"Big Whiskey: A Legacy of Naval Dominance from World War II to the Gulf War"

There are warships that become famous because of a single battle, a single captain, or a single moment in history. USS Wisconsin was different. Her story stretched across generations.

She fought during the final months of World War II, returned to war off Korea, spent three decades seemingly destined never to fight again, and then came roaring back to life in time to fire both Tomahawk cruise missiles and her enormous 16-inch guns during Operation Desert Storm. Men who served aboard her in 1945 could scarcely have imagined the weapons and technology she would carry when another generation took her into combat nearly half a century later.

Around the Navy she became known simply as “Wisky,” “Big Wisky,” or “Big Whiskey.” Whatever name her sailors used, BB-64 became one of the last great representatives of an era when a battleship could dominate the horizon simply by appearing on it.

USS Wisconsin was laid down at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on January 25, 1941. She slid down the ways on December 7, 1943, exactly two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was commissioned on April 16, 1944, with Captain Earl E. Stone in command. At 887 feet long and capable of more than 30 knots, she combined the armor and enormous firepower traditionally associated with a battleship with enough speed to operate alongside the fast aircraft carriers that had become the centerpiece of American naval power.

Her most imposing weapons were impossible to miss. Three armored turrets carried nine 16-inch/50-caliber Mark 7 guns. A single armor-piercing projectile could weigh approximately 2,700 pounds. The guns could throw their enormous projectiles more than 20 miles. But those weapons were only part of the ship. Thousands of sailors were required to operate the machinery, communications systems, radar, anti-aircraft batteries, damage-control stations, engineering spaces and gun mounts that allowed Wisconsin to fight.

That distinction matters. Battleships are easy to remember as numbers: armor thickness, gun caliber, displacement and speed. But Wisconsin was never simply 45,000 tons of steel. She was a floating community of sailors working deep inside a machine whose spaces stretched for hundreds of feet and many decks. Every time those great guns fired, men below decks moved powder, handled projectiles, operated machinery and carried out carefully choreographed jobs that most people watching the spectacular photographs of a battleship broadside never see.

Big Whiskey Goes to War

Wisconsin reached the western Pacific combat zone in December 1944 and joined the fast carrier forces striking Japanese positions throughout the western Pacific. She participated in operations connected with the Philippines and Iwo Jima while helping protect the carriers whose aircraft were carrying the war ever closer to Japan. Her anti-aircraft batteries were an important part of that protective screen, particularly as Japanese air attacks became increasingly desperate.

The popular image of a battleship is one of huge guns firing at another battleship across the sea. By the time Wisconsin entered World War II, that kind of naval warfare was disappearing. Aircraft carriers had become the fleet's principal offensive weapon. Fast battleships like Wisconsin found another role, racing with the carrier forces, protecting them from air attack and providing the immense gunfire support that only a battleship could deliver when operations moved close to shore.

On March 24, 1945, as American forces prepared for the invasion of Okinawa, Wisconsin finally turned her 16-inch guns against targets ashore. Alongside other battleships, she bombarded Japanese positions and installations in preparation for the landings. Once the invasion began, the battle became a nightmare of kamikaze attacks, and Wisconsin's secondary and anti-aircraft batteries joined the fleet's desperate effort to keep attacking aircraft away from the carriers and other ships offshore.

By July, the battleship was operating against Japan itself. On July 16, her 16-inch guns struck industrial targets at Muroran on Hokkaido. Two days later, she participated in another bombardment against industrial facilities on Honshu. These were no longer attacks against distant island outposts. American battleships were now sailing close enough to Japan to throw massive shells directly into the industrial heart of the enemy homeland.

When Japan surrendered in August 1945, Wisconsin's first war was over.

She had entered the conflict late, but her career was only beginning.

Korea: Big Whiskey Gets Hit

Following the war, Wisconsin was decommissioned on July 1, 1948 and placed in reserve. The Korean War changed that. She was recommissioned on March 3, 1951 and sailed for the western Pacific later that year, arriving in Japan in November and becoming flagship of the Seventh Fleet.

This time her 16-inch guns would become much more intimately connected with the soldiers and Marines fighting ashore.

Beginning in December 1951, Wisconsin provided naval gunfire support along the Korean coast. Her targets included bunkers, artillery positions, command posts, troop concentrations, railway facilities and supply routes. She fired in support of the U.S. 1st Marine Division and Republic of Korea forces, sometimes responding directly to observers ashore who needed enemy positions destroyed or illumination rounds fired over a battlefield at night. She later bombarded targets around Wonsan and repeatedly returned to the Korean "bombline."

