The USS Nevada (BB-36) eldest of the old battleships present that day was anchored along the southeast shore of Ford Island's seaplane base just across the main channel from the Navy Yard, She was the northern most capital ship in line on Battleship Row. And being moored singly, as were battleships Arizona, California, and Pennsylvania (in dry dock), while other old "battlewagons" were paired together like Tennessee/West Virginia and Maryland/Oklahoma.
During the first wave of the Japanese torpedo planes, the USS Nevada was hit by one torpedo to the ship's port side, but her old protective bulge armor minimized the damage and immediate counterflooding corrected her list. The senior naval officer aboard at the time, Lt. Commander Francis J. Thomas, ordered Nevada to get underway and she skillfully backed clear from her berth and maneuvered her way without the assistance of any tugs at 0840. Meanwhile, she had taken a couple of bomb hits amidships. The slowly moving battleship was the focus to the ever-present Japanese dive bombers targeting her as she lumbered down the narrow channel, suffering numerous hits and near-misses. Famed Naval historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, describes the scene best.
Down the ship channel she stood, fighting off dive-bombers and at one time surrounded by a curtain of smoke and spray so dense that spectators thought her gone; but most of the bombs were near-misses. A proud and gallant sight she made, with her tattered ensign streaming from the fantail.
She might have made it to sea, but fearing lest she be sunk and block the harbor channel, thus bottling up the rest of the fleet, it was decided to anchor her to one side off a point. Before that directive was carried out successfully, more bombs hit her superstructure and forecastle deck causing massive casualties and fires. Nevada gently went aground on the Navy Yard side of the channel, just south of Ford Island.
The crew valiantly fought the fires while tugs pulled her off the bank and towed her to the other side of the channel. Despite efforts of damage control to stem the flooding in the old leaking battleship, she settled in the shallows there by next day. It would take 2-months time before she was raised and salvaged, brought back to the U.S. to be refitted and modernized to fight again full-strength in 1943. The Nevada was "thoroughly wrecked topside," fifty officers and men of her 1500 crew had been lost.
Battleship USS Nevada--the only warship to sortie from Pearl Harbor that fateful December day.
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References:
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Two-Ocean War. Atlantic Little, Brown & Company, 1963.
hhtp://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/pearlhbr/ph-nv.htm
