General History: USS Nevada - Tanking Nukes to the Face
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- Опубликовано: 11 мар 2023
- USS Nevada, the first of the Standard-type battleships, went from a boring career to one filled with excitement the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The only battleship to get underway during the attack, she would proceed to spend the rest of the war bombarding both German and Japanese forces.
In this she would be very successful and never take any real damage. Her legend of toughness would come later. When, as one of the targets at Operation Crossroads, Nevada would shrug off two nukes with relatively minor damage.
Even being used as a target ship wasn't enough, on its own, to sink this stubborn old warhorse.
Further Reading:
www.amazon.com/Attack-Pearl-H...
www.amazon.com/Day-Infamy-60t...
www.amazon.com/Operation-Cros...
www.amazon.com/Silver-State-D...
www.amazon.com/U-S-Battleship...
On December 7th she managed to raise steam because her engineering officer, a man who had been an NCO and raised up to be a commissioned officer through a navy program knew every trick in the book. He received a Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions that day but it was kept secret. As far as the Japanese knew she was sunk and destroyed. The navy kept it that way.
Here’s a little more to the story of USS Nevada getting underway on Dec 7, 1941 when none of the other BBs did. The previous comment on the Engineering Officer in Charge is correct. When I was a student at the US Naval Postgraduate School in 1991, NPS brought in the Officer of the Deck of USS Nevada that morning to talk to us and related the following story.
Ships in port normally only keep one boiler going to generate electrical power but rotate which boiler they’re using at intervals to keep wear and tear consistent across the system. He told us that every ship would rotate their boilers at different intervals. Some used one boiler for each port visit and switched the next time they came into port. Others switched boilers once per day. Nevada had the practice of switching boilers once per shift.
Nevada’s shift change was scheduled for 0800. When the attack commenced at 0755 the new boiler was almost up to steam while the old one was, of course, hot. Neither was at full pressure to begin movement and two boilers at full pressure was the minimum necessary for propulsion.
As the attack began he called the engineering officer and told him to keep the old boiler hot, bring it up to full pressure and get all the other boilers on line ASAP. That’s when the engineering officer started his magic that was previously mentioned. Nevada began her trip past Battleship Row once that second boiler got fully ready. None of the other battleships that day had a second boiler almost ready to come online which is why only Nevada got underway.
Its little things like this that get lost to time.@@raycollins4328
Another on the list of ships that should have been preserved. She and her crew definitely earned it.
Good info about the storage temperature of powder affecting ballistic performance!
This is a fantastic video!
A very tough ship . Atleast she wasn't scrapped.
During Operations Crossroads when she was repainted Orange, her name was struck off of the Naval books and she was renamed Scarlet Fever for Test Able!.
Very nice and informative video! Look forward to more.
You do excellent, informative & very interesting videos. I'm glad I found you !
They should raise the Nevada and turn her in to a museum
I love your writing
I sometimes wonder if, in hindsight, the Nevada would have been better off to simply stay at her berth rather than try to move out for action given her beaching just a few miles away.
Should have been made a museum
The irony of the whole ALL-OR-NOTHING versus DISTRIBUTED armor debate is that virtually no All-or-Nothing battleships were tested to the same degree as the distributed designs and the few that were badly damaged tended to do worse than distributed designs. For various reasons, all-or-nothing battleships didn't fight nearly as much and pretty much never endured the same kind of pounding that several ships with distributed armor did. German capital ships, notorious for being difficult to sink, were all distributed designs. Meanwhile, there really is no example of an All-or-Nothing ship withstanding the same kind of punishment as ships like SMS Seydlitz or HMS Tiger.
I am not arguing that All-or-Nothing is in fact inferior, but nor am I arguing it is superior. I am simply observing that using historical example alone, the Distributed Armor designs tend to have more actual evidence of their efficacy to look to, even though it is generally asserted that All-or-Nothing is the superior system. Ironic.
Yamato and Musashi took 10-13 and 19-20 torpedoes before sinking, Bismarck only took 5-6, Repulse only took 5, Conte De Cavour and Dulio only took one, Kongo and Yamashiro both only took two, etc.
If you want to talk about naval gunfire, sure Bismarck took 400, but most of those were 4-inch, 5.2-inch, 6-inch, and 8-inch shells, and only a few dozen were 14 and 16-inch shells. Scharnhorst didn't take all too much damage from Duke of York and destroyer torpedoes before sinking, and Tirpitz capsized pretty quickly to those Tallboy hits. Kirishima sank to 20 hits from Washington, Bretagne sank to only four main battery hits from Hood, Valiant, and Resolution, etc, etc.In fact, if Hood used the all or nothing armor scheme, Bismarck's shell that hit the 5-7-inch upper-works armor and exploded would have simply passed through harmlessly without exploding.
