Battleship Cove

July 2009 --  I'm glad we stopped at Battleship Cove. Mom and I stopped there are the way home from Boston. Battleship Cove is a maritime museum in Falling Water, Massachusetts. It has the world's largest collection of WWII-era naval vessels. I'd seen WWII-era planes before, but not ships. 

DD-850 is the USS Joseph P. Kennedy.

On hands on deck

The centerpiece of the collection is the USS Massachusetts ("Big Mamie"). During WWII, no Navy personnel were killed in action while aboard the Massachusetts.  The USS Joseph P. Kennedy is also docked at Battleship Cove. The highlight of its service is the naval blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

In front of the USS Massachusetts is the Hiddensee 

The USS Lionfish is a WWII-era submarine that was commissioned on 1 November 1944. It serves as a revered monument to all submariners. The Hiddensee was originally a Soviet naval ship (missile corvette) before being transferred to the East German Navy and eventually a unified German Navy. It was really neat to see how different it was from American ships. American sailors were pampered compared to their counterparts in the East. The ship is no longer at Battleship Cove. It was sold for scrap metal because it was deemed too expensive to maintain. 

Lionfish (R) and Hiddensee (L

Getting around 

Bunk beds

Recipe for biscuits

Big guns

LCM stands for landing craft, mechanized. They were designed to carry vehicles. It is also the type of vessel that brought American and Allied troops to the beaches of Normandy. There was one at Battleship Cove. I thought what it must have been like to come ashore aboard one of the crafts:  how brave and scared the men must have been.

D-Day Landing Craft