Ship That Survived Pearl Harbor Met Its End Years Later In Baffling Military 'Experiment'

Now, the USS Nevada endured severe damage long before her mysterious sinking. For one thing, the massive battleship survived the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And then the vessel went on to fight in WWII, where suicide bombers attempted to destroy her. Despite all this, the ship still returned home in a functional state.

From there, the military used the USS Nevada in their atomic bomb testing – but that didn’t bring her down to the depths of the Pacific, either. Instead, she sank in 1948, not as the result of any conflict or bomb-testing program. So what exactly was it that sank the unsinkable ship? Well, thanks to a crew of explorers in 2020, we now have a clearer picture.

The USS Nevada was one of two 27,500-ton battleships constructed in Quincy, Massachusetts, ahead of the WWI effort. After her commission in March 1916, it took two years for the vessel to hit the open seas. Eventually, she headed to the British Isles to aid in the European conflict.

At the end of the war, the ship sailed through the Atlantic, Caribbean and Pacific, completing various exercises and fleet drills along the way. And soon enough, the vessel reached her 10th anniversary of service – receiving modernizations between 1927 and 1930 to make her even tougher at sea.

These upgrades included a set of anti-aircraft guns, a secondary battery, a strengthened superstructure and improved masts. All of this, you see, made the Nevada stronger in both its protection and firepower. And so she returned to service on the Pacific Ocean, joining up with the U.S. Battle Fleet.

What’s more, the Nevada was in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the Navy’s station at Pearl Harbor. She was, in fact, the oldest battleship in the water that day – and the only one able to get underway as the shower of bullets, bombs and suicide planes began to fall.

And as the Nevada moved slowly through the water, she became an easy target for the assailants overhead. Yes, dive bombers swooped and shot at the vessel, and a torpedo launched by the Japanese caused the ship to start leaking, in spite of its updated anti-torpedo fittings. The damage that they caused was not enough to sink her, however.

The Nevada’s war wound didn’t stop her moving, you see – even when gasoline fires began to break out on board. Instead, the ship lumbered on and nearly reached the Navy Yard before grounding on the side of the waterway. The battleship eventually sunk to the bottom, but because the water there was shallow, she was far from lost.

Thankfully, the Navy later beached the USS Nevada and got to work repairing all of the damage that had been caused by the surprise attack. Temporary repairs and quick salvage work had her back on the water in April of 1942 – just four months after the invasion. And the attack on Pearl Harbor itself was the impetus for the United States joining the Allied forces in WWII.

But it seems the Nevada wasn’t quite ready to head straight into battle. Instead, repairmen ensured that she was functional enough to leave Pearl Harbor and head to the west coast of the United States. It was there that the vessel underwent a year-long service to get her shipshape and back on the water with enhanced resources. Workers made sure to boost the anti-aircraft gun battery, for example.

With all of these fittings in place, the ship was ready to return to the front lines – and the Navy put her straight to work. She journeyed from the U.S. mainland to the Aleutian island chain in the North Pacific. There, American forces battled with the Japanese for control of a small island, Attu.

As of June 1942, you see, the Japanese occupied both Attu and the neighboring island of Kiska. They either wanted the islands to shift the U.S. forces’ attention away from Midway Island, which they attacked in the same month. Or, they may have thought that having an Aleutian base could’ve stopped American troops from moving through the Pacific and onto Japan.

Either way, the Japanese held Attu from June 1942 until May 1943, which was when the Nevada – among other resources – regained control of the island. This certainly wasn’t the end for the vessel, though, as the Navy then sent her on another critical mission in the WWII effort. And this time, the ship would have to sail halfway around the world to reach her next post.

The Nevada arrived off of the coast of France to partake in the Normandy Invasion, which is also known as D-Day. Soldiers from the States, Canada and the United Kingdom came together to fight for France’s freedom from Nazi control on June 6, 1944. It took until the end of August to liberate the northern portion of the country, though, and the Allies then regrouped to plan their march into Germany.

Throughout the Normandy Invasion and French liberation, the Nevada remained in the Atlantic. But the ship then shuttled to the south of the country for August and September 1944, before moving onto her next assignment back in the Pacific. Yes, she sailed a long way to reach another important WWII battle.

Back on the Pacific front, the Nevada helped the Allied forces in their final push to conquer Japan. Now, they did so in two major battles of 1945: Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Both conflicts resulted in thousands of deaths on both sides, and the vessel didn’t make it out unscathed, either.

You see, a suicide plane dove into the Nevada on March 27, 1945, and about a week later an artillery shell pierced the vessel. As a result, she temporarily docked just off Okinawa for approximately two months. Then, as America prepared to invade Japan, she rejoined the war effort.

At the time, military officials called their plan to invade Japan, “Operation Downfall.” But they also knew that sending American troops into the country would result in massive losses. President Harry S. Truman therefore authorized another course of action that didn’t involve sending in men on the ground.

So, on August 6, 1945, Truman gave the green light for American forces to fly over Hiroshima and drop “Little Boy,” the code name for the atomic bomb. And three days later, another atomic bomb called the “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki. This led to Japan’s unconditional surrender on August 14, meaning that the Allied forces never had to complete the Operation Downfall invasion.