For a comparison, battles involving ships with all or nothing armor scheme were somewhat rare due to the lack of BB vs BB engagements in WW2, but Prince of Wales survived three battleship caliber shells from Bismarck and four 8-inch shells from Prinz Eugen in great condition, and went on to fire on Bismarck two more times. South Dakota survived 42 hits, including a few 14-inch shells from Kirishima, with complete watertight integrity. Other than that, AoN battleships usually remained almost undamaged in their battleship engagement. Massachusetts was only straddled and near missed by Jean Bart's main battery, an only took damage from an 8-inch shore battery and a few 6-inch cruiser shells, Washington was only hit by a 6-inch shell from Kirishima's secondary battery, Duke of York was only hit by two 11.1-inch shells from Scharnhorst before she disabled Scharnhorst's forward turrets, while West Virginia, California, and Tennessee completely annihilated Yamashiro before she could make any hits.
@@metaknight115 You kind of reinforce the point I was making: All or Nothing has less in the historical record to demonstrate its efficacy, hence the irony that it is lauded as the superior system despite having less opportunity to actually prove itself such in practice.
As I said, this is not me arguing for or against one scheme over the other, just the observation that history has less to say about the merits of one system than the other.
Well in the case of armor, you can pretty easily see which is better by the design, and knowing the steel quality involved. Regardless of whether or not it got shot by other battleships.
All-or-nothing is an objectively better armor scheme, simply because it is more efficient. Whether or not a ship with turtleback and/or distributed armor was better protected than contemporary all-or-nothing ships is really irrelevant. Because that same ship would have been even better protected if they had all-or-nothing.
Even the Queen Elizabeths which were better armored than the Nevada in almost every way, would have either been lighter, or even better armored had they used the all-or-nothing scheme.
Bismarck is another example: while generally well armored. If she had an all-or-nothing scheme she would have either been significantly lighter with the same protection, or would have been significantly better armored with the same weight. As she had a lot of frankly useless armor that did nothing to actually keep her from sinking (the 145mm upper, fore and aft belts for example)
@@bullreeves1109 Well, that is the thing I am talking about: ON PAPER, All-or-Nothing is arguably better, but rarely did an All-or-Nothing ship get the chance to prove it in practice to the same degree. It is a reminder that not everything can be argued entirely with historical data alone, because sometimes history just doesn't have the desired data to offer.
If Pearl Harbor didn’t happen was Oklahoma gonna be retired due to engine problems?
As far as I've read no. Oklahoma had triple expansion reciprocating engines, essentially a big version of what powers a steam locomotive. Nevada her sister had turbine engines. High pressure "dry" steam spins a turbine that is either mechanically linked through reduction gears to the props or it turns a turbo generator that generates current to run huge electric Motors that spin the props.
Of the two systems turbines allow a ship to maintain full speed until they run out of fuel. Reciprocating engines can't maintain that kind of performance. Their very motion will start to tear themselves apart if run too hard. The navy was unhappy with the performance of American made turbines so hedged their bets by putting older technology engines in Oklahoma.
The Nevadas were the oldest standards in the fleet but the New Yorks and the even older Arkansas were still in commission on December 7th.
I've always found the story of Nevada extremely overrated. Yea, she survived two nukes, but so did USS New York, so did USS Pennsylvania, so did....almost IJN Nagato. Several lightly armored cruisers also survived two nukes. What Nevada survived was nothing special, she just gets all the credit for it.
As for five days of target practice, I think that more or so displays to poor gunnery of USS Iowa. I remember a Drachinifel drydock video claiming that the hit rate was only 2%.
More impressive was Nevada's actions during WW2 but people only remember Nevada from Operation Crossroads.
@@diegoarias7774 Not really. While Big Mammie was duking it out with Jean Bart and the rest of the Vichy France navy, Washington was beating the living Christ out of Kirishima and Ayanami, and Duke of York was sending Scharnhorst to the ocean floor, Nevada was stuck to pounding a bunch of sand
@@metaknight115
I agree with almost everything you said, except one thing: Massachusetts’s duel with Jean Bart wasn’t much of an achievement (at least not in the way Second Guadalcanal or North Cape were). Jean Bart was incomplete and stationary, and in spite of that, Massachusetts somehow didn’t thoroughly destroy her, to the point Ranger had to finish the job for her.
@@metaknight115 Nevada may not have gotten into the slugfest’s she was designed for, but she dang well did good service. Her surviving all that whilst being incredibly old and outdated is a credit to her designers. The fact that Iowa didn’t sink her doesn’t say much as she was being used as a target for training for a reason. The new guys had to learn somehow.
Like Yamato