Explorers find wreck of Nevada
The stricken battleship loomed out of the smoke and wreckage that morning, hurrying past sunken and burning ships, straining to get out of Pearl Harbor and into the open sea.
Past the doomed USS Arizona, which exploded in a fireball, the old ship rushed.
It had a hole the size of house in its hull, and its captain was ashore. The frantic crew had chopped the mooring ropes and got the ship underway as Japanese planes swarmed overhead.
The USS Nevada raced to escape the unfolding catastrophe of December 7, 1941. ‘‘Out of this pall came a sight so incredible that its viewers could not have been more dumbfounded had it been the legendary Flying Dutchman,’’ historian Gordon W. Prange wrote.
Earlier this month, undersea explorers announced they had found the wreck of the famous Nevada: It had failed to make good its escape at Pearl Harbor, but it had survived, was repaired and returned to sea to serve out World War II.
It had been found in 4500m of water, purposely sunk by the Navy in 1948 after a career that spanned three decades of service, from World War I to the atomic bomb.
The Nevada had fought on D-Day in 1944 off Normandy and, re-equipped with guns from the shattered Arizona and USS Oklahoma, fought again at the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the Pacific. After the war it had been painted orange and used as a test ship at the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb detonations in 1946.
The Nevada survived again, but in 1948 the vessel, possibly still radioactive, was sunk by naval guns, explosives and torpedoes 100km southwest of Pearl Harbor, said maritime archaeologist James P. Delgado, of SEARCH Inc., one of two firms that found the wreck in April.
It took the Navy 41⁄2 days to hammer the Nevada to the bottom. Afterward, a funeral, with chaplain and crew, was held on the USS Iowa over the site where the ship had gone down, Delgado said.
The ‘‘Ol’ Maru,’’ as its crews called the Nevada, was 34 years old.
Delgado, former head of the Maritime Heritage Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had studied iconic ship wrecks around the world and knew roughly where the Nevada was. (The Nevada’s band was famously playing ‘‘The Star Spangled Banner’’ on deck on December 7 as the attack began. The band hurried through the piece and ran to battle stations.)
He had wanted to search for the wreck because ‘‘ultimately, finding where most of these ships lie and looking at them again is a reminder of the past,’’ he said. ‘‘It connects this, and future, generations with those stories in a powerful way . . . . For many of us who are archaeologists, we’ve always known that the greatest museum we have is at the bottom of the sea.’’
Delgado said the project started ‘‘with a chance phone call’’ with Ocean Infinity, a marine survey and robotics company that had found other famous wrecks and happened to have a search vessel stationed near Honolulu, Delgado said. The two firms were planning to work together, and Ocean Infinity agreed to have its ship, the Pacific Constructor, look for the Nevada, he said.
Ocean Infinity said the ship had been working commercial projects in the Pacific since early this year and because of the pandemic had stayed at sea. ‘‘They said, ’Let’s just go do this,’’’ Delgado said.
‘‘We drew a box that was 10 by 10 miles and said ‘that’s where to go,’’’ he said. The Pacific Constructor went to the site and searched with underwater robots. Delgado, based in Jacksonville, Florida, followed along from his computer and provided historical and archaeological guidance.
‘‘Nobody got paid for this,’’ he said. ‘‘We all did this because we felt it was the right thing to do at this time.’’
The Nevada, built in Quincy, Massachusetts, and launched in 1914, had 36 painted on its bow and stern. – Washington Post