A Long Service Record, Stated Plainly

Where USS Texas went, and what she did there — two world wars, three decades of active service, stated as record.

02Between the Wars: Modernisation and Change

The interwar period reshaped Texas substantially. In the 1920s she underwent significant modernisation work — cage masts were replaced by tripod masts, anti-aircraft armament was added and reconfigured across several refits, and fire-control systems were progressively updated. She also converted from coal to oil fuel during this period, a change that transformed her endurance, reduced her crew demands in the engineering spaces, and ended the brutal labour of the coalhole. The ship that emerged from interwar refit cycles was recognisably Texas, but upgraded at nearly every level of her fighting and navigational systems.

She also received her distinctive anti-torpedo blisters — external sponsons added to both sides of the hull below the waterline — which increased her beam significantly and altered her silhouette in photographs taken from that era onward. The blisters added buoyancy and offered some protection against underwater explosions, but they also reduced her speed somewhat and changed the geometry of the hull that maintainers would be managing for the rest of her life.

This was an unusual arrangement, placing American ships under foreign operational control, and it was taken seriously by both sides.

In the 1930s Texas served in fleet exercises, appeared at reviews, and functioned as a training vessel and fleet workhorse in the way that ageing capital ships tend to do — useful, not obsolete, but no longer at the cutting edge. By the time the second world war arrived, she was a pre-war battleship in a conflict that was already moving toward the carrier and the submarine as its decisive instruments. Her role would be shaped accordingly.

03The Second World War: Shore Bombardment and Support

Texas entered the Second World War in a role suited to a heavily armoured, slow, large-calibre-gun platform that could not keep up with a fast-carrier task force: she became a naval fire support ship, putting 14-inch shells ashore in advance of amphibious landings. This was not a secondary role. Amphibious operations were among the most complex and costly undertakings of the war, and the suppression of coastal defences and enemy positions in the hours before troops hit the beach was operationally critical.

She was present at the Allied landings in Northwest Africa in November 1942 — Operation Torch — supporting the assault on the Moroccan coast. In June 1944 she stood off the coast of Normandy for the D-Day landings, providing naval gunfire support to Allied forces going ashore on Omaha Beach. She was assigned to support the western end of that sector, directing fire against German positions in conditions of heavy resistance. Her 14-inch guns, firing at ranges where the gun crews could not see their targets and depended on spotters and fire-control coordination, engaged shore fortifications and artillery positions. In August 1944 she was part of the bombardment force supporting the landings in southern France — Operation Dragoon — again in a naval fire support role.

Her Pacific service followed. Texas operated in support of the landings at Iwo Jima in February 1945, contributing pre-invasion bombardment, and at Okinawa in April 1945 in the same capacity. These were the largest amphibious operations in the Pacific theatre, mounted against heavily fortified positions, and the sustained fire support provided by battleships like Texas across the preparatory phases was a standard element of operational planning by that point in the war.

She was decommissioned in April 1948, having served the United States Navy in an active capacity for thirty-four years. No other American battleship that served in both world wars has survived into preservation. That fact alone gives her record a particular character — not simply as a long service history, but as the only remaining physical evidence of a class of warship, and a type of naval service, that has otherwise passed entirely out of existence.

04Preservation

Texas was transferred to the State of Texas in 1948 and berthed at the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site near Houston, where she served as a memorial and museum ship for decades. The years were not kind to the hull. A steel ship in brackish water, with limited maintenance budgets and the slow accumulation of corrosion damage across riveted seams and plate faces, deteriorates in ways that are initially invisible and eventually catastrophic. By the early twenty-first century, the condition of her hull had become a serious engineering problem requiring intervention at a scale the ship had not seen since her wartime refits.

She was towed — without power, on her own aged hull — to a dry dock in Galveston, Texas, for a major restoration programme beginning in 2022. The dry-docking allowed access to her underwater hull for the first time in many decades, enabling inspection, plate renewal, and structural work that could not be done afloat. The programme represents the most significant investment in her physical survival since commissioning, and its outcome will determine whether the ship that has kept herself afloat this long continues to do so for another generation.

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