Anchors Aweigh: Postal Service Issues a USS Missouri Commemorative Stamp

The new USS Missouri commemorative. 
Photograph courtesy of the United States Postal Service

The United States Postal Service will issue a commemorative stamp on Tuesday June 11, 2019, recognizing the commissioning of the battleship USS Missouri. 

Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to end the Depression and win World War II are widely recognized and documented. 

What is less well-known is how Roosevelt and Congress started modernizing the United States Navy - - a decade before Missouri’s commissioning.  In his excellent history Carrier War in the Pacific, Stephen Sears notes that five United States Navy aircraft carriers were designed, constructed and commissioned between 1934 and 1941.  USS Missouri, and her sister ships Iowa, New Jersey and Wisconsin, were ordered between July 1, 1939 and June 12, 1940.

If the United States had not started modernizing the fleet when it did, World War II might very well have ended much differently.

And speaking of World War II’s conclusion, the Japanese signed the Instrument of Surrender on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.  With the help of my sister, I discovered my father had a set of commemorative photographs of this event in a photo album and illustrations of them follow.

The caption reads: "Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz signs the surrender for the United States
aboard Missouri September 2, 1945." From the photography album of William A. Rowen

The caption reads: "Shigemitsu signs the surrender terms on board the Missouri on September 2, 1945."
"Shigemitsu" is Mamoru Shigemitsu," the Japanese Foreign Minister. 
From the photography album of William A. Rowen

The new stamp shows Missouri steaming straight towards the viewer.  When I asked Bill Gicker, the United States Postal Service’s Stamp Services Director, why Dan Cosgrove, the stamp artist, chose this view, he said, “The Postal Service looked at several sketches and selected the image of the ship steaming towards the viewer.”  “It was,” he continued, “the most recognizable at stamp size and immediately conveyed the power of the battleship.”

Missouri served in World War II, the Korean War, Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and is now a museum ship in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  In the stamp, Missouri is painted in dazzle camouflage.  “Using this pattern,” Gicker stated, “immediately identifies the period we're honoring as World War II. Our intention was to honor the 75th anniversary of Missouri’s launch in 1944, and her combat role and her role in the end of the war.”

Cosgrove’s painting of Missouri is based on photographs.  He and the Postal Service were unable to find a historic, head on photograph of the battleship; he worked from a modern photograph of Missouri as it is docked today in Pearl Harbor and then referenced historic photographs from World War II.

The caption on the back of this photograph reads:
"Pacific Fleet Entering Tokyo Bay, Mt. Fujiyama silhouetted by the setting sun." 
Missouri is likely one of the ships in the photograph.  From the
photography album of William A. Rowen

According the Gicker, “Dan enjoyed the process of studying the ship as it looks today as a Museum and then redrawing the superstructure, bow and other elements to make it accurate to the way it looked when it was first commissioned.” Cosgrove and the Postal Service worked with naval historians to make sure that the details were correct.

Gicker recalled that “an ‘Ah Ha’ moment occurred during discussions of the bow wave size created by a ship this large and the position of flags while underway.”  Cosgrove painted a wave. “But since he was not familiar with how the size of the bow wave would indicate the ship speed,” Gicker continued, “Dan created a few drafts to get it just right.”  Much study was also devoted to ensuring the painting accurately showed the height at which a fully loaded, operational battleship would ride in the water while underway.

On several occasions, my co-worker Ray Oram and I planned training for transportation staff in upstate New York.  If we were planning training in the bleak winter or early spring, or if getting the training set up got to be a problem, Ray, who has since retired, would break the tension by joking about offering the training in Honolulu.    

If you cannot visit Hawaii, Pim van Wijngaarden’s website museumships.us lists seven battleships open to the public in the continental United States.  Pim and his website are so fascinating in their own right that they will be the subject of an upcoming blog post.

These battleships include Missouri’s sister ships: Iowa in Los Angeles, California; New Jersey in Camden, New Jersey; and Wisconsin in Norfolk, Virginia.   Alabama, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas are in, respectively, Mobile. Alabama, Fall River, Massachusetts, Wilmington, North Carolina and La Porte, Texas.

Missouri had a crew of several thousand sailors and officers and was a small city afloat.  If you are curious about battleship life, there is no substitute for visiting one of these battleships to experience them first hand. 

This stamp is expected to be available in post offices on June 11^th.  If you cannot find it there, you can order it online at https://store.usps.com/store/product/buy-stamps/uss-missouri-S_478704