They said a reluctant goodby Tuesday to the battleship Missouri, a vessel her captain called "the ship that every sailor in the world envies."

There were public officials--politicians like U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, on hand in 1986 when the venerable, 58,000-ton dreadnought was returned to service and who was the principal speaker at Tuesday's decommissioning ceremonies in Long Beach.

There were members of her current crew--like Capt. A.L. Kaiss, who commanded the world's last active-duty battleship, and Seaman George Tababa, who helped scrub her teakwood decks.

And there were sailors from her past--men like Bob Schwenk, Art Albert and Richard Wilson, who were on the ship when she survived a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, and a few months later, on Sept. 2, 1945, when Japanese officials signed the surrender documents on her deck that ended one of the bloodiest wars in history.

"It's sad," Schwenk said softly, blinking away the tears as a signalman ran down the ship's ensign for the last time.

"They won't bring her back again," the 65-year-old Long Beach resident said. "It's the end of an era."

The last battleship built by the United States, the Missouri was launched Jan. 29, 1944. Harry S. Truman, then the junior senator from the state for which the ship is named, was the main speaker that day, and his daughter, Margaret, smashed the champagne bottle against the bow that sent the ship sliding into New York's East River.

Five months later, equipped with nine 16-inch guns that could hurl 2,700-pound, armor-piercing shells more than 20 miles, the Missouri joined the three sister ships of her class--the Iowa, the New Jersey and the Wisconsin--in some of the closing battles of World War II.

The Missouri was participating in the shore bombardment of Okinawa in the spring of 1945 when Japanese aviators launched a suicide attack against the ship.

"I was a machinist's mate, working damage control, when one of those kamikaze planes hit the ship," Albert, now 65, said Tuesday. "Sure I was scared. . . . When I opened the hatch, there was the wing, right in my face."

Albert said he slammed the hatch shut and escaped the flames, but he said the battered knees he suffered tumbling down a ladder are giving him trouble these days.

After completing operations off Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the Missouri was preparing for the planned invasion of Japan's home islands in the fall of 1945 when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to the war.