Perhaps one of the strangest naval battles ever recorded involved the USS New Mexico (BB-40), yet this is not only a battle that almost no one in New Mexico has heard of: almost no military historians have ever heard of it, either.
I wouldn’t know about this battle if I wasn’t abnormally attracted to the obscure, a trait that the reader probably shares or they wouldn’t be reading my blog.
Years ago, I was a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico, I was a non-traditional student (that translates as old fart) that spent a lot of time reading for classes. On good days, I could sit outside of Zimmerman Library and read in the sunlight. I may have mentioned it before, but I like libraries very much and visit them frequently.
Near the library was a bell tower containing a brass bell, and the plaque on the tower explained that the bell was from the battleship USS New Mexico. Besides a brief history of the ship, there was a mention that the bell was a gift from the Lipsett Corporation. Who the hell were they?
The USS New Mexico was the lead ship of a new class of three battleships built during World War I. Commissioned too late to take part in the battles of the Great War, she escorted President Woodrow Wilson to the Versailles Peace Conference. After the war, the New Mexico served as the flagship of the Pacific Fleet, her role in the fleet slowly being replaced by more modern battleships that were larger and faster.
Transferred to the Atlantic Fleet shortly before Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II, the New Mexico escorted convoys across the Atlantic. Transferred back to the Pacific Fleet, the New Mexico took part in the Navy’s numerous shore bombardments, her 14-inch guns helping to destroy coastal defenses before the landing crafts hit the beaches. During these engagements, the ship was repeatedly attacked by Kamikaze planes, one of which struck her bridge, killing the commanding officer, Captain Robert Walton Fleming and killing or wounding 85 other sailors. Among the killed was Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden, the British representative to General MacArthur. General Lumsden was the highest-ranking British Officer killed in combat during the war.
And this is where Morris Lipsett comes into the picture. Lipsett was only 23 years old and was working as a salesman in a men’s wear shop when he bought a condemned hotel in Jamestown, New York. Demolishing the building and selling off the contents and wreckage for salvage, Lipsett began a long career in salvage operations. Though Lipsett had no formal engineering training, his company became one of the largest ‘wreckers’ in the world.
Over the next six decades, Lipsett demolished houses, commercial buildings, bridges, dams, New York’s Second Avenue El, the old Madison Square Garden, the Third Avenue El, and the old Penn Station, and cleared most of the land necessary to build the Chase Manhattan Bank. Branching out, Lipsett began scrapping surplus ships after the war, including the SS Normandie—perhaps the greatest ocean liner ever launched—and the first aircraft carrier named Enterprise.
At one point, Lipsett even salvaged a tunnel through a mountain in Pennsylvania. I would love to have more information about that—how do you scrap a tunnel? If you dig a tunnel out of a mountain—doesn’t it just leave a bigger tunnel?
In 1946, Lipsett bought the decommissioned battleships New Mexico, Wyoming, and Idaho, with plans to tow the three ships, one at a time, to Newark and begin the long process of cutting them up. The first ship to be moved was the New Mexico, with two tugs towing her to the docks at Newark. Unfortunately, during heavy seas, the tugs were forced to cut the lines, setting the 624-foot dreadnaught adrift with a crew of three very worried men who briefly had the largest private navy in the world.
Surprisingly, it took a whole day for the ship to be relocated. A Coast Guard plane spotted the abandoned vessel 58 miles off the coast of New York. With the help of a Coast Guard cutter, the tugs were finally able to tow the ship towards Newark, where the city had mobilized its own private navy to block her entrance to the bay.
The city of Newark had just budgeted $70,000,000 to a new ‘Beautify Newark’ project, hoping to change the harbor’s image from that of a junkyard to something more attractive to new investors. Effectively, the City of Newark was declaring war on the New Mexico.
The standoff, which the newspapers called the Battle of Newark Bay, lasted for only a couple of days. Both Lipsett and the mayor of Newark made frantic phone calls to Washington to intervene and force their opponent to surrender. Even the governor of New Mexico got involved in the public argument, claiming that the honor of the state was being insulted by Newark.
The Coast Guard wisely took no side, just standing by to make sure that there were no unintended nautical accidents. What the Coast Guard could have done if there had been any intentional incidents is still open for debate, for Washington mediated a peace treaty: Lipsett would be allowed to scrap the three battleships in Newark, but he had to promise to pay a hefty daily penalty if the scrapping process took longer than nine months.
Lipsett met the deadlines. While dismantling the ships, he recovered the two ship’s bells, the larger of which is on display in a museum in Santa Fe, while the slightly smaller bell still stands in front of the UNM library in Albuquerque.
Nearby is a nice bench—it’s a great place to read a book.
Don't you just love politicians, especially if they are cooked properly? It's funny what interesting bits of history one stumbles upon if you stop and read the monuments. It may be why some people are so anxious to demolish monuments. With students, perhaps, it's that they fear the information might be required of them on a test, under the mistaken belief that if the monument is gone, the history and the resulting exam question will simply not be required of them. After all, who can remember all that crap after last night's kegger at Phi Epsilon Beta.
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