Historic PT Boats, a Cold War Soviet Ship, and WWII Battleships Found Home in This Massachusetts Museum

Battleship Cove, Massachusetts

Most folks drive past Fall River, Massachusetts without knowing they just missed the world’s largest fleet of naval museum ships. At Battleship Cove, massive warships rest in the calm waters, waiting to share their tales.

Among them stands the USS Massachusetts, a beast that fought in 35 battles. Here’s what makes this naval park truly one of a kind.

USS Massachusetts’ Battle History Exhibit

The crown jewel of Battleship Cove is the massive USS Massachusetts, the biggest boat in the collection. 

Her crew called her “Big Mamie,” and she earned 11 Battle Stars in the chaos of World War II. This beast fired 786 sixteen-inch shells during just one attack on Casablanca, turning two destroyers and a floating dry dock into scrap metal. 

In the Pacific, her gunners knocked 18 enemy planes out of the sky, and not a single crew member died from enemy fire – a miracle in that meat grinder of a war. 

Her final shots at Kamaishi on August 9, 1945 were the last giant shells fired before Japan threw in the towel.

National PT Boat Museum

The PT Boat Museum houses the biggest collection of these fast attack boat artifacts in the world. 

At its heart are PT Boats 617 and 796, the only two restored PT boats you’ll find anywhere on public display. 

Over 200 rare items fill this place – actual gun sights used in combat, depth charges that were meant to blow Japanese subs to kingdom come, and gear from the famous PT-109. 

Get up close to the beastly Packard V-12 engines that pushed these wooden rockets to 40+ knots. 

Their guns could spit out 8,000 .50-cal rounds per minute – enough to turn anything in their path into Swiss cheese.

PT-617 Elco Boat Exhibit

PT-617 is the last surviving 80-footer from Elco, identical to the one Kennedy commanded in the Pacific. 

The Electric Launch Company of New Jersey built her in 1945, finishing just after the war wrapped up. She stretches 80 feet with a 21-foot beam and tips the scales at 56 tons fully loaded. 

Her hull is a sandwich of mahogany planks with special glue to keep the water out – a wooden boat in a world of steel killers. 

After the war, she lived as a pleasure yacht named “My Pleasure” in the Caribbean until some lucky bastard found her in St. Thomas and bought her for a mere five grand before restoration.

PT-796 Higgins Boat Exhibit

PT-796 is a 78-foot Higgins boat built in New Orleans, nicknamed “Tail Ender” because she was the last of her kind ever made. 

The Navy handed her over to J.M. “Boats” Newberry in 1970, who eventually brought her to her final home at Battleship Cove. 

She’s got that shark-tooth paint job on her bow, just like the boats that prowled for Japanese ships in the South Pacific. 

Her twin .50-cal gun mounts and 20mm cannon are still there, ready to rock.

Inside, her ward room still has the actual plotting table where officers planned night raids with sweaty palms and cigarette smoke hanging in the air.

USS Lionfish Submarine Exhibit

USS Lionfish is a Balao-class sub that ran two war patrols hunting Japanese ships in the Pacific. 

Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander Edward D. Spruance, son of Admiral Raymond Spruance, one of the big brass of the Pacific war. 

This underwater predator stretches 311 feet with a 27-foot beam and could dive 400 feet down into the crushing black depths. 

Her galley still has the original gear where cooks whipped up six meals a day in a space no bigger than a modern bathroom. 

Eighty men crammed into this steel tube to run her ten torpedo tubes, and you can see the actual electric fish – Mark 18-2 torpedoes – still sitting in her forward torpedo room.

Admiral Arleigh Burke National Destroyer Museum

The USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. houses this tribute to destroyer history with cruise books, photos, and gear spanning a century of these workhorses of the fleet. 

Burke got his “31-Knot” nickname from pushing his destroyer groups through the Pacific at speeds that made the Japanese sweat bullets.

Burke’s actual brass telescope from the Battle of Cape St. George sits here, an instrument of war that spotted enemy ships before they became targets. 

Over 50 meticulously built ship models show how these fast killers evolved from 1900 to 1990. 

They’ve even got salvaged bits from USS Ward, the destroyer that fired the first American shots when the Japanese came knocking at Pearl Harbor.

USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Cuban Missile Crisis Exhibit

The “Joey P” wasn’t just another destroyer – she stood on the front lines when the world nearly went nuclear in 1962. 

On October 26, her crew boarded the Greek freighter Marucla, suspected of smuggling missile parts to Castro’s Cuba. 

Step into her Combat Information Center with the original sonar gear used to track Soviet subs lurking in the depths. 

See the actual boarding gear – weapons, radios, and search tools – used when Kennedy sailors climbed aboard the Marucla. 

The gun sighting systems are still there, the same ones that kept a bead on the freighter during a two-hour search that had everyone’s finger near the trigger.

USS Massachusetts Engine Room Exhibit

The guts of this steel beast are laid bare in the engine room, where you can see the power plant that moved 35,000 tons of war machine through the waves. 

Four massive General Electric turbines fed by eight oil-fired boilers gave her the muscle to chase down enemies. 

She guzzled 24 tons of fuel every hour at full throttle, enough to drive her 15,000 miles at cruising speed. 

Her propellers are monsters – each one weighs 17.5 tons and spans 17 feet. 

The fire control systems could pump 43,000 gallons of water per minute, enough to fill five backyard pools, a necessity when your ship might become an inferno after a direct hit.

USS Massachusetts Main Battery Turret Exhibit

The big guns on Massachusetts are a sight that’ll make your jaw hit the deck. 

You can walk through the massive armored barbettes that protected the machinery that made these weapons of mass destruction function. 

Each gun barrel tips the scales at over 100 tons and could hurl a shell as heavy as a compact car more than 20 miles. 

Loading these beasts was a ballet of muscle and machinery – shells rode hoists from the bowels of the ship in a complex dance that took 90 seconds per round. 

The turrets could swing at 4 degrees every second, tracking enemy ships trying to escape their deadly reach.

Women Protecting US Exhibit

This exhibit is New England’s first real look at how women served their country in uniform, often forgotten in the testosterone-soaked narratives of war. 

Rare WAVES uniforms from 1942 show how women first formally integrated into the Navy. 

The welding tools on display were used by female hands that built the very ships that carried men to battle from the nearby Fore River Shipyard. 

Personal items from nurses who patched up broken bodies on hospital ships during Korea give a human face to their quiet heroism.

Titanic: Birth and Death of a Titan Exhibit

At the Maritime Museum, the Titanic exhibit lets you walk the doomed liner’s passages and see menus from her elegant dining rooms while exploring a 28-foot model of history’s most famous shipwreck. 

This beast of a model weighs over 800 pounds and took six months to construct for a 1953 film. 

Authentic White Star Line items – the same fancy plates and serving gear used on Titanic’s sister ships – give you a taste of that lost luxury. 

Scale models of her massive steam engines show the industrial heart that powered this floating palace before the ice tore open her belly.

The Fritz-X Guided Bomb Exhibit

Tucked away in Massachusetts’ collection is a weapon that changed naval warfare forever – the Fritz-X guided bomb. 

This nasty piece of Nazi tech sits there painted training-weapon blue, with too little explanation of why it’s so important. 

Weighing 3,450 pounds, this flying death could punch through 5 inches of armor plate like it was cardboard. 

Just two of these monsters sent the Italian battleship Roma to the bottom in 1943, proving that no ship was safe from air attack. 

The radio control system was so advanced that Allied ships were sitting ducks until special jamming gear was cooked up to scramble its brain.