Rotation for the Big Mo

Early in 1944 Margaret Truman, daughter of Missouri's Senator Harry S. Truman, christened the battleship Missouri. The "Big Mo," as the ship came to be called, displaced 45,000 tons, had a top speed over 30 knots, a deadly main battery of nine 16-inch rifles. She first fired her guns in anger at Iwo Jima and Okinawa ; before the war ended, she had been hit by a Japanese suicide plane (but suffered no casualties and slight damage). On her broad deck, in 1945, the Japanese signed their surrender. By 1948 the Missouri was the only U.S. battleship in commission.

Last August the Missouri stood out of Norfolk for Korea. Since then, she has been shelling Communists almost continuously for six months. She supported MacArthur's amphibious stroke at Inchon, the X Corps evacuation from Hungnam. Most of the time she harried Red communications along the east coast, shelling towns, roads, convoys, bridges. Last week the Big Mo was on her way back to the U.S. She was being "rotated," to give other ships a chance at the Korean war.

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