Battleship Cove
The second half of Memorial Day Weekend was devoted to exploring Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts. Battleship Cove is a massive maritime museum featuring the world's largest collection of World War II naval vessels. Or as I affectionately called it, A McDonald's Play Place for adults. In every direction lies a plane, a helicopter, a boat, a submarine, or a battleship that you can climb all over and explore like a jungle gym.
A Bell AH-1 Cobra Attack Helicopter (above) and a Bell UH-1M Iroquois Helicopter (below).
The USS Lionfish SS298 is a Balao-class submarine and was laid down on December 15, 1942, launched on November 7, 1943, and commissioned on November 1, 1944. It is Mike's first sub and my second (having previously toured the USS Dolphin in San Diego).
I gotta get this man a captain's hat.
Submarines are roomier than you imagine on the inside. Also smellier. Everything reeks of metal and grease and exhaust.
Also 98% of submarine interior is either a) wheel, b) dial, c) gauge, d) switch, or e) lever. To imagine building, connecting, installing, and maintaining all of this stuff is mind boggling. Somewhere out there are people who know what each little thing is on this wall and how it works and what it does and why and how to fix it if it breaks. Engineers are crazy smart and have my ultimate respect.
This is the level of my engineering capability.
The dial below measures how deep down in salt water the submarine could dive to before risking collapse.
With no guided tour, we just climbed around, up ever ladder, and down every staircase.
Now over to the the USS Massachusetts. This battleship was built in Quincy, Massachusetts at the Fore River Shipyard of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. The ship was launched on September 23, 1941, the heaviest ship ever launched in Quincy. She was delivered to the Boston Navy Yard in April 1942 and commissioned the following month.
For a brief moment as we stood on the deck, I got to see a glimpse of Mike as an excited little boy awestruck at the sheer size and scale of a real battleship and it was beautiful.
We spent hours descending into the labyrinthine depths of the ship. Each new level took us into a new exhibit or window into daily life aboard the Massachusetts. You can't see it all in a day, nor can you fully absorb everything you experience. The amount of history here is overwhelming. So we cherry picked a handful of locations that piqued our interest, like the ordinances display.
The medical bays are always fascinating to me, full of scary vintage tools and not nearly enough sanitation. But usually museums leave them as empty sets to walk by, assuming your imagination will fill in the rest. The USS Massachusetts crew thought that was super boring so they added mannequins into the rooms for extra visual punch. Only the mannequin budget must have run out at some point because this one fellow here appears to have been left to die in the middle of his open chest surgery.
Which is probably a good thing because just look at this dentist office.
After three hours, several ships, multiple museums, and countless exhibits we reached our saturation point for history and horror, so we headed out and to the gift shop.
This is where I congratulated myself for keeping it classy and not making a SINGLE Battleship board game reference the entire tour. Finally we departed to a local pub where we toasted a fantastic weekend.
