I reckon one reason why US has quite a few is simply business - they generate enough revenue to make it worthwhile.
Think of the number of veterans who have served, along with their families, and all those who have ancestors who served - that must be a pretty big number and that’s aside from ordinary tourists.
In Stockholm, instead of a museum in a ship they have a ship in a museum. The whole ship.
Vasa Museum. Does that count?
The list also skips ships like the USS Midway, which is an amazing museum.
At least two. I did not see the HMCS Sackville on the list, and I very much was aboard her not that long ago.
The three number is wrong for the UK. I can think of four off the top of my head:
HMS Belfast
HMS Victory
SS Great Britain
Cutty Sark
Some of you haven’t read the OP carefully enough. Also, SS Great Britain and the Cutty Sark were never military ships. One might even argue that one reason why the UK doesn’t make more of an effort to preserve modern warships is that it prefers to preserve older ships, including non-military ones.
But the real answer to the OP is that the USA is very obviously the outlier whose tradition is the one that requires explanation.
Belfast qualifies, but Victory is 18th century and the other two were commercial not war ships.
I’ve been aboard her too. In Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The OP’s link is a little out-of-date, as HMCS Haida is, to the best of my knowledge, now in Hamilton, Ontario, not Toronto; and is still a museum ship. I visited Haida a few times, when she was in Toronto.
All of our own Belgian museum-ships are non-military AFAIK, but there’s a Soviet submarine you can visit in Zeebrugge.
I wouldn’t call Wisconsin landlocked – it is two of the Great Lakes, and there are still (smaller) navy ships produced in the state. The USS Cobia is a museum submarine in Manitowoc. Hypothetically the Wisconsin could be disassembled an placed on a lake. (It’s too big to fit though the various locks/canals)
Bothe Wisconsin and Missouri are on the Mississippi, but the navigation channel is only 12 feet deep and the battleships have a draft of > 34 feet so that is even a more difficult challenge.
Brian
Here is Wikipedia’s much more comprehensive list of museum ships. It can be sorted by launch date which will let you easily get to the era you consider modern. Not all are warships or even ships (c’mon, a lifeboat?) but OTOH no replicas are included, none of which were warships anyway.
In the UK. those are modern, just US perspective is a little different, old to you is new to us - hence the New Forest
But it’s not only one. There are many; Haida, Sackville, Acadia, Ojibwa, and probably more. The OP is just wrong.
I checked the French article about the Colbert (the French ship that was dismantled). Apparently, it was only kept temporarily as a museum ship for about 15 years, and it wasn’t really envisioned to keep it permanently. Apparently, it requires a lot of maintenance, that costs a lot (they mention half a million euros just to repaint it), nobody was willing to pay for it (and in particular not the permanently money-starved French navy), and it seems that ecologists wanted it gone (I think because of potentially toxic materials in the hull, it’s not clearly explained). Even people living around where it was moored demanded vehemently to get rid of it, it was an issue of interest during the local elections (again, the article doesn’t explain why).
They aren’t kept because they’re too modern, so nobody is interested in preserving them. Of course, two centuries down the road, people would be amazed to visit such antiquities, but few people think that much ahead. That’s a problem for everything, not just for ships, like for instance relatively recent architecture. People don’t see it as historic and romantic, just old and ugly, so it’s an uphill battle to preserve a remarkable example of, say, 1950 housing building or 1900 factory. To give another example, while people clamor for the restoration of even the less remarkable but still lovingly preserved medieval ruined wall, renaissance battlement or Vauban-era fortress, not a single Maginot line fort was, even though they were exceptional examples of 20th century military engineering.
So, IMO, the surprising thing is that the USA keep such ships, not that other countries don’t.
Well, they can’t keep the ships they sent to Lepanto…
Indeed, but you didn’t keep those, either.
Others have quibbled with the specific numbers, but the thing that’s much more common in the US than most other places is WWII era warships maintained as permanent exhibits. Pre and post WWII warship exhibits are much less common everywhere including the US. The only non-WWII US warships of significant size maintained as memorials are USS Constitution (the 1790’s frigate which is technically still an active USN ship), the 1854 sailing sloop Constellation (which used to be presented as the 1790’s frigate Constellation, technically the new ship was a ‘rebuild’ of the old but almost entirely different), the 1890’s cruiser Olympia and the WWI era battleship Texas, though that ship also served in WWII. The Coast Guard cutter Taney dates from the 1930’s and might or not be considered WWII era. That contingent is vastly outnumbered by ships built or at least started during WWII, and the contingent of definitively post WWII museum ships in the US is also much smaller.
Not only is the attitude toward WWII naval power different in the US (it’s part of a longer history in Britain, the French and Soviet navies were comparatively less active in WWII, Germany and Japan lost nearly all* their WWII warships, etc), I think the degree of support for all those monuments is going to decline in the US as time goes on. It isn’t just that the US won WWII. It also won the Spanish War of 1898, Olympia is the only ship of its type left in the world (a steel ‘protected cruiser’), but the organization which runs it has been fighting a basically losing battle to maintain it. WWII ship memorials are more popular IMO in large part because relatives whom living people remember (or even are still alive) served on them or similar ships. Once that isn’t true, there will be too many to support I suspect.
*U-995 is maintained on land at the Laboe monument in Kiel, Germany but Japan is completely devoid of real (rather than simulated) WWII warship memorials.
Texas is the last surviving Dreadnaugt BB but is deteriorating badly. There’s been talk of putting her in a dry berth, as has been done for Mikasa, for thirty years, but it has not happened yet.
As it happens, I wrote to Stephen Colbert when it was rumored that the French were going to scrap her, encouraging him to mention it on his show and offer to kick in some money to help preserve her. Seemed like a natural, given the ship’s name, but I never heard back from him or his staff.
Wisconsin isn’t landlocked at all, and doesn’t need the Mississippi. From Lake Michigan, you can travel via the St Lawrence Seaway out to the Atlantic Ocean. I can’t speak for Navy ships but we have about two billion dollars worth of foreign shipments coming into the Port Of Milwaukee annually. Container/cargo and oil ships are a regular site here.