The Nevada, therefore, didn’t have to partake in any combat past the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions – WWII had ended when the Japanese signed their surrender. But the battleship still kept busy nonetheless. Indeed, she trekked from her final post in the Pacific toward Hawaii, at which point officials deemed the ship too old to rejoin the Naval fleet.

Instead, the Navy began to use the old warship for target practice – for atomic bomb tests, no less. So the battleship shuttled to the Marshall Islands, which sit between Hawaii and Australia. And once the tests began, radioactive weaponry damaged the storied vessel in more ways than one.

Of course, atomic bombs caused physical damage to the Nevada. But the tests also made the ship radioactive, and thus unfit for service in the military altogether. In August 1946, the Navy decommissioned the battleship when she was 30 years old. The vessel’s story didn’t end there, though.

No, the former warship sat inactive for two years before she was taken out to sea one last time. She had returned somewhat close to the Hawaiian Islands, and she fell to her final resting place on the seafloor on July 31, 1948. And while historians had some of the puzzle pieces needed to solve the mystery of this ship’s demise, the discovery in 2020 would shed more light on what really happened.

Although servicemen were present as the Nevada began to sink, they only recorded relative bearings to help relocate the vessel later on. So, rediscovering the shell of the former battleship would be a tough job – and a nearly impossible one if helmed by humans alone.

So, in 2020 two companies joined forces to send the proper technology in search of the Nevada. SEARCH Inc., which manages cultural resources, collaborated with marine robotics specialists Ocean Infinity. The latter sent an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to capture photos and send them to SEARCH for analysis.

Of course, the AUV’s assignment was no small task. The device hit the seafloor and searched a 100-square-mile stretch of land near where eyewitnesses thought that the ship went down. And while it scoured more than 15,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, it found something.

Soon enough, images of the Nevada flooded onto the screens of the land-based team’s computers. And after analyzing the photos, the experts could see that the battleship’s wreckage had landed atop a muddy underwater plain. Interestingly, the battleship had settled upside down and had a 2,000-foot line of debris trailing from its hull.

Both the Nevada’s bow and stern had disappeared from the vessel, too. But finding the busted, upside-down battleship meant a lot to many, including those who worked on board. Former Nevada crewmate Richard Ramsey served in Normandy, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. He told National Geographic in 2020, “It’s really a great thing that they found it.”

And the researchers felt the same way. Maritime archaeologist James Delgado led the mission and served as SEARCH’s senior vice president. He seemingly knew the importance of the Nevada as a symbol of the American people, pointing out that both entities were “stubborn” and “resilient.”

Delgado said, “It struck me, if there was one ship to find that particularly now could speak to something about human nature and particularly Americans, it would be Nevada – stubborn, resilient.” Rediscovering the vessel – and seeing what it was that brought her down – only proved how strong she had been.

As previously mentioned, historians knew a little bit about the events that left the old warship on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The vessel – still painted bright orange after its days as an atomic bomb-drop target – had been towed out to sea. Then, cruisers and planes partook in a four-day naval drill.

Yes, the servicemen and women involved fired rounds and even dropped bombs onto the Nevada. But nothing could sink her until a plane’s torpedo finally did the trick. As National Geographic’s Kristin Romey put it, the blast “did what the Germans and Japanese could not: send Nevada to the bottom of the sea.”

However, a new look at the Nevada has revealed that this may not be entirely accurate. After poring over the footage of the waterlogged vessel, Delgado hypothesized that two torpedoes actually brought down the battleship. He could see “a whole section of the hull just blasted open, exposing the armor, but with the outer skin just peeled back and torn.”

So the possibility that two torpedoes may have taken down the ship was a revelation for the researchers. As SEARCH’s President James Pochurek put it in a 2020 press release, “The discovery of the USS Nevada is another reminder of the powerful human stories lying beneath the waves waiting to be retold.”

Delgado added, “Rising from its watery grave after being sunk at Pearl Harbor, [the USS Nevada] survived torpedoes, bombs, shells and two atomic blasts. The physical reality of the ship, resting in the darkness of the great museum of the sea, reminds us not only of past events but of those who took up the challenge of defending the United States in two global wars.”

And the prospect of rediscovering a piece of history was precisely why Delgado and his peers had dedicated themselves to such searches. He said, “This is why we do ocean exploration – to seek out those powerful connections to the past.” As of May 2020 their work in analyzing the sunken ship continued.

But Ramsey, who served on the Nevada himself, felt the vessel deserved a different send-off. He didn’t mince his words when he said, “They should not have sunk that ship.” And he countered that the ship’s role in a slew of important battles should have solidified it as a WWII memorial.

The USS Missouri was the battleship upon which the Japanese signed their official surrender. That vessel remains afloat – and, as Ramsey suggested for Nevada – it has become a memorial of the War fought nearly a century ago. He even said that the sunken ship “should be tied up next to the Missouri.”

Although the ship’s entire story will eventually unfold, what we know now should be enough to inspire us, according to Ocean Infinity’s Shawntel Johnson. She said, “It is our hope that by sharing the USS Nevada’s story that it not only honors those who served in the Navy and fulfills an important educational role but that in these challenging times it also serves as a symbol of perseverance and courage.”