USS Alabama

The Alabama earned her nickname the hard way — 'the Mighty A' steamed from the North Atlantic in 1943 to the Pacific island campaigns, screening carriers through the Marianas, Leyte, and Okinawa, and anchored in Tokyo Bay for the occupation after sixty-seven days of continuous steaming. The South Dakota-class battleship never lost a man to enemy action — the crew's war record is the rare one where every sailor who shipped out shipped home.

The scrapyard was the closer call. Decommissioned at Bremerton in 1947, BB-60 was marked for the torch in 1962 — and Alabama's schoolchildren paid her way home in dimes and nickels, the state's citizens raising the money to tow 35,000 tons down the West Coast and through a Panama Canal she cleared by eleven inches a side. She opened as Battleship Memorial Park on January 9, 1965, the state dedicating her to every Alabamian who wore the uniform.

The haunting reports ride the ship's museum silence — footsteps on empty ladders, voices in compartments, hatches that slam in sealed-off passages, a figure in black reported by NJROTC overnight groups. Whether the crew that never lost a man left anyone aboard is the file's open question: the Mighty A kept all her sailors through the war, and some say a few of them stayed.

USS Alabama is the archive's Mighty A file — the battleship that fought from the Atlantic to Tokyo Bay without losing a man to enemy fire, saved by schoolchildren's dimes, now the Mobile memorial where footsteps still sound in the empty compartments.