Top Photo: The unique structure and stamps on the base of the anchor, with “Navy Yard” visible through the marine growth, helped confirm the identity of the USS New Orleans’ bow. Ocean Exploration Trust/ Nautilus Live, NOAA

Ironbottom Sound off the island of Guadalcanal is a target-rich environment for undersea explorers. The site of five major WWII naval battles, the wrecks of warships that litter this stretch of water are so numerous that it becomes inefficient to reel a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) up to the deck of an exploration vessel, only to cruise a few thousand yards, and then redeploy the intricate research device back down into the depths.

As a result, the crew of E/V Nautilus sometimes tows ROV Hercules from one known target to the next, gliding just above the seafloor as a time-saving method. That is how Nautilus Live and Ocean Exploration Trust made a startling discovery in July 2025. While passing over an anomaly towering above the often-featureless seafloor, Hercules’s high-definition cameras spied an alien slab of steel.

Further exploration revealed the previously undiscovered bow section of an American heavy cruiser—a New Orleans-class cruiser to be more specific. The revelation set off a rush to scour US Navy records to account for each of the American vessels lost in the area and her prospective major parts. There were seven ships in the class, all relatively similar. Three of them, bows not always intact but at least accounted for, were sunk during engagements with the Japanese in the area. The others, the USS Tuscaloosa (CA-37), USS Minneapolis (CA-36), USS San Francisco (CA-38), and USS New Orleans (CA-32) survived the war. They would become some of the most combat-decorated American cruisers of World War II.

The wildcard in the mix was a costly and violent engagement off Guadalcanal’s Tassafaronga Point on the night of November 30, 1942. Patrolling an inky black ocean, an American task force attempted to intercept a clandestine enemy resupply effort. They ran headlong into a deadly spread of 44 “Long Lance” torpedoes fired from a squadron of Japanese destroyers.

The USS Northampton (CA-26) was struck by two torpedoes, burned, and sank. Among the severely damaged vessels were the New Orleans and Minneapolis, both of which limped to Tulagi Harbor with nearly mortal wounds. Amazingly, both vessels had their bows severely mangled in the fray, leading researchers to wonder exactly which one they had found on the ocean floor more than 80 years later.

It didn’t take long to account for one of the two smashed forepeak sections. The bow of the USS Minneapolis collapsed and turned under but did not come free that night. As the ship’s action report relates, “the bow section had folded downward at an angle of about 70 degrees but still dangled from the ship.” Navy divers later chopped it loose where it sunk to the bottom of Tulagi Harbor. It is still there in shallow water today, a popular Solomons dive spot.

And, so, there was one major vessel component unaccounted for—the long-missing bow of the cruiser USS New Orleans.

While the battle-scarred warship sailors lovingly called “NO Boat” lasted more than 26 years, this missing portion, left behind after that nearly fatal skirmish, was only attached for less than a decade. 

When the USS New Orleans took shape at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the early 1930s, the idea of a war in the Pacific was no more than a distant thought. On a rainy April day in 1933, a young New Orleanian, Cora S. Jahncke, was the sponsor for its launch. The 18-year-old and her father, the newly retired Assistant Secretary of the US Navy Ernest L. Jahncke, conspired to buck tradition and christen the ship not with the traditional Champagne, but with Mississippi River water. Cora smashed the bottle against the as-not-yet infamous knife-edged bow, and the cruiser named after “The Big Easy” began her illustrious career.

USS New Orleans (CA-32), the flagship of the New Orleans class of heavy cruisers, was heavily damaged in the WWII Battle of Tassafarronga at Guadalcanal when hit by a Japanese torpedo, catastrophically detonating the forward magazines and tearing off nearly one-third of the ship, including the bow. National Archives

When war started for the Americans, the USS New Orleans was there, docked at a pier within Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Robbed of internal power, sailors fed her weapons by hand, giving birth to the slogan and song Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, famously shouted by the ship’s chaplain, Lieutenant Howell M. Forgy. Escaping the “Day of Infamy” with little more than a few dents and scratches, “NO Boat” went on to rescue survivors of the USS Lexington (CV-2) at Coral Sea, shadow aircraft carriers at Midway, and enter the bloody fight off Guadalcanal.

The New Orleans not only lost her bow that night. She staggered away from the conflict with over 180 men in her crew dead or missing. But like the city for which she was named, quitting was never an option. The survivors rallied to patch up the vessel, and she traveled to Australia—backwards—for temporary repairs. With a rudimentary “stub bow” fitted in place, “NO Boat” returned to the United States for upgrades and permanent repairs.

As they pulled into Puget Sound, exhausted New Orleans sailors hoped for a long respite while shipyard workers recreated what amounted to one-fifth of the ship. Little did most of them know, the workers at Bremerton Navy Yard had built New Orleans’ sister, the USS Astoria (CA-34), 10 years earlier. Even as “NO Boat” was struggling to survive, builders in Puget Sound dusted off the Astoria’s blueprints and started work early. When the New Orleans arrived, the crew was confronted with a nearly complete prow awaiting them in drydock. The mating of old, riveted hull and new, welded bow was only misaligned by a small fraction of an inch. 

A year later, in October 1943, “NO Boat” was back in the Pacific, once again complete, ready, upgraded, and pummeling targets at Wake Island with her 8-inch main batteries. In the months after, the vessel crisscrossed the Pacific, most often leveraged to hammer the next steppingstone in America’s island-hopping campaign—the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, and beyond. Near the end, “No Boat” savaged shore positions on Okinawa while her crew kept a wary eye in the skies for kamikaze attacks. She was in the Philippines when the war ended, then hastily dispatched to ports in Asia to secure Japanese warships. She later brought a large compliment of homesick soldiers home from the island of Guam.