USS Nevada (BB-36)

USS Nevada was a landmark in the history of the battleship — the lead ship of a class that broke sharply with everything before it. Commissioned on 11 March 1916 and built by the Fore River yard at Quincy, Massachusetts, she and her sister USS Oklahoma introduced a cluster of innovations that would shape every American battleship that followed.

She was the first US battleship designed to burn oil rather than coal, the first to mount her main guns in triple turrets, and — most influential of all — the first built to the “all or nothing” armour scheme. Nevada spent the last months of the First World War based in Irish waters, then passed the inter-war decades as a mainstay of the battle fleet, modernised at the end of the 1920s with new tripod masts and improved protection.

Nevada’s ten 14-inch (356 mm) guns were carried in an unusual mix of two twin and two triple turrets. But her real significance lay beneath the waterline, in the all-or-nothing principle: rather than spreading thinner armour across the whole hull, her designers concentrated very heavy protection — a belt around 343 mm thick — over the vital spaces of magazines and machinery, and left the ends effectively unarmoured.

The reasoning was that at long battle ranges only heavy armour was worth carrying at all; thin plate merely added weight while stopping nothing. It was a radical idea in 1914, and it proved so sound that it became the standard for battleship design worldwide. Oil firing, meanwhile, gave cleaner, more responsive steaming and a longer reach than the coal-burners she replaced, though her top speed remained a stately 20.5 knots.

On the morning of 7 December 1941 Nevada was moored on Battleship Row when the Japanese attack fell on Pearl Harbor. Struck by a torpedo and several bombs, she alone among the battleships managed to get under way — and the sight of the old ship steaming defiantly down the channel amid the smoke and wreckage became one of the enduring images of the disaster.

It also made her a target. Japanese dive-bombers concentrated on Nevada in the hope of sinking her in the harbour mouth and corking the entire base; to prevent it, her crew deliberately ran her aground at Hospital Point. Some 60 of her men were killed, and she settled into the mud — battered, beached, but unlike USS Arizona not beyond saving.

Nevada was refloated in February 1942 and sent to the yards for a transformation. Her old cage-and-tripod silhouette was swept away and rebuilt, her feeble original anti-aircraft outfit replaced by a bristling modern battery of 5-inch, 40 mm and 20 mm guns, and radar fitted for gunnery and search. The reconstruction turned a First World War dreadnought into an effective mid-century warship.

By 1943 she was back in the fight, opening her second war far to the north: in May she bombarded Japanese positions during the retaking of Attu in the Aleutians, then crossed to the Atlantic for convoy-escort duty. The battleship the enemy had left for dead at Pearl Harbor had become a roving heavy gun, and her most famous work still lay ahead.

On 6 June 1944 Nevada lay off the coast of France as part of the Normandy bombardment force, and at dawn her 14-inch guns opened fire in support of the landings at Utah Beach. For weeks she stood off the coast, dropping her heavy shells on German batteries, strongpoints and troop concentrations far inland, and taking her turn in the fire that helped break open the Cherbourg peninsula.

In August she moved to the Mediterranean for Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, bombarding the coast around Toulon and Marseille. Alongside veterans of the European war like HMS Warspite, the salvaged Pearl Harbor battleship had become one of the reliable siege guns of the Allied navies — able to reach where no field artillery could.

Her war ended where it had begun, in the Pacific. In 1945 Nevada joined the great bombardment fleets off Iwo Jima in February and Okinawa in April, pounding the islands ahead of the Marines and soldiers going ashore. Off Okinawa on 27 March 1945 she was struck by a kamikaze and, days later, by a shore battery — hit hard, but kept in action.

It was a fitting close to an extraordinary arc. The ship that had been bombed and beached in the first hours of America’s war was now among those carrying that war to the doorstep of Japan, her rebuilt guns firing in support of the last great amphibious assaults of the Pacific.

With the war won, Nevada was judged too old for the peacetime fleet and given a grim final duty: a target ship for the Operation Crossroads atomic tests at Bikini Atoll in July 1946. Painted bright orange as the aiming point for the air-dropped bomb, she survived both the air burst and the underwater shot — like the Japanese Nagato moored near her, too tough to be sunk by the new weapon.

Left radioactive and worn out, she was finally expended as a gunnery and torpedo target and sank off Hawaii in 1948. USS Nevada is remembered as the battleship that would not lie down — present at the shattering start of the war and at its atomic epilogue, and defiant to the very end.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Norman Friedman, U.S. Battleships: An Illustrated Design History (Naval Institute Press).