Battleship Missouri comes out of drydock

[unhappycamper]

Battleship Missouri comes out of drydock
The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Jan 7, 2010 19:48:06 EST

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii — The battleship where officials from Japan and the Allied Forces signed surrender documents ending World War II, came out of drydock Thursday after three months of maintenance and repairs.

Tugs began pulling the former USS Missouri, which has been turned into a WWII museum, about five hours after shipyard workers started flooding Pearl Harbor’s Drydock 4.

Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, was to speak later in the day at a private ceremony. Capt. Gregory R. Thomas, commander of Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, and retired Vice Adm. Robert K.U. Kihune, chairman of the USS Missouri Memorial Association, were also slated to speak.

The renamed Battleship Missouri Memorial resides in Pearl Harbor, moored a few hundred yards from the USS Arizona, a battleship sunk during Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack that forced the U.S. into the war. The surrender documents were signed on the Missouri’s deck on Sept. 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay.

The battleship was also used in the Korean and Persian Gulf wars before being decommissioned in 1992. The memorial opened in January 1999.


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/01/ap_ussmissouri_drydock_010710/

[jonnyblitz]

1. I was stationed on it during Desert Storm.

:patriot: