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World Warships, New York, NY (2026)

09/04/2026

Up close, USS Abraham Lincoln doesn't look like a warship so much as a wreck under tow. Running rust bleeds down her bow in wide brown streaks, the paint along her flight deck edge and sponsons has worn clean through to bare steel, and the blotching along her waterline runs unbroken from bow to stern. This is what 286 days at sea, 264 of them without touching any port at all, does to 104,000 tons of steel.

It isn't damage in the structural sense. A former Navy captain who did three tours on Nimitz-class carriers explained that rust along the waterline is ordinary once a ship passes 60 continuous days at sea, and Lincoln blew past that mark months ago. What makes her case unusual is that carriers are supposed to get repainted constantly, precisely to keep the corrosion from ever reaching this point, and this deployment never gave her the chance.

Fixing it properly isn't a quick job. Crews have to be lowered over the side on ropes or work stages, sand the hull down to bare metal, then apply two coats of rust-preventative primer and two coats of naval gray on top, a process experts put at roughly 30 days of solid work. None of it can happen underway or in rough water, which is exactly why nobody touched her hull for the better part of nine months.

During this seven-day stop, crews are only tackling the highest-priority spots, the bow and forward hull that take the worst pounding when the ship is moving. A full repaint could start here in Thailand or wait for wherever she stops next, according to analysts, since doing this kind of work in a foreign port means arranging equipment and permits through local authorities. The Navy hasn't put out a public timeline.

What's already clear is that Lincoln won't leave Laem Chabang looking new; the deep restoration is more likely once she's finally back home in San Diego later this fall, whenever that turns out to be.

Even Navy leadership has made peace with how often this comes up. The Secretary of the Navy has said the President used to call him late at night with one line, over and over: fix the damn rust.

09/03/2026

The Destroyer Es**rt That Rammed A U-Boat And Fought Her Crew By Hand, Before dawn on May 6, 1944, off the Cape Verde Islands, aircraft from the es**rt carrier USS Block Island had been hunting a U-boat for days, dropping experimental Fido acoustic torpedoes from TBM Avengers to flush her up. The target was U-66, a Type IXC boat that had already sent 37 Allied merchant ships to the bottom.

Just after 3 a.m., the destroyer es**rt USS Buckley picked her up on radar and closed to point-blank range. Gunfire and torpedoes went both ways in the dark, close enough that Buckley's lookouts could see muzzle flashes on the U-boat's own deck. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Brent Abel, decided to settle it the old-fashioned way and rammed her.

The collision locked the two hulls together, and a boarding party led by U-66's first officer scrambled onto Buckley's forecastle, not to surrender but to create a diversion while the rest of the crew fought to work the boat free. What followed was several minutes of combat at arm's length, fought with pistols, rifles, a shotgun that happened to be aboard, and anything else within reach, including shell casings and a coffee pot.

U-66 broke loose, rammed Buckley's stern on her way out and snapped off her own propeller shaft in the process. Buckley put three more shells into the conning tower and finished her with grenades thrown down the open hatch. From first contact to the sinking, the entire fight lasted sixteen minutes.

Buckley pulled 36 survivors from the water and transferred them to Block Island, where this photograph was taken, the German crew still in the plain shirts stamped PW. Abel received the Navy Cross. Buckley herself sailed home with her bow bent from the ramming and needed a new one at the Boston Navy Yard before she could put back to sea.

The story didn't end in 1944. In September 1987, three of Buckley's crew sat down with several of the men they had fought that night, at a reunion in Frankfurt, Germany.

09/03/2026

Old Ironsides Sails Again After 116 Years, Sailors aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage manned the rails on a gray July morning in 1997, watching history unfold just off Marblehead, Massachusetts. Ahead of them, USS Constitution set her sails and began moving under wind power alone, something no crew had witnessed in 116 years.

Old Ironsides had not sailed unassisted since 1881. A restoration years in the making brought her hull back to fighting trim, and her crew spent months relearning seamanship from the age of sail just to raise six canvas-colored sails, cut from modern synthetic cloth to mimic the originals.

Ramage did not stand alone in the es**rt. The frigate USS Halyburton held station alongside her, while overhead the Blue Angels swept past in formation, their Hornets tracing a sky Constitution's lookouts once searched for enemy topsails.

The sail fell three months ahead of the ship's actual bicentennial, marking the year rather than the exact date of her 1797 launch in Boston Harbor. No one aboard seemed to mind the technicality. For one afternoon, the oldest commissioned warship in the world moved on nothing but wind, just as she had when the nickname was earned.

09/03/2026

The Oldest Battleship In The US Navy To Fight In World War II, USS Arkansas was commissioned in September 1912, nearly five years before the United States entered the First World War. By the time she took her place off Normandy in June 1944, she was the oldest battleship still in active combat duty in the entire US Navy, still armed with the same twelve 12-inch guns she had carried since she was launched.

