USS Guam was an large cruiser which served with the United States Navy during the last year of World War II. She was the second and last ship of her class to be completed. The ship was the second vessel of the US Navy to be named after the island of Guam, an American territory in the Pacific, and she was assigned the hull number CB-2. Due to her commissioning late in the war, Guam saw relatively limited service during the war. She participated in operations off Okinawa in March–July 1945, including providing anti-aircraft defense for the carrier task force and conducting limited shore bombardment operations. She participated in sweeps for Japanese shipping in the East China and Yellow Seas in July–August 1945. After the end of the war, she assisted in the occupation of Korea and transported a contingent of US Army troops back to the United States. She was decommissioned in February 1947 and placed in reserve, where she remained until she was stricken in 1960 and sold for scrapping the following year. Design The ship was long overall and had a beam of and a draft of . She displaced as designed and up to at full load. The ship had a flush deck with a flared bow and a rounded cruiser stern. She had a large superstructure that included an armored conning tower with a tall tower mast, along with a smaller, secondary conning position further aft. She carried four OS2U Kingfisher or SC Seahawk floatplanes, housed in two hangars, with a pair of aircraft catapults mounted amidships. The ship was powered by four sets of General Electric geared steam turbines, each driving a screw propeller. Steam for the turbines was generated by eight oil-fired Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boilers, which were vented through a large funnel located amidships. The propulsion system was rated to produce , generating a top speed of . The ship had a cruising range of at a speed of . The ship was armed with a main battery of nine L/50 Mark 8 guns in three triple gun turrets, two in a superfiring pair forward and one aft of the superstructure. The secondary battery consisted of twelve L/38 dual-purpose guns in six twin turrets. Two were placed on the centerline superfiring over the main battery turrets, fore and aft, and the remaining four turrets were placed on the corners of the