USS North Dakota (BB 29)
USS North Dakota, a 20,000-ton Delaware class battleship, was built at Quincy, Massachusetts. Commissioned in April 1910, she generally operated with the Atlantic Fleet along the U.S. east coast and in the Caribbean area for most of her career. She participated in the Mexican intervention in April-October 1914, served as a gunnery and engineering training ship during the First World War, and took part in aerial bombing tests off the Virginia Capes in 1921. When the Navy formally adopted hull numbers in 1920, she was designated BB-29.
North Dakota also made a number of more distant cruises. In November 1910, she steamed across the Atlantic to visit England and France. The battleship returned to European waters in late 1919, when she visited ports throughout the Mediterranean Sea while on a mission to bring home the remains of the U.S. Ambassador to Italy. During a Naval Academy Midshipmen's training cruise in 1923, she went to Scandinavia, Scotland and Spain.
The Washington naval limitations treaty rendered North Dakota excess to the U.S. Navy's battleship allowance, and she was decommissioned in November 1923. Demilitarized in 1924, she was to be converted to a mobile target and was redesignated "unclassified". North Dakota was sold for scrapping in March 1931.