She earned that record the hard way. On June 6, 1944, Arkansas opened fire on the German battery at Longues-sur-Mer from roughly 4,000 yards off Omaha Beach, anchoring the naval bombardment force on D-Day. She stayed in French waters through the month, shelling German positions during the fight for Cherbourg, before moving south to support the invasion of southern France in August.

From there, Arkansas crossed the entire planet. By early 1945 her guns were firing in support of Marines at Iwo Jima, and later that year at Okinawa, closing out a war that had taken her from the English Channel to the far side of the Pacific.

Arkansas survived every battle she fought, then drew a final assignment nobody could train for. Moored at Bikini Atoll for the 1946 Operation Crossroads atomic tests, she came through the first blast, Test Able, without serious damage.
The second, an underwater detonation called Test Baker on July 25, 1946, went off less than 700 feet away. Arkansas capsized and sank within seconds, becoming the first battleship in history destroyed by an atomic weapon without ever being struck by one.

09/03/2026

Judge Had No Authority to Void Bergdahl's Verdict, Court Rules, Bowe Bergdahl's name is back in headlines nearly two decades after he became one of the most divisive figures in modern U.S. military justice.

A federal appeals panel ruled this week that the judge who threw out Bergdahl's 2017 conviction never had the legal power to do it. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that only military appellate courts can vacate a court-martial verdict, not a federal district judge. With that ruling, Bergdahl's original conviction for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy is back in force.

The case traces to June 2009, when Bergdahl walked off his post in Afghanistan. Taliban-affiliated fighters captured him within hours. He spent nearly five years in captivity before his release in 2014, part of a prisoner exchange for five Taliban-linked detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, a swap that set off its own political firestorm in Washington.

Three years later, Bergdahl pleaded guilty at Fort Bragg to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. He received a dishonorable discharge but no prison time.

The conviction stood until 2023, when a federal judge vacated it over an undisclosed conflict of interest involving the military judge who presided over the trial.
That judge had quietly applied for a job as an immigration judge with the Justice Department while the case was still active. Court records show he filed the application on the same day Bergdahl entered his guilty plea, without ever telling the defense.

This week's ruling never touches that conflict-of-interest question. It sidesteps it entirely, holding that a federal court never had the jurisdiction to intervene in a military court's judgment in the first place. The consequences of the original 2017 verdict, dishonorable discharge included, are back in effect.

Few court-martial cases have tested the wall between civilian and military justice this directly. The ruling reaffirms a principle that has held since the Uniform Code of Military Justice was written, that civilian courts don't get the final word on a soldier's conviction. Only the military's own appellate system does.

09/02/2026

Called The Worst Battleship In The Navy, She Outlived Every One Of Her Sisters, USS Massachusetts (BB-2) was an Indiana-class pre-dreadnought, launched in 1893 and commissioned in 1896 at William Cramp & Sons in Philadelphia.

On paper she looked formidable. Her twin 13-inch guns were among the largest afloat when she was built, backed up by 8-inch secondary batteries and four torpedo tubes.

In practice, the design had serious flaws. Her turrets had no counterweights, so swinging both massive 13-inch guns to one side could tip the ship dangerously. Her belt armor sat too low in the water to do its job. Historians would later call her the worst battleship the U.S. Navy ever built.

She still saw real action, helping blockade Cienfuegos and Santiago during the Spanish-American War. Peacetime was less kind. A powder explosion in one of her gun turrets in 1903 meant nine sailors never came home, and she ran aground twice, each time needing months of repairs.

By 1919 she'd been renamed Coast Battleship Number 2 and quietly decommissioned. She was struck from the Navy list in 1920, with nothing left to do with her.
On January 6, 1921, she was towed out from Pensacola and scuttled on purpose, used as a target for experimental coastal artillery. That's her in the top photo, going down stern-first.

Here's the irony. She was too outdated and too flawed to be worth the cost of scrapping, so the Navy just left her where she sank. That neglect is exactly what preserved her. In only 26 to 30 feet of water, her turrets still break the surface at low tide.

She was handed over to the state of Florida in 1956, named an underwater archaeological preserve in 1993, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. Today she's one of the most-dived wrecks on the Florida Panhandle, wrapped in coral and patrolled by goliath grouper and barracuda, exactly as the underwater photos show.

There's a stranger footnote. In 1962, a group of divers went down to explore her. Only one came back up. The survivor later told a magazine he'd run into something monstrous in the wreck, and the story ran in print in 1965, giving an old battleship hull its own local sea-serpent legend.

The Navy built her to fight and got one of its most flawed designs instead. That same failure is why USS Massachusetts is the oldest American battleship hull still in existence, sitting right where they sank her, more than a century later. (Not to be confused with the WWII-era USS Massachusetts, BB-59, preserved today as a museum ship in Fall River.)

