The tour guide at the time shook it off, saying the guns were permanently deactivated, breeches removed, welded shut in the elevated position, and filled with cement, which I accepted as I was a kid, and what adults said was the end of the story. One of the questions asked by a young me while touring Alabama at the time was “do the guns still work?” followed up by “could the ship be put back into service like the Iowas are?” I remember first touring Big Al when I was in elementary school in the early 1980s– at a time when Ingalls in my hometown of Pascagoula was busily reactivating mothballed Iowa-class battlewagons to be ready to take on the Soviet Red Banner Fleet as part of the Lehman 600-ship Navy of the Cold War. During its career, the Alabama captured 66 ships and was hunted by more than 20 Federal warships.This brings me to a semi-related video that I recently caught. In a spectacular battle, the Kearsarge bested and sank the Alabama. Semmes moved out of Cherbourg Harbor and found the USS Kearsarge waiting. He sailed around Africa to France, where the French denied him access to a dry dock. By the summer, Semmes realized that after three years and 75,000 miles his vessel needed overhauling in a modern shipyard. The ship sailed around South America, across the Pacific, and docked in India in 1864. The Union navy spent an enormous amount of time and effort trying to track down the Alabama. In January 1863, Semmes sunk a Union warship, the Hatteras, after luring it out of Galveston, Texas. It sailed around the globe, usually working out of the West Indies, but taking prizes and bungling Union shipping in the Caribbean, off Newfoundland, and around the coast of South America. Under its captain, Raphael Semmes, the Alabama prowled the world for three years, capturing U.S. The cruiser was equipped with a machine shop and could carry enough coal to steam for 18 days, but its sails could greatly extend that time. The most successful and feared Confederate commerce raider of the war, the CSS Alabama, sinks after a spectacular battle off the coast of France with the USS Kearsarge.īuilt in an English shipyard and sold to the Confederates in 1861, the Alabama was a state-of-the-art ship-220 feet long, with a speed of up to 13 knots.
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