What the Iowa Class Battleship's 16-Inch Guns Were Actually Built For

The Iowa Class battleship's 16-inch guns are the largest naval weapons America ever put to sea. They could throw a 2,700-pound shell 24 miles, penetrate 32 feet of reinforced concrete, and create a crater 50 feet wide from a single shot. They fired their last round in combat not in 1945 — but in 1991, against targets in the Iraqi desert that had never been within a thousand miles of the ocean. In this video, we go back to 1938 and the specific engineering decisions that produced those guns — and explain why the mission they were designed and built to accomplish never happened once in the entire history of the United States Navy. The 16-inch Mark 7 gun was built for one purpose: to destroy the Japanese Yamato class in a surface fleet engagement. The Yamato was the largest, most heavily armed battleship ever constructed — 65,000 tons, nine 18.1-inch guns, 16 inches of belt armor. The Iowa Class was the American answer. Four ships, 45,000 tons each, 33 knots — fast enough to run with the carriers, powerful enough to destroy anything that tried to stop them. What most accounts skip over is that the Mark 7 gun itself was created by a bureaucratic miscommunication between two Navy bureaus — a design error that forced engineers to build an entirely new weapon from scratch. That weapon turned out to be more effective than the gun it replaced. And then it spent 47 years doing a job nobody in 1938 imagined it would ever need to do. The Iowa Class and the Yamato Class never engaged each other. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, they spent the entire battle moving in opposite directions. The Yamato was eventually sunk by 386 carrier aircraft. The gun duel the Mark 7 had been built to win never took place. Instead, the guns fired at North Korean supply lines, Vietnamese logistics routes, and Iraqi command bunkers. The armor-piercing shell engineered to penetrate battleship steel turned out to be one of the most effective bunker-busting weapons ever built — performing a mission its designers considered secondary at best, better than anything the United States subsequently built to replace it. In 1989, USS Iowa set the record for the longest-range accurate naval fire in history — 26.9 miles. That same year, an explosion in Turret Two killed 47 sailors and ended the Iowa's service. Her three sister ships went on to fire the last combat rounds ever fired by a battleship, in the Persian Gulf in 1991. The guns built to end the battleship age by destroying the Yamato outlasted it entirely — and fired their final shots in the desert. If you're new here — Warships Explained covers the real engineering decisions and unexpected turns behind the most famous warships ever built. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. —————————————————————————————— Further reading: Iowa Class Battleships — Norman Friedman The Big Gun: Battleship Main Armament 1860–1945 — Peter Hodges US Battleships: An Illustrated Design History — Norman Friedman —————————————————————————————— Copyright fair use notice. All media used in this video is used for the purpose of education under the terms of fair use. All footage and images used belong to their respective copyright holders where applicable. —————————————————————————————— #IowaClass #Battleship #NavalHistory #WW2 #WarshipsExplained #USNavy #BattleshipHistory #NavalEngineering #MilitaryHistory #WW2History