Iowa and Kaho'olawe

While reading the new book on the Iowa by Lawrence Burr,¹ I stumbled across a statement that threw me for a loop. He claimed that after the bombardments of Japan in July 1945, Iowa was ordered back to do gunnery practice at Kaho‘olawe in Hawaii, shooting on July 29th and 30th, and explicitly pointed out that she missed several airstrikes Third Fleet conducted during that time. This was a baffling thing, and I was having trouble believing it had actually happened. Third Fleet was off Japan at the time, and every effort had been made to keep as many ships forward-deployed at sea as possible. A massive underway replenishment apparatus was built, and when that wasn't enough, mobile bases were constructed at islands across the Pacific. Ships only got sent as far back as Hawaii when they needed serious yard work, more than could be done in the forward-deployed floating drydocks. And absent battle damage, that typically didn't happen until the ship had been on the line for a year or more. Iowa had been stateside until the end of March for a refit, leaving her as the least likely ship to be sent back.

Iowa refuels from the oiler Cahaba in July 1945

But even beyond that, this story didn't make sense on several levels. First, doing this would have deprived Third Fleet of a powerful anti-air platform while conducting air strikes on the Japanese mainland. Strikes were flown on July 24th, 25th, 28th and 30th, and further strikes in early August were cancelled due to weather. Given the distance between Japan and Hawaii, even at 20 kts, her maximum plausible cruise speed, Iowa would have taken a week to make the trip, and it's over 9 days at a more typical 15 kts. Second, even if Iowa's gunnery during the bombardments was so bad that more training was urgent, there was no reason to send her all the way back to Hawaii. All you need is an uninhabited piece of land, maybe with a smokescreen if you want to practice air spotting and make sure the crew doesn't cheat. This wasn't exactly difficult to accomplish in the western Pacific, and by doing it in the Philippines or even off Okinawa, the amount of time the ship is out of action is greatly reduced.²

So at this point, I started looking at other sources. Surprisingly, Iowa's own website repeats the story, as did Malcolm Muir's The Iowa Class Battleships, a book that I generally think quite highly of, and that was almost certainly the source for both Burr and the ship's own website. Muir cites a record from "Naval Gunfire Training Section, Fleet Marine Force, Marine Corps Historical Center", but something still felt off. If he had cited the ship's logs, I would have probably been satisfied, if still very confused, but this kind of dash across the Pacific is extraordinary enough that the source being wrong was a serious possibility.

One of Iowa's SC Seahawks

So I kept digging, and the counterevidence came soon enough. First, the book on Iowa from the Legends of Warfare series had a couple of pictures credited to an Iowa floatplane from raids on the 24th and 28th. Now, there's no accompanying text outside of the captions and no citations, and even if the photos are genuine, it's not completely impossible that Iowa left her floatplane behind during the run. But if the purpose of the jaunt across the Pacific was shore bombardment training, it seems weird that they'd leave the key spotting element behind. A brief check didn't turn up the photos online, so I couldn't be sure they weren't mislabeled, but it did send me digging deeper. And I noticed that when I wrote about this period, I mentioned Iowa taking part in the big TF 38 UNREP on July 21-22, which would mean she had to make 20 kts the whole way west at the very least. There are details which probably came from a document Dave Way put together that I was having trouble finding a copy of because I wrote that section north of 7 years ago. But at the very least, I wasn't going to invent a number of shells transferred out of whole cloth, so it was safe to say she was there for that.

I also figured that a run back to Hawaii would be notable enough to be noted in the cruise book, so I went looking. Unfortunately, the main online repository of such things had only one relevant volume, the WWII victory book, but this had a map of the ship's operations from 1943 through September 1945. And it certainly looks like the ship only stopped in Hawaii on the way to and from Hunter's Point for the late 44/early 45 refit, with no sign of a trip direct from Japanese waters to Hawaii.

But then I finally tracked down the document Dave Way put together in the deeper recesses of my hard drive, drawing primarily from Iowa's war diary, and there was a lot of detail about operations with TF 38 over the relevant window, and nothing at all about a trip to Hawaii for gunnery training. It looks like this whole thing originated with Muir, and a report that he either misread or that was just wrong.³ And I wrote this post largely to correct the record. Simply put, Iowa did not do gunnery training at Kaho'olawe in July 1945. She spent the entire month in the Western Pacific.