For the men on the ground, a battleship offshore was considerably more than an impressive silhouette. Somewhere beyond the horizon sat nine guns capable of dropping enormous projectiles onto positions miles away. A radio call from troops ashore could eventually end with tons of American steel arriving on an enemy position.

Then, on March 15, 1952, someone ashore made the questionable decision to shoot back.

While operating off the Korean coast, Wisconsin came under fire from a communist shore battery. One enemy projectile struck the shield of a starboard 40 mm gun mount. Damage to the battleship was relatively minor, but three American sailors were wounded.

It was the first direct hit Wisconsin had received from enemy fire.

The battleship answered with her 16-inch guns and destroyed the enemy battery.

The exchange later became the source of one of the most famous stories associated with the ship. According to the story repeated by generations of sailors, an escorting destroyer watched Wisconsin's response and flashed a simple message:

“Temper, Temper.”

The basic combat incident is documented. The exact details surrounding the famous signal have become somewhat tangled over the decades, including disagreement over which escort sent it and even the exact caliber of the enemy gun that struck Wisconsin. The Hampton Roads Naval Museum has itself examined those discrepancies. The legend, however, became inseparable from Big Whiskey.

And frankly, it is difficult to imagine a more appropriate legend for a battleship.

The Battleship With Another Battleship's Bow

War was not the only thing capable of damaging Wisconsin.

On May 6, 1956, while operating in heavy fog, she collided with the destroyer USS Eaton (DDE-510). The collision badly damaged Wisconsin's bow and created an unusual problem. The Navy wanted the battleship repaired quickly enough to make a scheduled summer training cruise.

Fortunately, another Iowa-class battleship was sitting unfinished nearby.

USS Kentucky (BB-66) had never been completed. Shipyard workers removed a 68-foot-long, approximately 120-ton section of Kentucky's bow and carried it by barge across Hampton Roads to Norfolk Naval Shipyard. Working around the clock, sailors and shipyard workers grafted it onto Wisconsin. Only 16 days after the repair work began, Big Whiskey was ready to return to sea.

It means that the battleship preserved at Norfolk today carries a physical piece of another battleship that never entered service.

There are few better examples of naval improvisation.

Wisconsin remained active until March 1958 and then entered a much longer retirement. For nearly three decades she sat in reserve while naval warfare continued changing around her. Jet aircraft became faster. Guided missiles became more capable. Nuclear-powered submarines and carriers transformed the fleet.

The age of the battleship appeared to be over.

Apparently nobody told Big Whiskey.

Bringing a Battleship Into the Missile Age

As part of President Ronald Reagan's effort to build a 600-ship Navy, the Iowa-class battleships were brought back into service during the 1980s. Wisconsin was recommissioned on October 22, 1988.

The ship that returned to the fleet was both familiar and profoundly different.

Her nine 16-inch guns remained. So did her 5-inch secondary batteries. But much of her World War II-era anti-aircraft armament was gone. In its place were modern weapons and electronics, including Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles and Phalanx close-in weapon systems.

A battleship conceived before Pearl Harbor had entered the missile age.

That strange mixture of old and new would soon be tested in combat.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Wisconsin deployed to the Persian Gulf. On January 17, 1991, as Operation Desert Storm began, she served as a Tomahawk strike warfare commander in the Gulf. During the first two days of combat, Wisconsin fired 24 Tomahawk missiles while helping coordinate the launches of hundreds more from American warships.

Then the Navy called on weapons considerably older than the computer-guided missiles sitting elsewhere aboard the ship.

The 16-inch guns went back to work.

On February 6, an OV-10 Bronco observation aircraft called in Wisconsin's first naval gunfire mission of the war. Eleven 16-inch rounds were fired at an Iraqi artillery battery in southern Kuwait.

The battery was destroyed.

The following day, Big Whiskey fired 29 rounds against an Iraqi communications facility. Later she attacked Iraqi boats and facilities along the Kuwaiti coast, firing dozens of one-ton high-explosive projectiles into the target area. As coalition forces prepared for the ground campaign, Wisconsin continued hammering bunkers, command facilities, artillery positions and other Iraqi defenses.

The contrast was remarkable. Sailors aboard a battleship designed in 1940 were using modern unmanned Pioneer reconnaissance aircraft to locate targets for guns whose basic concept belonged to another era.

One of those unmanned aircraft produced an extraordinary moment during the war. While operating over Faylaka Island, a Pioneer observed Iraqi soldiers waving white flags. The incident became famous as one of the earliest recorded cases of enemy troops attempting to surrender to an unmanned aircraft.

A battleship built for World War II had somehow found herself fighting a computerized war.

