Word: dakotas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Navy's newest battleship touched water last week. Twenty-three months after her keel was laid at Camden, N.J., four months ahead of contract schedule, the great hull of the U.S.S. South Dakota slid, smoking, down greased ways and smacked the Delaware River. In ordinary times, another year would pass before the hull became a ship with all her armor, engines, guns. Now the Navy hopes that New York Shipbuilding Corp. can have the South Dakota ready to commission next January...
That the South Dakota and her two 35,000-ton, $70,000,000 sisters are the world's finest, Secretary of the Navy Knox insisted last week. There were some formidable doubters. These critics of U.S. and British naval design included not only the New York Times's respected Hanson Baldwin but the British Admiralty itself. Boasting about the destruction of the German Bismarck, the Admiralty had said that she and her surviving sister ship, the Tirpitz, were the most powerful battleships in the world. Secretary Knox proudly compared the new U.S. ships' nine 16-in. guns...
...sooner had the South Dakota left the ways than, into the same space (see cut), a waiting crane swung the first keel section for the 10,000-ton cruiser Santa Fe. Already under construction on New York Shipbuilding ways were six more cruisers. And scheduled for later construction there are the first of a wholly new kind of U.S. warship-six of the coming Alaska class, which the Navy selfconsciously refuses to call battle cruisers. The Navy's untidy substitute: "large cruisers...
...According to published reports and Washington naval gossip (long since picked up by German and Japanese attaches), the Alaskas will have nine 12-in. guns in their main batteries (the Hood had eight 15-in.). They will be 700 ft. long (the Hood was 860 ft. long; the South Dakota's overall length...
Unofficial reports first had it that an Alaska cruiser, instead of an older type like the Santa Fe, was to go down in the South Dakota's vacated space. Secretary Knox said last week that the Navy was awaiting full details of the Hood and Bismarck sinkings, implied that some changes in U.S. design may result...