NAVY: Biggest Roar Afloat

Steady, grim and forbidding in a wind-chopped sea, the new 35,000-ton U.S.S. North Carolina last week took a cruel final test such as no man-of-war had ever met before: two and three-quarter tons of powder exploded aboard her, flinging twelve tons of shells miles across the water.

By the touch of a button her blond, urbane skipper, Captain Olaf Mandt Hustvedt, gave her the works. Her answer was a belching, searing flame, the shattering roar of the heaviest broadside ever fired by any warship of any Navy on any sea. All nine of the 16-in. guns in her main battery, tripled in turrets each of which weighs more than many a destroyer, answered the Old Man. Ten of her secondary battery of 20 five-inchers simultaneously blasted the night. North Carolina took it as it came, shook her head and plowed on.

Fortnight ago this 16th battleship of the U.S. fleet—the first to be added in 18 years—completed her speed tests. Last week she headed out to sea for the toughest tests of all: gunfire that would show how well she could stand the shock of her own battle punch. Many a navyman still remembers how some years ago one famed U.S. battleship fired her forward turret on her test run and spent six months in the navy yard getting her damage repaired. And now North Carolina was out to prove the hard way that she could take a slug many times heavier. Neither so fast nor so heavily protected as such new-day beauties as the 15-in.-gunned German Tirpitz and the unhappy Bismarck, she carries a more powerful wallop* than any foreign ship afloat.

Salvos and Broadsides. Her firing tests began a few hours after she was out of sight of land. Like test pilots feeling out a new airplane, her builders and crew tried her slowly, firing each gun singly. There were no targets. Between salvos, technicians topside and below took readings from strain and blast gauges, many another gadget that would show how North Carolina writhed when her guns let go.

Her voice rose terribly through the three days. After her 16-inchers had been fired singly and by pairs, they were fired in turret salvos. After her 5-in. all-purpose guns (for surface and aerial targets) had been fired singly they were fired by twin mounts, then by ten-gun broadsides.

In her first tests, North Carolina shed only superficial skin. Light doors on deck cleaning-gear lockers warped and hung from their hinges in her hot breath, and strip molding from the wardroom overhead dropped down with a jangling crash. But damage-control crews found no major shaking-up. In her first try, North Carolina did better than many an oldtime battlewagon does in target practice.

She began to show her true mettle when two main battery turrets—six 16-inchers —were fired in salvo. The concussion sucked the back off a newsman’s camera, pulled the lenses out of a pair of binoculars. But by that time every superficiality that was shakeable had been jarred loose.

Battle Stations. Late on the third day out the wind made up and North Carolina rolled gently through a rising sea that whipped plumes of spindrift over her lean sides and wet down the main deck. The light was fading and the moon hung low in the west when a score of newsmen (including Reserve Lieut. Commander Walter Winchell) leaned against the wind and made their way forward to grandstand seats in the bow. Except for a few lights on her foremast, North Carolina was dark, as she and her destroyer escorts had been every night. But inside she was alive. In fire-control stations, in the great turrets, on the bridge and below, her crew was at battle stations.

On the forecastle the observers huddled, backs to the wind, facing her towering superstructure. Off to starboard a destroyer close at hand plowed on in precise formation, grew dim and lost outline as darkness fell. Off to port, hull-down on the horizon and patrolling the area where the shells would fall, another destroyer disappeared except for the slim reaching pencil of her searchlight, the occasional blinking of her signal light.

Fifteen minutes dragged into a half-hour, close to an hour, as the technicians with their gauges settled themselves and made their equipment ready for the test. How would she take it? Would she heel to starboard before the recoil of her broadside? Would it rip her guts? Would the blast dash the laymen observers from the eyes of the ship into the sea?

With these doubts in mind, some of the observers, while there was still 15 minutes to go, high-tailed it for the wardroom and coffee. The rest waited. Upwind from the loudspeaker came ripped fragments of speech: “five minutes”—”one minute.” Everybody stood up, tamped the cotton tighter in his ears, cupped his hands over them in the bargain, spread his feet wide apart.

It was dark. A white sheet of spray lifted high over the starboard lifelines and swished down on the deck. From the siren on the foremast came a hoarse groan—ten seconds to go. The loudspeaker took up the count. It came faint, thin and broken to the forepeak: “9-7,6—FIRE.”

From North Carolina’s port side burst a flaming earthquake—a roar that shattered its way to the marrow of man, a lurid flame that seemed to lick the water for hundreds of yards and lift itself above the ranging top of the foremast. The deck slid to starboard, oscillated to port, leveled off handily, rode steady again.

Express Trains. Men who watched were blinded by what they saw. They clung to stanchions, to each other, waiting for sight to return, for the earth where they stood to still itself. And as they wove drunkenly about, they heard the deadly tumult of twelve tons of steel hurtling away, whistling and rattling like more express trains than any man had ever heard together.

Some who had looked away from the blast turned their eyes to sea and saw a great phosphorescent geyser where the 16-in. projectiles plunged into the ocean. Others, who had traded sight of the great flash for what would come later, shook their heads, rubbed their eyes and began to see again.

Back of the steel the North Carolina’s crew was grinning, shaking hands, cheering. For that night a ship that had been an impersonal, vastly complicated structure of machines had come to life. She was real, stout, nervy. She was the kind of person her oldtimers had known before, that her recruits (more than a third of enlisted strength) would soon love with the fierce ship loyalty of navy men. She could take it, and deliver it.

* She also has many a wrinkle new to U.S. battleships: more elaborate compartmentation, greater protection for her fighting crew on the topside and below, greater handiness in maneuver, greater range, more horsepower from new-type engines.