USS California (BB-44) was the second of two s built for the United States Navy between her keel laying in October 1916 and her commissioning in August 1921. The Tennessee class was part of the standard series of twelve battleships built in the 1910s and 1920s, and were developments of the preceding . They were armed with a battery of twelve guns in four three-gun turrets. California served as the flagship of the Battle Fleet in the Pacific Ocean for the duration of her peacetime career. She spent the 1920s and 1930s participating in routine fleet training exercises, including the annual Fleet Problems, and cruises around the Americas and further abroad, such as a goodwill visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1925.
California was moored in Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 when the Japanese attacked the port, bringing the United States into World War II. The ship was moderately damaged by a pair of torpedoes and a bomb, but a fire disabled the ship's electrical system, preventing the pumps from being used to keep the ship afloat. California slowly filled with water over the following three days and eventually sank. Her crew suffered heavy casualties in the attack and four men were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions during the attack. She was raised in April 1942, repaired and heavily rebuilt, and returned to service in January 1944.
The ship thereafter supported the amphibious operations conducted during the Pacific War, including the Mariana and Palau Islands campaign (though she was damaged in a collision with and thus missed the Battle of Peleliu) and the Philippines campaign, during which she took part in the Battle of Surigao Strait. She was hit by a kamikaze during the invasion of Lingayen Gulf in January 1945, but after undergoing repairs, she rejoined the fleet supporting troops fighting on Okinawa during the Battle of Okinawa. Her crew took part in the occupation of Japan after the end of the war, and after returning to the United States via the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, was laid up in Philadelphia in 1946. She remained in the fleet's inventory until 1959, when she was broken up for scrap.
Design
The two Tennessee-class battleships were authorized on 3 March 1915, and they were in most respects repeats of the earlier s, the primary differences being enlarged bridges, greater elevation for the main battery turrets, and relocation of the secondary battery to the upper deck.
California was long overall and had a beam of and a draft of . She displaced as designed and up to at full combat load. The ship was powered by four-shaft General Electric turbo-electric transmission and eight oil-fired Babcock & Wilcox boilers rated at , generating a top speed of . The ship had a cruising range of at a speed of . Her crew numbered 57 officers and 1,026 enlisted men. As built, she was fitted with two lattice masts with spotting tops for the main gun battery.
The ship was armed with a main battery of twelve /50 caliber guns in four, three-gun turrets on the centerline, placed in two superfiring pairs forward and aft of the superstructure. Unlike earlier American battleships with triple turrets, these mounts allowed each barrel to elevate independently. The secondary battery consisted of fourteen /51 caliber guns mounted in individual casemates clustered in the superstructure amidships. Initially, the ship was to have been fitted with twenty-two of the guns, but experiences in the North Sea during World War I demonstrated that the additional guns, which would have been placed in the hull, would have been unusable in anything but calm seas. As a result, the casemates were plated over to prevent flooding. The secondary battery was augmented with four /50 caliber guns. In addition to her gun armament, California was also fitted with two torpedo tubes, mounted submerged in the hull, one on each broadside.
The main armored belt was thick, while the main armored deck was up to thick. The main battery gun turrets had thick faces on barbettes. The conning tower had thick sides.