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Arsenal is a military history and technology podcast focused on the weapons, war machines, and military systems that shaped how wars were fought. Each episode examines a specific platform, weapon, vehicle, aircraft, ship, or battlefield system, explaining what it was designed to do, how it worked, where it fit into the fight, and why it mattered.
From tanks and aircraft to naval power, artillery, missiles, radar, logistics, and emerging battlefield technologies, Arsenal connects hardware to doctrine, tactics, industry, and human decision-making. Developed by Dr Jason Edwards and Trackpads.com, the show is built for listeners who want clear, serious, and accessible military history with a stronger focus on the machines and systems behind combat power.
Welcome to Arsenal, where the weapons and war machines of military history come to life. Today we explore the New Mexico class battleships in the Pacific during World War Two, and the crews and opponents who gave them their reputation. If you enjoy learning how technology, tactics, and human decisions come together in combat, you can find more articles, podcasts, and resources at Trackpads dot com. As dawn breaks over Lingayen Gulf, one of these older battleships stands just off the Luzon coast, her fourteen inch guns sending great flashes across the water while lookouts scan the sky for the next diving attacker. Above the armored decks the air smells of burnt powder and hot metal, while deep below engineers feel the hull twist and shudder with every salvo and sudden turn.
On the open decks the ship seems huge, yet every man knows his own small patch of steel. Gun crews crouch around breeches and hoists, waiting for the order that will send another heavy shell toward the shore or toward a suspected battery inland. Anti aircraft gunners ride bare steel mounts that jerk and chatter as they follow a speck in the sky, trying to judge when to open fire before a kamikaze commits to its final dive. Officers on the bridge juggle course changes, call for smoke when needed, and listen to reports from radar and lookouts as they try to keep the ship alive without easing the fire support for the troops ashore. For the sailors of the New Mexico class, this is what war feels like: heat, noise, and a continuous calculation of risk that never quite pauses.
. To understand why these ships ended up in that deadly scene off the Philippines, it helps to step back several decades. In the years before the First World War, the United States Navy shifted from guarding its own coasts to thinking about long range operations across the Pacific. Battleships were the centerpiece of that plan, meant to fight in a line of battle where every ship turned and fired as part of a single, coordinated weapon. Planners knew that earlier dreadnoughts carried serious guns and armor, but they also knew those ships had real flaws in range, seakeeping, and the way their secondary batteries worked in rough water.
The core problem was simple to describe and hard to solve. The Navy needed battleships that could steam steadily at about twenty one knots, withstand heavy incoming fire, and deliver accurate gunnery at long ranges in open ocean conditions. They had to burn oil rather than coal to ease logistics and increase endurance, and they needed modern fire control to turn range estimates into hits. At the same time, designers worked within limits imposed by docks, channels, and the state of American industry. The New Mexico class emerged as the next step in a family of so called standard type battleships, all sharing similar speed, turning behavior, and protection philosophy so they could fight smoothly as a group. They were built to close a specific gap between older coal burning ships and a future battle fleet that could cross the Pacific with confidence.
On the drawing boards the New Mexico designers spent much of their effort on tradeoffs between gun size, armor, and machinery. Some argued for larger sixteen inch weapons, but that meant fewer barrels and heavier turrets. Others preferred twelve improved fourteen inch guns, reasoning that a greater weight of fire and a higher rate of fire mattered more than a slightly larger shell. The final design kept the refined fourteen inch guns in four triple turrets and used the saved weight for better armor distribution and improved seakeeping. One ship received an ambitious turbo electric drive that turned turbine output into electric power for her propeller shafts, while her sisters kept more conventional geared turbines, an experiment in propulsion that showed how designers were still feeling their way toward the best solution.
By the time the class entered service around 1919 they were near the peak of interwar battleship thinking. A typical New Mexico class ship displaced a little over thirty thousand tons and carried twelve fourteen inch guns backed by a secondary battery of five inch weapons and, later, many anti aircraft mounts. A crew well over one thousand men lived and worked aboard, with numbers rising further during World War Two as radar sets, directors, and light guns multiplied. Their top speed, just over twenty knots, matched the rest of the standard type line and made them ideal for a slow but steady battle formation rather than high speed carrier escort. They were built as heavy, compact platforms that could deliver consistent gunnery rather than sudden bursts of speed.
Walking along the weather decks in wartime, a visitor would have seen four massive turrets dominating the ship’s silhouette. Each turret and its barbette formed a vertical fortress of steel that plunged down to protected magazines, where powder bags and shells were hoisted up toward the guns in a carefully controlled chain. Between the turrets rose a rebuilt tower superstructure, the product of prewar modernization that replaced older cage masts with a solid block of command, navigation, and fire control spaces. High above the sea, gunnery officers and rangetakers in armored director stations fed bearing and range data into mechanical computers that turned complex motion and weather factors into elevation and training orders.
