Battleship X

On June 7, 1941, Vera Bushfield, wife of the governor of South Dakota, christened the new battleship South Dakota as it slid into the Delaware River at Camden, New Jersey. Longer than two football fields, costing almost $73 million, and weighing 35,000 tons, the U.S.S. South Dakota entered service after a year of fitting out, commissioning, and training its inexperienced crew, then was sent to the Pacific war zone. Armed with more than 100 antiaircraft guns, it first fought Japanese aircraft at the Battle of Santa Cruz on October 26, 1942, where its gunners shot down 20 planes from the first attacking wave, but a later attack struck the ship with a 500 pound bomb, killing Gunner’s Mate Hubert P. Chatelain, its first battle fatality, and critically wounding Captain Thomas L. Gatch; despite this, its action helped protect and save the carrier Enterprise. The ship then fought in the Battle of Guadalcanal, a night action off Savo Island on November 13-14, 1942, one of only two Japanese battleship against American battleship duels in World War II, where 34 torpedoes fired at South Dakota and the U.S.S. Washington all missed, but South Dakota suffered 27 major shell hits and lost 38 crew members, who were buried at sea. Because the Japanese believed the battleship had been sunk and for security reasons, the Navy gave it the code name Battleship X. In 1943 it joined the British Home Fleet on convoy duty and took part in an unsuccessful effort to draw the German battleship Tirpitz from a Norwegian fjord. After returning to the Pacific later that year, its 16-inch guns bombarded enemy territory in nine operations, including the first shelling of the Japanese homeland. By the end of the war, South Dakota had steamed 246,970 miles, destroyed 64 enemy planes, and earned 13 Battle Stars.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota · United States