Back on the Line

Each of its three turrets weighs as much as a destroyer. One salvo from its nine 16-in. guns carries nearly half the destructive power of a B-52 bomb load. Last week the world's only active battleship, the 59,300-ton U.S.S. New Jersey, with Captain Joseph Edward Snyder Jr. in command, joined a Seventh Fleet Task Force off the South Vietnamese coast. In its first action --which incidentally earned her crew combat pay for all of September -- the New Jersey silenced four anti-aircraft positions just above the DMZ and twelve miles inland. It also pounded a bunkered storage depot that had proved impervious to air and artillery strikes.

Battleships are decidedly old-fashioned in a nuclear age, but in a limited war like the one in Viet Nam, strange or archaic weapons sometimes do the most effective job. Within the 23-mile range of the New Jersey's guns are 60% of the North Vietnamese targets now hit by bombers, and the ship requires no garrison to protect its perimeter. The 25-year-old New Jersey was brought out of mothballs once before, for the limited war in Korea, and took part in the siege of Wonsan. The ship is a veteran of the South China Sea. During World War II, it participated in strikes against the Japanese-held Indochina coast, at Saigon and Camranh Bay, and served as flagship for both Admiral William F. ("Bull") Halsey and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. It bears the same name as the World War I battlewagon that ended up as a target ship for General Billy Mitchell's famed demonstration of air power in 1923. Today's New Jersey faces a potential new threat, in the form of North Vietnam's Russian-made Styx missiles, which sank the Israeli destroyer Elath last October. Just in case the North Vietnamese venture to use the Styx, the New Jersey carries its own secret countermeasures against missiles and is escorted by two missile-firing cruisers.

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