Sixty-seven years ago this morning, Japanese planes bombed and strafed the state's namesake battleship, the USS Pennsylvania, as she sat in dry-dock at Pearl Harbor.

The mighty battlewagon suffered damage but survived to carry the war to the Japanese across the Pacific in famous campaigns: Saipan, Guam, Palau, Leyte Gulf, Okinawa.

Scuttled in the South Pacific in 1948, she's been resting on the bottom for 60 years.

But two of her 14-inch diameter gun barrels, large enough around for a sailor to crawl inside, have been lying in a Navy depot since their removal during a 1944 refit.

And soon they'll be coming to a Centre County museum -- if a group of volunteers can scare up about $50,000.

The 66-ton barrels will be mounted on a concrete cradle built this year outside the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg with $200,000 in state money.

But transporting the guns by truck from the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., will cost another $75,000.

Friends of the Pennsylvania Military Museum, a volunteer group, has so far raised about $25,000. The group had hoped to have the guns mounted by Veterans Day, but the downturn in the economy apparently stalled donations. Now the museum hopes to have them on display next year.

"We're shooting for late spring or early summer," said Bill Leech, the director.

Hauling such massive items across three states is a challenge.

"It takes two months just to get all the state permits [from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania]," said David Rhoades, 77, of Centre County, a Korean War veteran who is coordinating the gun project. "It's a logistical nightmare."

The guns will be part of a larger display outside the museum that will include a stone-and-shrubbery outline of the ship's 612-foot-long hull and an interpretive center inside the building.

The museum already owns a bell and other artifacts from the Pennsylvania, but the guns clearly will be the showpiece.

Once the largest in the world, they were eclipsed in the run-up to World War II by the 16-inch guns of modern ships and then positively dwarfed by the 18-inch monsters of the two largest battleships ever built, the Japanese navy's Yamato and Musashi.

Still, the Pennsylvania's weapons weren't exactly pea-shooters, firing 1,500-pound shells some 15 miles.

"I could actually see the projectiles coming out of the gun," said Bill Gettig, 82, of Centre County, a Beaver Falls native who served as a quartermaster second-class on the ship.

"From my battle station on the bridge, you could look down on the first two turrets. There would be a sudden rush of air into the vacuum [as the guns fired]. You could feel that."

The shells emerged three at a time. Mr. Gettig said he could trace them as they headed to the target, the three images merging into one as they grew more distant.

The Pennsylvania dished out 6,854 of those shells in the Pacific campaigns, but she was also on the receiving end more than once in her career.

Launched in 1915 before a throng of 20,000 at Newport News, Va., BB-38 missed out on World War I because she burned oil instead of coal and no oil tankers could be spared to carry fuel to England.

But she would make up for that lack of action. On Dec. 7, 1941, she was in dry-dock with her screws removed when the Japanese attacked.

The ship took a bomb hit on the boat deck that wiped out a gun crew, but Japanese torpedoes could not penetrate the dry-dock caisson. The ship was among the first to return fire from its anti-aircraft batteries and emerged from the attack with minor damage.

After repairs, the Pennsylvania took part in the Aleutian Islands campaign near Alaska and then supported invasions throughout the Pacific.

In August 1945, shortly before Japan's surrender, the Pennsylvania was hit again, this time by a torpedo from a Japanese bomber off Okinawa. The blast blew off the screws on the starboard side and killed 19 sailors in their quarters in the stern compartments, many of them Mr. Gettig's friends from the quartermaster ranks.

He had just left the area to take a shower.

"[The blast] knocked me down, and when I got up, there was water everywhere," he recalled.

He ran up a ladder. The emergency "zebra doors" closed, sealing the men below to drown. "My shipmates that were playing poker and taking it easy were all killed," said Mr. Gettig, longtime owner of Gettig Technologies in Spring Mills.

The ship almost sank that day.

"But, by the Herculean efforts of the ship's repair parties and the prompt assistance of two salvage tugs, the flooding was brought under control," reads the history on the USS Pennsylvania Web site.

After the war, the Pennsylvania joined other ships for atomic tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946. It survived two nuclear blasts in July of that year. But the ship was too radioactive for salvage, and in 1948 she was scuttled off the island of Kwajalein.

Some of the guns from the front turrets did not go down with the ship.

By August of 1944, barrels originally installed in 1935 had worn out. The Navy replaced them with newer guns from other ships. Three of the old barrels ended up at the depot in Virginia. Navy researchers cut 30 feet from one of them for experiments.

But two others, including one made by the Midland Steel Corp. near Philadelphia, sat intact in the "boneyard" until 1999. They were slated for scrap, but the officer in charge of the depot contacted the museum. When he traveled to Penn State University to visit a lab conducting naval research, he met with Mr. Leech and Joseph Horvath, the museum's educator, and they came up with a plan.

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission would pay to construct the concrete cradle, clean up the guns and build the interpretive display.

Now the volunteer group has to do the rest.

Anyone interested in donating may write a check to: Friends of the Pennsylvania Military Museum, Box 160A, Boalsburg, PA 16827.