That may be the most remarkable thing about Wisconsin's career. She was not simply preserved long enough to witness enormous changes in warfare. She adapted to them.

The Men Behind the Steel

All of that machinery still depended on people.

Decades after the Gulf War, former Fire Controlman Third Class Basil Figliano remembered helping fire Wisconsin's 16-inch guns. Looking back at his service during a reunion aboard the ship, he described his shipmates as a second family and said the meaning of what they had done grew stronger as he got older.

That connection crossed generations. Men who had walked her decks during the Korean War returned alongside sailors whose Wisconsin carried cruise missiles and unmanned aircraft. The technology was different. The ship was different. The Navy was different.

But they were all Big Whiskey sailors.

That is the part easily lost when the story becomes nothing but gun calibers and displacement figures.

The spectacular broadside photographs are real. So are the statistics. But behind every turret were gun crews. Behind every engineering figure were sailors standing watches below decks. Behind every combat operation were thousands of individual jobs performed by men who made an enormous steel ship function as a single weapon.

Pieces of Big Whiskey at Ghosts of the Battlefield

That is also where Wisconsin's story intersects with our own.

Ghosts of the Battlefield preserves 16-inch projectiles connected with the story of the enormous guns carried aboard battleships like Wisconsin. Standing beside one gives an entirely different sense of scale than seeing a photograph of a broadside. These were not simply "big shells." They were enormous pieces of ordnance built for a weapon unlike almost anything remaining in military service today.

We have told the story of those projectiles separately, including how the 16-inch gun system worked and what it took to send one of these massive rounds toward a target miles away.

Read the story of the 16-inch battleship projectiles in the Ghosts of the Battlefield collection.

But our connection to Big Whiskey goes beyond her guns.

In June 2024, Ghosts of the Battlefield received one of USS Wisconsin's 26-foot whaleboats.

For decades, these smaller boats were simply working parts of life aboard enormous warships. They carried sailors, officers, supplies and equipment between ship and shore. Against the scale of an Iowa-class battleship, a whaleboat could almost disappear alongside the hull. Yet it represents something the gigantic gun turrets cannot: the everyday working life of the ship.

Our boat will be restored rather than simply placed behind a barrier. The goal is for her to appear at special events and, ultimately, sail again.

There is something appropriate about that.

USS Wisconsin herself survives only a short distance away at Nauticus in Norfolk, Virginia. One of the greatest battleships ever built is still here, preserved in the same Hampton Roads waters from which she once sailed. At Ghosts of the Battlefield, a much smaller piece of her story is being preserved as well.

One is nearly 900 feet of armor, machinery and guns.

The other is a 26-foot boat.

Both carried sailors.

Both are part of the same story.

Big Whiskey Comes Home

USS Wisconsin was decommissioned for the final time on September 30, 1991. She was eventually struck from the Naval Vessel Register and today remains preserved at Nauticus in Norfolk.

Her career had stretched from the Pacific War to Korea and finally to the Persian Gulf. She had escorted aircraft carriers while kamikazes attacked, fired on North Korean positions in support of Marines and soldiers ashore, survived a collision by borrowing the bow of an unfinished sister ship, spent decades in reserve, returned carrying cruise missiles, and fired her great guns in anger one final time against Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

The Iowa-class battleships are often described as some of the most powerful surface warships ever constructed. That is true, but it is not really why Wisconsin matters.

She matters because of the people who built her, sailed her, repaired her and fought from her. She matters because several generations of American sailors called the same steel decks home. And she matters because enough of that history survives that those generations do not have to exist only as names in a book.

You can still walk Big Whiskey's decks.

You can still stand beneath her guns.

And in smaller surviving pieces, including the artifacts entrusted to Ghosts of the Battlefield, the working life of that great battleship continues to tell its story.

Design and Specifications

• Class: Iowa-class battleship
• Hull Number: BB-64
• Laid Down: January 25, 1941
• Launched: December 7, 1943
• Commissioned: April 16, 1944
• Standard Displacement: Approximately 45,000 tons
• Length: 887 feet 3 inches
• Beam: 108 feet 2 inches
• Speed: Approximately 33 knots
• Main Battery: Nine 16-inch/50-caliber Mark 7 guns in three triple turrets
• Secondary Battery: Twenty 5-inch/38-caliber guns in ten twin mounts in her original configuration
• World War II Anti-Aircraft Battery: 40 mm and 20 mm weapons in numerous mounts, with the fit changing during her service
• 1980s Modernization: Tomahawk cruise missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, Phalanx close-in weapon systems and modernized electronics
• Final Decommissioning: September 30, 1991
• Preserved: Nauticus, Norfolk, Virginia

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