USS Tennessee (BB-43)

After being damaged at Pearl Harbor, USS Tennessee was repaired and modernized. The battleship’s first combat after that was in the Aleutian campaign in 1943. From that point on, Tennessee’s twelve 14-inch guns supported many of the landings in the Allied island-hopping Pacific campaign, including Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

David Doyle examines the ship’s storied career in USS Tennessee (BB-43) — From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa in World War II from Schiffer’s Legends of Warfare Naval series. Pictures dominate the hardcover’s 128 pages tracing construction from the 1917 keel laying to launching, fitting out, and commissioning, including the battleships service through the 1920s and ’30s.

Naturally, Tennessee’s wartime service takes up a substantial part of the book with photos of the damage on December 7, 1941 and subsequent repairs and refit on to various operations.  Many of them show the ship underway in the various camouflage patterns it wore and give a good sense of the weathering it endured. The final section details the ship’s decommissioning and eventual scrapping. Given USS Tennessee’s place in WWII history, it is an attractive modeling subject and this book is a good reference.