Vic Socotra

24 November 2009

The Channel at Pearl

(USS Nevada (BB-36) looking forlorn the week after the Admiral saw her in February 1942 at Hospital Point, Pearl Harbor, HI)

It is gray here and raining, and a trip to the Pentagon looms as vast as the bulk of the pale brown sandstone building.

History is a funny thing. It is being made right now here in town, what with all the historic mistakes being made, but we won’t know the consequences of this folly for a while, so let me put it aside for the moment.

I have to explain how we got to this, sunken battleships, with an innocent discussion about Thanksgiving. One of the other contractors at a meeting at the Secret office in Crystal City mentioned she was going home to Niles, Michigan, and I brightly said it was the best damn train station between Detroit and Chicago, although there was no one left in the Motor City to travel that way. That led to a animated chat about how great Chicago is, and that must have lingered.

I was having a drink with the Admiral at the Willow bar last night after work.

I was eager to tell him about a historical adventure I had over the weekend, when the world was bright and the skies were blue, but the present has a way of making its own way out of our intentions. I thought about Rush Street in Chicago, which was off limited to the Reserve Officers being trained at Northwestern University in 1941, when America was still at peace.

The Admiral is ninety years old now, and remarkably, his brothers and sisters are all still with us, too. Good Iowa stock, out of Ohio back in the early 19th century, and Scotland and Germany across the seas before that.

He was drinking a Virgin Mary, as much a meal as a drink the way Peter pours them with olives and lemon and hot sauce. I was drinking whiskey, which seemed in keeping with the dark damp outside.

We were talking about the attractions of the flesh on Rush Street and marching in formation to his classes in Chicago, the formations disrupting traffic on Michigan Avenue.

We got progressively further from Virginia, through the 13th Naval District, where he was sent, purely by chance, to train as an intelligence officer.

That is where history throws a curve right into the present. We should have been talking about this in a week or two, at the time of the anniversary of the attack on Pearl, since that was the centerpoint of so much.

It is all considerably more interesting when great events are presented as simple memory. The Admiral was in Seattle when the attack happened, and he mentioned sailing for Hawaii in the first organized convoy after the attack at Pearl. He was on the USS Henderson (AP-1) with a host of other 90-day wonders and a gaggle of Navy Nurses.

It was a slow trip, since the formation could only move as fast as the lumber-carriers that had the real priority cargo. They could only make ten knots, and were stuffed with the beams and timbers the shipyard required to construct cofferdams around the sunken battleships. Then the saltwater could be pumped out and the torpedo holes hastily patched and the great ships could be re-floated for more permanent repairs.

Tension was high. There was no telling where death was lurking out there under the glittering blue waves. The young male officers were assigned to stand deck watch looking for Japanese subs, four hours on, four hours off. The Nurses were not assigned duty, and played bridge all the way to MidPac.

Anyway, I asked him what it was like steaming up the channel into Pearl with all the wreckage from the attack still there, the great ships with their keels on the muddy bottom of the lagoon and decks awash.

The Admiral looked out into a distance that I could not see.

He said it was all there, and the recovery had not yet begun. There was oil in the water, of course, as the harbor flushed the lifeblood of ships and men down to the ocean. But what he remembered first was the vast bulk of the USS Nevada, (BB-36). Nevada was the first of the Navy’s super-dreadnaughts,

She didn’t look that good, in the first week of February of 1942. The Admiral said she had been rammed right into the shore to prevent her blocking the channel altogether, with parts of the great gray ship haning over the sugarcane.

On 7 December 1941, Nevada had been moored singly off Ford Island, and had a freedom of maneuver denied the other eight battleships present during the attack. An enterprising LTJG ordered her to get underway, which was one of the few brightpots on an otherwise dark and bloody morning for the Navy.

The engineers got up steam and she backed out and headed down toward the sea. In the process, the ship was struck by one torpedo and two, possibly three, bombs from the Japanese attackers. She was hit again nearing Hospital Point, and the decision was made to beach her, rather than risk sinking in the narrow channel and block it.

She lost 50 sailors killed that morning, and more than a hundred wounded.

Only Arizona and the target ship Utah were left behind, since they were both write-offs to history. The Admiral saw all of the ships, and all of the wounds below the waterlines as they cycled through the big dryock.

We had the fish and chips appetizer that they only serve at the bar. It is done more in the tempura style than in the British manner, and it is a tasty snack.

When I got home, I looked and found the picture above of Nevada, just as she was the week that the Admiral arrived at Pearl.

The timbers that his convoy brought helped the salvage efforts, and one by one, all the ships save two were re-floated and moved into the dry dock. All seven of the eight ships on Battleship Row made it back into action, and some of them were with there in Tokyo Bay for the surrender.

Nevada returned to service after a complex overhaul back in Puget Sound. She served as a convoy escort in the Atlantic, and as a fire-support ship in four amphibious assaults. She was there at D-Day off Normandy, the invasion of Southern France and again in the Pacific at Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

She made it to Tokyo, too.

At the end of World War II, the Navy decided that Nevada was too old to be retained, so they assigned her to be a target ship at Operation Crossroads atomic tests at Bikini Atoll in July 1946.

She was a tough old bird, she was. They built ships to last in those days. After being hit by two atomic bombs, she was still afloat but heavily damaged and radioactive.

She was towed back to Pearl and decommissioned on 29 August 1946.

She was sunk during naval gunfire practice off Oahu on 31 July 1948. It is one of those little ironies of history that she now sleeps in the vast deep not far from the channel at Pearl.

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