The Battleship Came Home to Camden Because Camden Built Her

Next week, on the eleventh, the Battleship New Jersey will hold her annual Veterans Day ceremony on her fantail, free and open to the public, in honor of the men and women who served. It is a quiet tradition, and a fitting one. But to understand why that gray steel giant sits where she sits — across the Delaware from the city that so often overshadows us, moored firmly on the South Jersey side — you have to go back and ask a question that got asked, and answered, a generation ago. Why Camden?

It is worth remembering that Camden had to fight for her. When the Navy decided, around the turn of the millennium, where the most decorated battleship in American history would live out her days as a floating museum, Camden was not the obvious choice. Bayonne, up in Hudson County, wanted her too, and Bayonne had arguments. What Camden had was something harder to put in a bid package and impossible to argue against: the people who built the thing were from here.

Built on this side of the river

The USS New Jersey was launched from the Philadelphia Navy Yard on December 7, 1942 — one year to the day after Pearl Harbor, a date no one who worked on her chose by accident. And the hands that built her, the welders and riveters and fitters who worked around the clock through the war, came from the row houses of Camden and Gloucester City and the little towns up and down this side of the river just as much as they came from Philadelphia. The Navy Yard was a South Jersey workplace as surely as a Pennsylvania one. When the ship came home, she was coming home to the neighborhoods that made her.

That is the part I think about when I walk her decks. We tend to tell the history of great machines as the history of admirals and battles — Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, the long cold decades in between, all of which the New Jersey saw. And she deserves that telling; she earned every battle star. But there is a second history layered underneath the famous one, and it is a working person’s history. It is the history of a lunch pail and a time card, of a shift that ran into the night because the war would not wait, of a man who could stand on his own porch years later and tell his grandchildren that he had a hand in that. When Camden argued it should get the battleship because so many of her builders had lived right here, it wasn’t sentiment. It was a claim of authorship.

When Camden argued it should get the battleship because so many of her builders had lived right here, it wasn’t sentiment.Henry Whitaker

The long way home

She did not arrive easily. She came back to the East Coast first in the autumn of 1999, towed around from the Pacific, and it took until 2001 before she was finally made fast at her permanent berth on the Camden side and opened her gangways to the public. In the years since, she has gone away for repairs — most recently a multimillion-dollar overhaul in dry dock before she returned to a genuine welcome-home celebration on the waterfront — and every time she leaves, you can feel the city hold its breath until she’s back. A town knows its own.

So when the ceremony begins on Veterans Day, and the old sailors come aboard, and somewhere a grandchild asks what this place is, I hope someone tells the whole story. Not just the battles. The building of her, too. Because the lesson of the Battleship New Jersey, the one that connects her gray hull to the streets just beyond the parking lot, is that history is not something that happens somewhere else to important people. It is made, plate by welded plate, by ordinary people in ordinary towns — towns like ours, which had the good sense, when the moment came, to bring their handiwork home.

She is not Philadelphia’s battleship, whatever the skyline behind her suggests. She is ours. We built her, and we went and got her back.

Based on reporting from Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial, the USS New Jersey historical record, CBS News Philadelphia, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.