USS Arkansas (BB-33), a dreadnought battleship, was launched in 1911 and commissioned in 1912. She was attached to the British Grand Fleet in WWI but saw no action. In WWII she conducted neutrality patrols prior to America’s entry into the war. Thereafter, she escorted convoys to Europe through 1944; in June, she supported the invasion of Normandy and in August provided support for the invasion of southern France. In 1945, she was transferred to the Pacific, where she supported the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After the war, she ferried troops back to the US as part of Operation Magic Carpet. Along with other obsolete surplus post-war vessels, she was used as a target during atomic bomb testing used to investigate the effects of nuclear weapons. She was sunk at Bikini Atoll by an underwater nuclear test, Baker, by a bomb named Helen of Bikini on July 25, 1946.
There have been 4 USS Arkansas,
(1) a Civil War ironclad,
(2) a late 19th-century monitor that was renamed Ozark because they wanted to use Arkansas as the name of a new battleship
(3) BB-33, which now rests in the Pacific at Bikini Atoll
(4) CGN-41, one of four Virginia-class nuclear-powered guided missile cruisers, commissioned in 1980 and decommissioned in 1998.
The next USS Arkansas will be the SSN-800, a future Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine, announced in June 2016.
Miss Mary L. Macon launching USS Arkansas
