What Was Added, and What Was Taken Off

A hull that served for thirty years while being steadily unmade and remade above the waterline.

02Added Weight, Redistributed Purpose

The Second World War brought the most aggressive phase of modification. Anti-aircraft armament was the immediate pressure: the threat from aircraft changed the calculus of what a battleship needed to carry, and Texas received successive additions and upgrades to her anti-aircraft fit across the early 1940s. Guns were added in numbers and positions that the original design had never anticipated. Platforms were built out from the superstructure to carry them. Director systems and fire-control equipment for the new weapons came with their own weight and their own topside footprint.

These additions had consequences. Every ton added high in the ship affects her stability. Her blisters, fitted in the 1920s along her waterline to improve underwater protection and — critically — to recover the stability margin that earlier additions had reduced, had already been one answer to this equation. As weight continued to accumulate topside through the war years, the engineering relationship between beam, draft, freeboard, and centre of gravity had to be managed continuously. The blisters that had changed her beam and slowed her slightly in the 1920s were also, in retrospect, buying the margin that made the later wartime additions possible.

Some were additive: equipment bolted, welded, or rigged onto a hull that had not been designed to carry it.

What came off during this period was largely the product of the same logic. Fire-control arrangements that had been state of the art in 1925 were removed or superseded. Equipment associated with her role as a fleet unit — torpedo nets, certain secondary armaments, structures associated with earlier tactical concepts — disappeared as her actual wartime roles clarified. By the time she was supporting amphibious operations in the Atlantic and Pacific, she was a ship whose function had been precisely redefined by what remained and what had been stripped away.

03The Hull Underneath

The accumulation of changes across thirty years of service means that a detailed inspection of Texas today — the riveted plates, the frames, the structural members of the hull itself — reveals a baseline that is significantly older and more original than almost anything visible at deck level or above. The visible ship is a palimpsest: each layer of modification sitting over an earlier one, with the original hull beneath them all.

For marine historians and preservation engineers, this layering is both the challenge and the interest. What counts as the ship? What, once removed and not replaced, is simply gone? These are not abstract questions. They have direct bearing on what any restoration programme is working to recover — and on what, however carefully the work is done, is already beyond recovery.

Written from published engineering and heritage sources. Where a figure is not documented, this archive describes the engineering rather than asserting a number.