NAVY: Biggest Roar Afloat

Steady, grim and forbidding in a wind-chopped sea, the new 35,000-ton U.S.S. North Carolina last week took a cruel final test such as no man-of-war had ever met before: two and three-quarter tons of powder exploded aboard her, flinging twelve tons of shells miles across the water.

By the touch of a button her blond, urbane skipper, Captain Olaf Mandt Hustvedt, gave her the works. Her answer was a belching, searing flame, the shattering roar of the heaviest broadside ever fired by any warship of any Navy on any sea. All nine of the 16-in. guns in her main battery, tripled in turrets each of which weighs more than many a destroyer, answered the Old Man. Ten of her secondary battery of 20 five-inchers simultaneously blasted the night. North Carolina took it as it came, shook her head and plowed on.

Fortnight ago this 16th battleship of the U.S. fleet—the first to be added in 18 years—completed her speed tests. Last week she headed out to sea for the toughest tests of all: gunfire that would show how well she could stand the shock of her own battle punch. Many a navyman still remembers how some years ago one famed U.S. battleship fired her forward turret on her test run and spent six months in the navy yard getting her damage repaired. And now North Carolina was out to prove the hard way that she could take a slug many times heavier. Neither so fast nor so heavily protected as such new-day beauties as the 15-in.-gunned German Tirpitz and the unhappy Bismarck, she carries a more powerful wallop* than any foreign ship afloat.

Salvos and Broadsides. Her firing tests began a few hours after she was out of sight of land. Like test pilots feeling out a new airplane, her builders and crew tried her slowly, firing each gun singly. There were no targets. Between salvos, technicians topside and below took readings from strain and blast gauges, many another gadget that would show how North Carolina writhed when her guns let go.

Her voice rose terribly through the three days. After her 16-inchers had been fired singly and by pairs, they were fired in turret salvos. After her 5-in. all-purpose guns (for surface and aerial targets) had been fired singly they were fired by twin mounts, then by ten-gun broadsides.

In her first tests, North Carolina shed only superficial skin. Light doors on deck cleaning-gear lockers warped and hung from their hinges in her hot breath, and strip molding from the wardroom overhead dropped down with a jangling crash. But damage-control crews found no major shaking-up. In her first try, North Carolina did better than many an oldtime battlewagon does in target practice.

She began to show her true mettle when two main battery turrets—six 16-inchers —were fired in salvo. The concussion sucked the back off a newsman's camera, pulled the lenses out of a pair of binoculars. But by that time every superficiality that was shakeable had been jarred loose.