09/02/2026

USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) finally made a real port call this Wednesday, September 2, pulling into Laem Chabang, Thailand with a rust-streaked hull that tells its own story. For her crew, it was the first solid ground under their boots in 265 days.

The Nimitz-class carrier left San Diego last November for a Middle East deployment now stretching close to ten months, putting Lincoln on pace to finish as the second-longest carrier deployment since the Vietnam War. It wouldn't be her first record — her 294-day COVID-era deployment held that title back in 2020, until USS Gerald R. Ford broke it earlier this year.

About 5,000 sailors and Marines are getting a rare stretch of liberty near Pattaya before Lincoln turns for home this fall.

09/02/2026

On This Day The Guns Fell Silent, At just after nine in the morning on September 2, 1945, the deck of USS Missouri held more admirals, generals, and dignitaries than any warship ever had. Officers from nine Allied nations stood shoulder to shoulder in Tokyo Bay, waiting for two Japanese delegates to cross the deck and put their signatures on a single document.

Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed first,
leaning on a cane. General Yoshijiro Umezu followed. General Douglas MacArthur, standing just a few feet away in his khakis, watched in silence before stepping to the microphone.

"Today the guns are silent," he told the world.

The whole ceremony took twenty-three minutes.

What's easy to miss in photos like these is what wasn't in Tokyo Bay that morning. Missouri sat surrounded by an armada of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, yet not a single U.S. fleet carrier rode at anchor. The flattops that had led the island-hopping campaign for four years were elsewhere. Only two American light carriers and one es**rt carrier flew the flag that day, alongside two British es**rt carriers. The instruments of the offensive stayed off camera. What stood in the frame instead was a battleship, built for exactly this kind of formal, unglamorous ending.

By the time the last signature dried, six years of war across three continents were officially over.

09/01/2026

The Battleship That Buried Its Enemy With Honor, On the afternoon of April 11, 1945, a Japanese Zero broke through Missouri's anti-aircraft fire off Okinawa and slammed into her starboard side. The impact tore open steel plating below the main deck, but damage control crews had the fires out within minutes. Not a single sailor aboard was seriously hurt.

What the crew found in the wreckage the next morning changed the mood on deck. Among the twisted metal lay the pilot's body, a teenager barely out of his teens, later identified as Petty Officer Setsuo Ishino, just 19 years old.

Captain William Callaghan made a call that unsettled some of his own men. Rather than treat the wreckage as scrap and the pilot as an afterthought, he ordered a full military burial at sea, the same honors Missouri would have given one of her own.

Overnight, sailors hand-stitched a makeshift Japanese flag from whatever cloth they could find. The next morning, six men carried Ishino to the rail. A rifle detail fired three volleys. A bugler played Taps.

The moment barely made a ripple at the time. That same day, word reached the fleet that President Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, and the nation's attention turned elsewhere.

Decades later, it stands as one of the Pacific War's quieter, stranger moments, a battleship's crew choosing to see a fallen enemy as a fellow serviceman, in the middle of one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war.

09/01/2026

USS Abraham Lincoln Reaches Port After a Record-Setting 250 Days at Sea, USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is finally getting her long-awaited liberty call. Early this month the Nimitz-class carrier is set to pull into Laem Chabang, Thailand, giving more than 5,000 Sailors and Marines their first real chance in nine months to walk on solid ground, sleep in a bed that isn't rocking, and call home without a satellite delay.

Lincoln left San Diego in late November 2025 expecting a routine six-month Pacific deployment. Instead she was redirected to the Middle East as tensions with Iran escalated, and beyond a single stop in Guam that December, the carrier hasn't touched a pier since. That adds up to more than 250 consecutive days underway, the longest unbroken stretch by a U.S. carrier since USS Dwight D. Eisenhower's pandemic-era 206-day run in 2020, and the second-longest deployment of any carrier since the Vietnam War, trailing only USS Gerald R. Ford's 326-day cruise earlier this year.

The Thailand stop is being framed on both sides as exactly what the crew needs, rest, resupply, and a break from nine months of flight ops and combat cycles most sailors never train to sustain for this long. Pattaya's hotels and shops are bracing for the arrival too.

But the length of this deployment has become a story of its own back home. Families of Lincoln's crew have described worsening conditions aboard, and in early August a sailor went overboard in the Arabian Sea and was pulled from the water within the hour, an incident his family has called a su***de attempt. The Navy says it hasn't tracked a rise in reported suicidal ideation fleet-wide aboard the ship and has added mental health staff, but has declined to release specific numbers. More than 200 military families met with Navy leadership over their concerns, and Senate Democrats have pushed for a Pentagon hearing on how deployments this long affect the people living through them.

Carriers have always been built to stay at sea a long time. What Lincoln's crew has been asked to endure this year is a reminder that there's a human cost to that kind of endurance, one that doesn't show up in a ship's specs.

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