USS TEXAS
Construction of USS Texas was authorised on 24 June 1910 with the work being awarded to Newport News Shipbuilding. The first steel plates were laid down on the slipway on 17 April 1911 and she was launched on 18 May 1912. She was commissioned into the US Navy on 12 March 1914.
In May Texas was involved in what became known as the ‘Tampico Incident’ when Mexican federal troops detained an American gunboat at Tampico. President Woodrow Wilson ordered that in retaliation US forces should land at Veracruz and seize the customs house.
World War One
In April 1917 the US joined the fighting and Texas was amongst the first units allocated to the war. Later, on 27 September the battleship ran hard aground on Block Island after the captain and navigator misjudged the entrance to Long Island Sound due to a protective minefield. Following repairs, she sailed for Great Britain arriving at Scapa Flow on 11 February 1918 and joined the 6th Battle Squadron of Britain’s Grand Fleet where Texas was tasked with convoy escort duties. With the signing of the Armistice on 11 November at 03:35 on 21 November, she got underway with the Grand Fleet to meet the surrendering German Fleet. The two fleets rendezvoused about 40 nautical miles east of the Isle of May and proceeded to the Firth of Forth.
Inter War Years
The fighting may have been done but the peace had yet to be secured and on 12 December 1918 Texas was one of the battleships that put to sea to escort President Woodrow Wilson onboard the George Washington as he made his way to the Paris Peace Conference.
The battleship made history on 10 March when she became the first American battleship to launch an aircraft, a Sopwith Camel flown by Lieutenant Commander Edward O. McDonnell while the ship was at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. In July 1919 Texas transferred to the newly created US Pacific Fleet where she would spend the next five and a half years.
In January 1924 she returned to the North Atlantic and made a training cruise to Europe. Her main gun armament was tested on 25 November when she sank the incomplete battleship Washington that had been abandoned in compliance with the Naval Arms Limitations Treaties of 1922. In the summer of 1925, she was modernised at Norfolk Navy Yard. On completion she was given the designation of Flagship of the United States Fleet. In January 1928, she transported US President Calvin Coolidge to Havana for the Pan American Conference. Texas would spend the next few years alternating between the Pacific and Atlantic.
European War
In September 1939, Texas was assigned to the Neutrality Patrol, the American effort to keep the war out of the Western Hemisphere.
USS had during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor been at Casco Bay in Maine and with
