never figured to serve a day on her. He had retired in 1979 and was working as a security guard in the federal court in San Diego when the phone rang on his birthday, Dec. 13, 1984. His wife Marilyn took the call and relayed the unexpected invitation from the Chief of Naval Operations. "You jumped on that like a buzzard on a dead cow," she told him as he went out the door the next morning for his re-enlistment physical. Kennedy and a select group of other noncommissioned officers with years of skill and leadership were chosen by the Navy to help bring the Missouri and her sister battleships, the Iowa and the New Jersey, back to active service.

Master Chief Boatswain's Mate John Davidson from Malden, Mass., didn't have to come out of retirement to be selected. He had first sailed on the Missouri as a seaman first class in 1946 when she carried the body of the wartime Turkish Ambassador to the U.S. back to Istanbul to be buried. Since then he's seen ports of call from Australia to Italy and been tattooed by the best in Norfolk, Va., Hong Kong, Yokohama and Pearl Harbor. With just over 40 years in service, Davidson isn't padding his pension. He can't improve on the 75% of his monthly base salary of $2,467.80 that's due him if he retires tomorrow. When the call from Washington reached him in 1983, asking him if he wanted a second tour on the ship, there was no hesitation. "I told them I'd pay them to let me serve," he says.

The Missouri, apparently, will do that to men like Graham, who retired in 1971 after 30 years, and Kennedy and Davidson. The ship exerts a magnetism that is as much physical as historical. Up close, she's an awesome sight. Her three sets of 16-in. guns, tooled more than four decades ago, are still, in the age of Star Wars, compelling instruments of destruction. They will hurl a projectile that is the equivalent in weight of a compact pickup truck out over the horizon to a target 26 miles away. The two-year refitting also added long- range Tomahawk missiles, medium-range Harpoon missiles and four 20-mm Gatling- type guns designed to throw out a "wall of lead" to stop incoming missiles. Combined with her 13.5-in. armor plate and 212,000 horsepower, the weapons give the Navy an asset that amounts to more than just a national historical treasure. "She can run with any task force we put together," says Captain George Fink, who oversaw the Missouri's modernization.

At a total cost of $475 million, the Navy considers the addition of the Missouri to the fleet a bargain as well. Fink points out that you'd get little more than a frigate for the money today and adds that to duplicate her would be impossible. "You'd have to put back a piece of the American steel business and part of the armaments industry that don't exist anymore." Critics argue that Mighty Mo should have been allowed to disappear also. Some naval tacticians say she's almost as outdated as the empty gun emplacements that line the headlands around the Golden Gate Bridge, ghostly sentinels of a day when the arts of war were simpler and its consequences not so frighteningly final.

As the Missouri cruised at eleven stately knots past those concrete bunkers into the bay for recommissioning ceremonies, she was greeted not only by tugs spurting festive plumes of water but by half a dozen boats of the "Peace Navy." The small flotilla was protesting the home-porting of the Missouri with its nuclear missiles along San Francisco's waterfront. Mike Kennedy, on the other hand, thinks of the Missouri as a force for peace. "We'd prefer never to fire a shot in anger," he says.

The debate will continue, evidently more in terms of means than of ends. Bobbing off to the Missouri's starboard, one of the protester's boats carried a banner that read GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. That sentiment differed remarkably little from the one delivered by MacArthur almost 41 years ago.