World War II Battleship USS "Missouri" Kit, by Aurora. WOW! An ORIGINAL, UNOPENED, MINT-IN-BOX, UNBUILT, STILL FACTORY-SEALED, PERFECT-CONDITION AURORA from 1972!! And it's one of the most important ships of World War II, gang, in glorious 1/600 scale... the USS "Missouri" (BB-63) ("Mighty Mo" or "Big Mo") was (and is) a U.S. Navy Iowa-class battleship, and was the fourth ship of the United States Navy to be named in honor of the U.S. state of Missouri. "Missouri" was the LAST battleship built by the United States, and was the site of the surrender of the Empire of Japan which ended World War II. "Missouri" was ordered in 1940 and commissioned in June 1944. In the Pacific Theatre of World War II she fought in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and shelled the Japanese home islands, and she fought in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. She was decommissioned in 1955 into the United States Navy reserve fleets (the "Mothball Fleet"), but reactivated and modernized by order of President Ronald Reagan in 1984 as part of the 600-ship Navy plan, and fought as recently as the 1991 Gulf War! "Missouri" received a total of eleven battle stars for service in World War II, Korea, and the Persian Gulf, and was finally decommissioned on 31 March 1992, but remained on the Naval Vessel Register until her name was struck in January 1995. In 1998 she was donated to the USS "Missouri" Memorial Association and became a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii near the sunken battleship "Arizona"...so VERY fitting, as the war in the Pacific Theatre began with "Arizona" being sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl December 7, 1941 and ended with representatives of the Imperial Japanese Government signing the surrender papers onboard the "Missouri" in 1945. Again, Poptoppers, this is an ORIGINAL and RARE kit from the glory days of the "Big A" Auroras...and it's still shrink-wrapped, just as if you pulled it from the shelf at your local Hobby Shop almost 40 years ago. (Yes, kiddies, there were such a things as "Hobby Shops" back in the day, before the internet made them all vanish.) Don't surrender this "Missouri" to another collector making a pre-dawn attack! It would live on as a day of infamy. Only one in stock.