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It's highly probable that the last battleships; USS Pennsylvania, USS New York, USS Arkansas, USS Nevada, and the battleship IJN Nagato were the last battleships ever sunk. These vessels were sunk during tests (target practice) from 1946 thru 1948.The only record of a battleship being sunk in May 2009 is the WW2 battleship AP-145 (known as both the USS Gen. Harry Taylor and the USNS Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg) which was sunk off the Florida coast to provide an artificial reef on May 27, 2009.
USN battleship USS New York (BB34), sunk in the Pacific as a target in 1948.
The Japanese Navy figured it was better for the battleship Yamato to go down fighting; rather than being ingloriously sunk at her moorings.
In 1915, the British ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German u-boat (submarine) and sunk because the central powers believed the ship was being utilized to transport contraband (war materials) to the United Kingdom.
Possibly less than a dozen SS merchant ships were torpedoed by I-Boats off the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and California. Only the battleship, USS Oklahoma is known to be sunk between California and Hawaii; along with a cluster of US Navy cruisers, destroyers, and submarines sunk as targets after the war. The USS Oklahoma sunk after the war in '46, while being towed to Calfornia for re-cycling (scrapping), her cables snapped (parted) and she sunk at sea. Oklahoma was raised from the bottom of Pearl Harbor after being sunk there on December 7, 1941 (she sunk twice).