Operation and Updates
Serving in the western Atlantic in 1916–18, these ships visited Europe just after the November 1918 Armistice and were thereafter stalwart members of the Navy's Battle Fleet. Reconstructed in 1929–31, they received greater main battery gun elevation, tripod masts to support improved gun directors and modern Aircraft catapults. The ships' secondary gun batteries were updated, as was protection against gunfire, aircraft bombs and torpedoes. Now capable of long-range gunfire in an age when the role of aircraft was steadily growing, the ships spent another decade in the Nation's battle line.
Read more about this topic: Pennsylvania Class Battleship
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)