[Joe Boucher]

EAch time I drive by the U.S.S. Alabama I remember hearing how a Battleship sat over the horizon off Beirut and pinpointed small volkswagon sized shells at will where and when it cared to.
Most impressive.

[Old Teufel Hunden]

"EAch time I drive by the U.S.S. Alabama I remember hearing how a Battleship sat over the horizon off Beirut and pinpointed small volkswagon sized shells at will where and when it cared to. Most impressive."

That was the U.S.S. New Jersey. Blowing away bad guys in the Bekkeau valley. It was awesome to know they had our back...

[tanknetter]

EAch time I drive by the U.S.S. Alabama I remember hearing how a Battleship sat over the horizon off Beirut and pinpointed small volkswagon sized shells at will where and when it cared to.

Not exactly "pinpointed". The New Jersey's gunfire support provided off Beirut showed a massive CEP (circular area probability, which helps define the accuracy of shellfire) that was far out of proportion to what BBs had achieved in earlier wars.

Turned out to be a power issue. The explosives the propellant bags that the New Jersey's 16" rifles contained consisted of thousands of small cylindrical charges. Over the years the cycles of being in storage, being brought out and reconditioned for use and then sent back to storage again had left the cylinders all jumbled up in the bags. When, after the poor Beirut performance propellant charges were restacked in the bags, performance improved greatly (meaning the CEP diminished greatly).

The reason why the New Jersey got such a good rep for such poor performance was that in the process of showering 16" HE shells all over the Bekaa Valley one of them got a lucky/golden-bb hit on a Syrian command post with a lot of brass inside. A hit like that couldn't have been chance, it just HAD to be intentional right? Quieted things down pretty quickly, according to legend there wasn't so much as a pistol shot in Lebanon (where ever day'd been the 4th of July!) for two weeks.