The Montana class of battleships with their 16-inch guns would have been the most feared vessels ever put to war by the United States Navy.
But just before production started and after years of planning, U.S. defense officials cancelled plans to build them, realizing the new superhero of war at sea was aircraft carriers, not battleships.
They became dinosaurs before they ever had their keels laid.
The armor plating on the 71,000-ton Montana class was so heavy the ships would have been dead in the water before thru could have gotten out of the way of enemy vessels, according to a new historical analysis.
The Maine would have been one of five in the so-called Montana class, the other four being the Ohio, New Hampshire, Louisiana and, yes, the Montana.
“The state of Montana remained, as the Navy itself sometimes joked, the child without a toy – the only state in the union without a namesake battleship,” writes Harry Kazianis.
Kazianis is a former senior director of national security affairs at the Center for the National Interest, a foreign-policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon.
He wrote a history of the ill-fated Montana-class battleships for 19FortyFive.com.
Summary:
Though the Maine of the Montana class would have been one of the nation’s five most powerful battleships ever built, the Pine Tree State had two other battleships named for it.
The most famous was the USS Maine (ACR-1) commissioned in 1895, whose 1898 sinking in Havana Harbor sparked the Spanish-American War.
A second, larger battleship, the USS Maine (BB-10), was commissioned in 1902 and served until 1920. USS Maine (ACR-1/Second-class battleship) (1895–1898): Frequently referred to as a battleship, this ship’s mysterious explosion on February 15, 1898, killed 268 crew members and prompted the “Remember the Maine” rally cry, leading to war.
USS Maine (BB-10) (1902–1920): A Maine-class pre-dreadnought battleship that served in the Atlantic and participated in the Great White Fleet’s voyage.
Cancelled Ship: A third ship, the Montana-class battleship USS Maine (BB-69), was shelved amid planning in 1943 during World War II. “Nothing would have been more powerful,” says Kazianis.