Below that tower the ship became more cramped and human. Casemates and enclosed mounts housed five inch guns, where crews had to work in tight, noisy compartments that could flood or fill with smoke in bad weather. Mess decks and berthing spaces were squeezed wherever the armor scheme allowed, so sailors slept and ate among pipes, stanchions, and bulkheads that constantly sweat condensation or shook with machinery noise. Deepest of all lay the boiler and engine rooms, where firemen, machinist’s mates, and electricians tended the heat and humming equipment that kept the ship moving. For them, orders from the bridge arrived as changes in telegraph pointers and subtle shifts in vibration and sound rather than shouted commands.
When war came again the New Mexico class did not immediately sail into great surface battles. In the early years they patrolled and escorted, guarding convoys and training crews while the carrier forces took shape. The first hard combat came in the Aleutians, where their guns thundered against fog shrouded Japanese positions on cold, rugged islands at the far edge of the North Pacific. There, the danger came as much from weather, poor charts, and mines as from enemy guns. Soon after, in the Gilberts and Marshalls, the ships moved south into warmer seas, standing in close to atolls like Tarawa and Kwajalein to bombard airstrips, strongpoints, and shore batteries ahead of amphibious landings.
As the Pacific campaign shifted to the Marianas and beyond, the New Mexico class settled into a demanding pattern of support. Off Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, they fired thousands of shells, adjusting their aim with help from spotter aircraft and shore observers so that bombardments could walk inland ahead of advancing infantry. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the ships joined the old battle line at Surigao Strait, where American battleships crossed the path of a Japanese force in the last classic battleship engagement in history. There, the role of the New Mexico class was brief but symbolic, representing the enduring idea of a battle line even as carriers and submarines proved decisive elsewhere.
The fiercest trials came in the Philippines and at Okinawa under the threat of suicide aircraft. At Lingayen Gulf in early 1945 New Mexico and her sisters led bombardment groups that had to support landings while bracing for kamikaze attacks. Despite layers of anti aircraft guns and radar warnings, some attackers broke through, slamming into superstructures and gun positions with devastating effect. New Mexico took a hit that destroyed much of her bridge and killed her captain, yet damage control teams and crews kept her fighting. Later at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the class again endured weeks of bombardment work under almost constant air threat, suffering further damage but remaining on station.
From the perspective of their crews, the New Mexico class had real strengths. The main battery was reliable and accurate, especially after upgrades allowed higher elevation and longer range, and the all or nothing armor scheme wrapped vital spaces in thick protection that inspired confidence under fire. Interwar refits and wartime upgrades steadily improved their fire control, gunnery spotting, and anti aircraft defenses, so by the later campaigns these ships could combine radar information, aerial spotting, and heavy gunfire in a tightly coordinated system. For amphibious forces, having such a ship on the gun line meant steady, predictable fire support that did not easily falter under return fire.
Yet their weaknesses never fully went away. Their modest top speed barred them from fast carrier task groups and left them more exposed when air attacks came from unexpected directions. Early casemate guns had been miserable to work in heavy seas and had to be removed or relocated, a reminder that even the best plans can fail in real ocean conditions. Their armor layouts had not been designed with near vertical dive bombing or suicide attacks in mind, and damage at Lingayen and Okinawa showed how vulnerable bridges, fire control positions, and exposed gun crews could be to determined pilots. Even engineering innovations like turbo electric drive in one ship brought added complexity that later designers chose not to repeat.
Over time, the class evolved more through refits than through distinct variants. In the nineteen thirties, major modernizations grafted new bows, tower superstructures, and improved machinery onto the original hulls, increasing range and improving seakeeping. Aircraft catapults and hangars appeared so that small floatplanes could spot fall of shot and scout ahead, extending the battleship’s reach beyond the horizon. During the war, radar arrays multiplied along with anti aircraft mounts, turning the once clean lines of the ships into dense forests of masts, directors, and gun tubs that reflected the changing nature of naval threats.
After the war only one of the three ships found a truly new role. Retained and converted into a gunnery training and test platform, she carried experimental weapons and later early guided missiles, serving quietly as a bridge between the age of big guns and the coming missile era. The other two followed a more common path, decommissioned and scrapped once their heavy guns and thick armor no longer fit the Navy’s vision of future conflicts. In their final years they served as reminders that even well loved, battle tested ships eventually give way to new technology.
Although no complete New Mexico class battleship survives today, pieces of their story remain scattered across memorials and museums. A single fourteen inch gun, now mounted on shore, hints at the scale of the weapons these ships once carried. Visitors who step aboard preserved contemporaries such as other battleships from the same era can still walk through similar turret interiors, engine rooms, and cramped berthing areas, gaining a sense of the daily routine that lay behind every action report. Photo and film archives show the New Mexico class ships lying off smoking beaches or surrounded by bursts of anti aircraft fire, reinforcing the reality that their service was long, hard, and often dangerous.
In the end, the legacy of the New Mexico class is not just about standard type design or the evolution of battleship doctrine. It lies in the way these older ships adapted to new demands, standing in to shield landing forces, trading fire with shore batteries, and absorbing blows from kamikazes while younger ships sprinted ahead with the carriers. Their story connects directly to the sailors who slept beside armored bulkheads, hauled powder bags in sweltering magazines, and watched the sky for the glint of an incoming attacker. For those men, the New Mexico class was not an abstract design but a steel home that could either protect them or fail them in the next few seconds of combat.