which long-gone 20th-century ship would you like as a museum today?

[Owens Z]

Preserving ships is an expensive business. Apart from HMS Belfast in London the UK has not saved any major warships from the last century.
Worth a new thread to look for candidates and places?

We don't yet have much perspective, but I suspect that continuing into the far future, the 20th will be considered a key century for world history (political, economic, military, technological, scientific, and cultural history). Inspired by member UK75, let's discuss—If you were given the free choice, which one ship of historical significance from the 20th century, gone in real life, would you have preserved intact for the edification and enjoyment of people today and the centuries to come? A ship built by any country. We won't consider here wrecks now rusting on the seafloor (perhaps recoverable by future tech, like Space Battleship Yamato), but only ships that were dismantled in a scrapyard and hence definitively gone. Feel free to weigh in with your own choice.

 

[Owens Z]

London has HMS Belfast...

I suppose if the RN had only one opportunity to preserve a major vessel this was a pretty good choice.

...Saving Belfast was a massive achievement I think, very few WW2 ships survive outside of the USA.

I enjoyed my visit aboard veteran light cruiser HMS Belfast, now a museum anchored in the Thames, although I accidentally whacked my head passing a hatchway through one of her armored bulkheads. The steel, of course, had no give at all, and a headache troubled me the rest of the day.

The UK has a good selection of her earlier creations on display, like Mary Rose, steamship Great Britain by the formidable Isambard Kingdom Brunel, clipper Cutty Sark, ironclad HMS Warrior, historic Turbinia, and of course Nelson's flagship. Which now-vanished 20th-century vessel would you choose to join those and the 20th century's Belfast, cruiser Caroline, monitor M33, and liner Queen Mary as a museum ship?

 

[Owens Z]

For myself, I would have liked to see HMS Vanguard retained as a training/museum ship but as maintenance becomes more and more costly (Check out USS Texas for example) it becomes harder to justify. How many ships will be retained at all in the future?
Bloody sad imho, the future is where these ships should be going to, not the breakers.

Warspite is another loss to history. She decided that she wasn't going to the breakers...

I recall Oscar Parkes once wrote that three dreadnought battleships should have been saved: Dreadnought, for she was the first; Vanguard, being the last; and Warspite as she was the greatest.

HMS Vanguard was a fine battleship, but as was discussed when conversion into a museum was mooted, she hadn't actually accomplished anything (some or all of her 15-inch guns had fired in anger, but before Vanguard was conceived).

Understandably, many pine for battleship Warspite, hard-fighting veteran of both world wars. Maybe, in the spirit of make-lemonade-when-given-lemons, the unrepaired 6m hole in the bottom blasted by a Fritz X guided bomb could become a dramatic visitors' entrance: with the museum ship up on concrete pylons in a drydock, escalators would run up and down through the hole, allowing tourists to explore the ship.

Myself, of 20th-century UK vessels I would select stately RMS Aquitania (in service 1914-49) for preservation. The 'Ship Beautiful' was a famous transatlantic liner, and saw service in both world wars as a troop transport, to the Dardanelles and as far away as Australia, New Zealand, and Pearl Harbor. A grand four-stacker like Aquitania as a museum ship would manifest the British shipbuilding, propulsion technology, and seamanship of her time. The museum ship's hull would not be drab liner black, but rather a spectacular WW1-style dazzle camouflage paintjob. Perhaps like preserved Liberty ships John W. Brown and Jeremiah O'Brien, the four-stacker could even still put to sea under her own power from time to time. I would love to visit a working engine room, although doubtless the ship's restored first-class accommodations would get the most attention from tourists.

 

[Owens Z]

How about a museum ship of German battlecruiser SMS Goeben? Commissioned in 1912, she (or he, as per German ships?) was ostensibly the Ottoman navy's Yavuz Sultan Selim from August 1914 and saw heavy fighting, and after the German crew went home in late 1918, she continued as an actual Turkish warship for decades. The 283mm guns remained fireable until the early 1950s. Before the aging warship was towed to a scrapyard in 1973, the Turks offered to sell her to West Germany, for use there as a floating museum, but the Bonn government declined.

In our alternate history, restored to approximately her 1912-14 appearance and flying a big Reichskriegsflagge ensign, the veteran battlecruiser could be visited today at the Deutsche Schifffahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven, or on display by the Hamburg Maritime Foundation in the port where the ship had been built. Twelve euro per adult. (Admittedly, there might be even more objections within the Germany of the 2020s to a militaristic museum than there had been in the 1960s/70s.)

 

[Desertfox]

USS Enterprise, USS Phoenix (I know she's a wreck... one of her sisters would do), one of the Kongos, and one of the big 8" IJN heavy cruisers, one of the Splendid Cats, One of the Richeliues, HMS Rodney.

 

[publiusr]

As much as I love S.S. UNITED STATES, my pick would have been the radar picket sub Triton---Jules Verne made reality.

 

[Nicknick]

There are many warships kept as museum ships but almost no freighter (at least one Liberty and one Victory ship) and almost none of the great passenger liners (after the sinking of the United States, the Queen Mary will be the last).

As a German, I would have loved to see one of the Kaiser class ships as a museum ship. They look very beautiful with their 4 funnel arrangement and the Kronprinzessin Caecilie had the most powerful(total 46.000 PS) and advanced steam engine ever built in a ship. Each of the two engines were built as two quadruple expansion engines with eight cylinders, with the high pressure cylinders in the middle and the low pressure cylinder at the ends. The arrangement enabled complete mass balance.

Their barock style interior I also fascinating to see, quite a pinnacle of era which ended with WW1.

Despite that, the French Normandie (1935) would be great to see, it might have had the most luxurious and elegant ship interior ever.

 

[Dilandu]

HMS Warspite, I think.

 

[Arjen]

Ocean going tug Zwarte Zee, 1963