"USS Missouri kamikaze photo - where are the guns?" Topic

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Surely I am not the only one who has wondered "where are the 5" gun barrels" in this picture? Apparently they have been edited out, but why?

That is weird. Maybe it was a wartime security thing, although I am sure the Japs knew about them by then!

Possibly the mounts had radar aerials for VT fuses? Anyway, that is way neater than most war time censorship of photos where they usually either scratched off the emulsion or painted over the offending bits.

I have seen this picture in the past and thought the same thing. Maybe they were not installed in that particular mount or maybe they were previously damaged and removed. Just wondering.

Phil

I think that's one of the two fire control mounts on the BB. In addition to local fire control at each turret, a US BB had a main fire control tower, and port and starboard secondary fire control mounts.

Missouri went to sea with her full compliment of 5", and took little damage during the war.

SBminisguy, I am looking at the 5" twin mounts themselves – no barrels on two of them. Also the quad 40 in the middle of the picture seems to lack barrels, though mount 9 in the foreground has them. There are other versions of this picture on the web with better and larger detail – I just could not get them to link.

Here's a better picture.

(picture resolution is 1850 × 2128, you might want to save it to your hard drive and open with a photo editing or viewing program)

If you look carefully at the left hand 5" turret (only the right half of the turret is in the picture), you can see the right hand barrel of the turret, but from that line of sight it is directly in front of the bollard(?) so it is hard to spot in a lower res picture.

Is it possible from that angle that the barrels are blocked by the turret itself? With the 5" mount in the center of the picture, I can accept the right hand barrel was edited out since the background is a rather plain patch of the deck, but the left hand barrel will take some very top-notch photo editing skill to remove as it would be over part of the railing and the ship's wake.

Same thing with the quad 40 mount#11 in the middle. I think the barrels were all blocked from view by the gun shield.

I don't think that is the barrel on the left hand turret. I think the thing that is "touching" the bollard is the cloth anti-flash sleeve.

Here's some twins from a similar angle – the guns are apparent.

Here's an even wider angle… no guns in the left side of the left turret either.

The turrets seem to be on the rail at main deck level, although the left-hand one might be higher. I don't see anywhere on an Iowa class ship where the 5" turrets are in those positions.

The barrels are blocked from view by the turrets. The 5"/38 wasn't that long to begin with and firing at low depression to engage a plane coming in that low would account for not seeing the barrels.

The 5"/38 could only depress 15 degrees so the barrels could not be hidden by the turrets. Further, they would not be firing on this plane – too close in. Moving along the axis of the ship it would be too fast to track and so close that the fuses would not have time to arm, and even if they did the shrapnel would endanger men topside.

I don't think they are on the rail. On the aft most turret you and see a little bit of the pedestal/deck beneath. The arrangement of the quad 40's is consistent with an Iowa.

From what I can tell from looking at various photographs (there's one that shows the firefighting after the plane hit) and both overhead and side views, the picture was taken from the stern-most & highest gun position on the starboard side of the forward funnel (which is above the middle 5" gun turret). The view is looking down the starboard side towards the stern. The two 5" gun turrets are the two aft turrets on the starboard side and the three 40 mm AA gun positions are the ones located between the stacks on the starboard side.

If I am correct above the location of the camera, then the 5" guns can easily be blocked from view by the height of the turrets, especially if they were undoubtedly depressed as far as they could go (I would guess they had been firing at this plane also as it came in).

One book I have, "Mighty Mo: The U.S.S. Missouri – The Last Battleship" copyright 1969 has the following description of this attack:

"…gunners on the Missouri sighted a single Japanese "Zeke" streaking for the battle ship low off the starboard quarter. Massed tracer streams converged on the kamikaze and it was torn by hit after hit, but the suicide pilot kept his disintegrating plane on a smoking course towards it huge target. The kamikaze crashed the starboard side of the Mighty Mo about 3 feet below main deck level. Most of the wreckage, along with the pilot's body, was strewn over the after part of the ship, but one wing hurled forward to land near the Number Three 5-inch gun mount. Its ruptured fuel tank sprayed burning gasoline over the deck, but the well-trained fire control crews of the Missouri had the flames extinguished within three minutes. The kamikaze had sacrificed his life to inflict a few patches of scorched paint on Mighty Mo." (That's really the writing style of of this book.)

The photographer was standing in a platform on the foreword funnel. (There is a photo of him and his fixed mount camera there). Mount 7, the first of the three amidships mounts which is lower than 9 is not visible. . Mounts 9 and 11 are the aft most of the cluster of three amidships on each side. Mount 13 in the background is abreast the aft director towers. In the clearer pictures the square thing just visible is the range finder on the stern 16" turret.

Again, that close in no guns would be able to tract the plane. If you look close you can see that the 20mms in the gun tub are not even on it.

The 5" were direct fire weapons – they were barrage guns. The directors predicted a place to put a shrapnel cloud and the fusers set the shell accordingly. They would not be doing this for something that close.

The 5" were direct fire weapons – they were barrage guns. The directors predicted a place to put a shrapnel cloud and the fusers set the shell accordingly. They would not be doing this for something that close.

We were using proximity fuses for 5" AA by this time in the war.

The 5" would have been tracking and shooting at this plane throughout its attack run. For all I know, given the use of proximity fuses, a shell exploding above and in front of a plane on the deck could well have been effective, so they were probably shooting up until just before the moment of this photo. Even it they wouldn't function that close to the water, it is likely that the 5" Mk 37 director was still tracking the target. At the point when the photo was taken, the barrels were probably at maximum depression, since if the director was still tracking the target, the gun barrels would respond accordingly. Furthermore, if they had recently fired, and given the speed at which this situation would have developed (300 mph-plus plane), the guns could still have been in recoil, making the barrels shorter still. Given that the existence of secondary armament on BBs was hardly a secret, there is no logical reason why censors would have edited them out.

BTW, it doesn't seem to do any good to upload large images on TMP, as the site seems to reduce them to a standard maximum size anyway.

MH

I intended to link to the images, but they kept converting to directly loaded images.

Also meant to say "NOT" a direct fire weapon.

Having been on the Missouri. . . I can tell you the ship is indeed bristling with 5" mounts. Still – despite having some removed.

So. . . just some wierd camera angle or something.

They did have to replace the barrels after X number of rounds.

Is it possible they had been removed at this point, and it was just really bad timing?

"They did have to replace the barrels after X number of rounds.

Is it possible they had been removed at this point, and it was just really bad timing?"

Absolutely not. Since the 5" were critical to the ship's AA defence, under no circumstance would she be allowed in a combat zone with missing 5" batteries.