Why Is San Pedro Called “Battleship Country”?

The Battle Fleet comes to San Pedro Bay.

On August 9, 1919, Admiral Hugh Rodman's newly organized Pacific Fleet arrived in San Pedro Bay aboard its flagship, USS New Mexico, with other warships. USS Mississippi had also sailed west that summer to take up her new base at San Pedro; the Navy's ship history does not give her exact arrival date. For roughly two decades, the San Pedro–Long Beach anchorage served as the Battle Fleet’s home port. Battleships returned from exercises, took on supplies, and sent their crews ashore. The harbor offered deep water, access to training areas near the Channel Islands, and proximity to Southern California’s oil supplies.

The concentration of ships was substantial. By the fall of 1934, the local anchorage held a force that included fourteen battleships, two aircraft carriers, fourteen cruisers, and sixteen support ships, according to Beigel. Ships such as USS California, USS Arizona, USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, USS Maryland, and USS Mississippi gave the anchorage a changing skyline of masts and gun turrets. Their sailors visited local businesses, played sports, and made homes with their families in the harbor area. Beigel later gave the era its name in Battleship Country: The Battle Fleet at San Pedro–Long Beach, California, 1919–1940.

The waterfront that kept the fleet running

A home port required more than water deep enough for battleships. It needed a way to move people, fuel, mail, food, and equipment between shore and ships at anchor. The 22nd Street landing area was one of the human connections to that fleet. As preserved in local museum memory, whaleboats brought sailors ashore there: the first step of a sailor's trip into San Pedro, and the last before returning to the ship. Beigel's history also describes the Navy's shore landings and the daily boat traffic between the anchorage and town. The precise historic berth used by each ship's boats deserves confirmation against period harbor plans and photographs.

Fuel followed a different route. Beigel describes Navy oil storage ashore and a pipeline to a dock at 22nd Street. Barges took the fuel from that dock to the anchored battleships. Repair ships, including USS Vestal and USS Medusa, provided maintenance near the breakwater. Shore boats, fuel barges, piers, tanks, and floating workshops together made a fleet of enormous ships workable in a busy commercial harbor. This is why the story belongs to San Pedro's working waterfront as much as to the warships offshore.

Sailors had a life ashore.

The harbor’s Navy history survives in its buildings and gathering places. The Army and Navy YMCA opened at 921 South Beacon Street in 1926. Its lounges, gymnasium, swimming pool, and 410-bed dormitory gave service members a place to rest and connect while ashore. The building still stands as Harbor House.

At Cabrillo Beach, the public Bath House opened in 1932, during the Battle Fleet years. It provided changing and shower facilities, beach rentals, and gathering space at the end of a Pacific Electric streetcar line. For families looking out toward the breakwater, Cabrillo Beach was part of the shared geography of a naval town. The Bath House was a public recreational building rather than a Navy installation, and it survives today.

Athletics connected shipmates with spectators. Battleship baseball teams played at Bloch Field; San Pedro’s Navy Field also hosted fleet sports. Beigel describes the city-run Navy Field’s two baseball diamonds, along with a basketball stadium and pool serving sailors. These games could lead to contests far beyond the harbor. In 1927, USS California won the Battle Fleet baseball championship and met USS Wright, champion of the Scouting Fleet, for the U.S. Fleet title at Guantánamo Bay. California won the middle game 7–1, but Wright took the first and third games, winning the series two games to one. A surviving scorecard and photographs of the 1927 series identify the teams and venue. A 1930 tournament program also records a meeting between the baseball clubs of battleships USS Maryland and USS California, again at Guantánamo. Wright went on to win fleet titles in 1930 and 1931. The games in Cuba show how the shipboard rivalries familiar to San Pedro traveled with the fleet.

The crews also competed on the water. The Battenberg Cup began as a challenge trophy for enlisted boat crews, whose cutter and whaleboat races made the ships' rivalries visible. The Navy's photograph of the cup's engraved winners records USS Arkansas among the repeated winners of the late 1920s; USS Utah also won in October 1928. A Navy photograph published in All Hands shows USS Arizona's winning crew posing with the cup in 1931. USS Tennessee won in 1937, and USS West Virginia won the final prewar race in 1940. The trophy was aboard West Virginia when she sank at Pearl Harbor and survived. Fleet Forces Command recounts that history. The winners belong to the story of the Battle Fleet, although the available records do not place every one of those races in San Pedro Bay.

San Pedro mourned with USS Mississippi.

The bond between the fleet and the community was also visible in grief. On June 12, 1924, a fire in USS Mississippi’s No. 2 gun turret during gunnery practice off the coast killed forty-eight men. Five days later, the Navy held a funeral at Trona Field in San Pedro. The San Pedro Bay Historical Society records 1,200 people standing beside the coffins and another 2,700 sailors observing the service.

The memorial plaque displayed in the Battleship IOWA Museum brings that moment into the present. It reminds visitors that “Battleship Country” was home to crews and shipmates, and that their losses were felt ashore.

That relationship also mattered when the surrounding community needed help. After the destructive 1933 Long Beach earthquake, the Navy sent thousands of sailors and Marines ashore to provide relief. Beigel describes rescue and firefighting parties and a medical unit from the cruiser USS Omaha. The fleet that depended on the harbor for a home port could, in an emergency, help its neighbors in return.

A later generation of battleships

The Battle Fleet’s regular home port era ended when the Navy kept its major combat ships in Hawaii in 1940. Decades later, the harbor played another role in battleship history. Long Beach Naval Shipyard played a role in the 1980s reactivation and modernization of Iowa-class ships. USS New Jersey, for example, arrived at Long Beach in 1981 to be returned to service.

Battleships continued to visit or be based in the area. Then, in 2012, USS Iowa arrived at the Port of Los Angeles and opened to visitors that July. She remains an accessible link to the ships, sailors, and waterfront communities behind the name.

San Pedro is called Battleship Country because the ships were part of the harbor’s working and civic life. The fleet depended on its landings, oil dock, barges, and repair ships; its crews came ashore to rest, compete, and celebrate; and their losses were mourned here. Families waited, worked, reunited, and in some cases made lasting homes around the harbor. The Great White Fleet’s 1908 arrival introduced the spectacle, the Battle Fleet’s two decades made it a way of life, and wartime homecomings, the later shipyard, the museum, and LA Fleet Week carried the connection forward.