On December 7, 1941 USS Maryland was moored inboard of USS Oklahoma. The ship’s guns responded to the attack almost immediately. From their vantage point, the men witnessed the attacks that critically damaged Maryland’s sisters along battleship row, and faced attacks so fierce that the Japanese reported her sunk. They were wrong, and the “fighting Mary” would come back to haunt the empire of the rising sun, and feel the fury of the dreaded Kamikazes.
In August of 1918, as the armies of Europe neared exhaustion, American troops of the 28th “Keystone” division were thrown into a nearly forgotten battle that fully represented the horrors of the War to End All Wars.
Of the vaunted ironclad warships of the US Civil War perhaps the mightiest and most terrifying was the confederate ram Tennessee. On August 5, 1864, she would be put to the test in the largest naval engagement of the war, an engagement that defined the divided loyalties of the War of the Rebellion.