The ship arrived in mid-1946 at the Marshall Islands' Bikini Atoll to serve as one of dozens of targets for several nuclear bomb tests that July. It spent the remainder of the war in the region.Īfter the war, the ship was assigned one final mission. But the Nevada's World War II service wasn't done yet it returned to the Pacific to support the US invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945. On June 6, 1944, the Nevada's guns blasted German positions at Normandy's Utah Beach to support the massive Allied landings.
The Nevada then transferred back to the Western Atlantic in mid-1943, before it sailed the following year to British waters to prepare for D-Day. The following year, the Nevada took part in combat operations during the battle for Attu, an island off the coast of Alaska, where it provided fire support to US Army landing units. When the attack was over, 50 crewmembers had been killed and 109 wounded.īecause it had been grounded rather than allowed to sink into deeper waters, the Nevada was given a second chance at life, and it spent much of 1942 undergoing salvage work, repairs, and improvements. The powerful ship was purposefully run aground out of the way, and it eventually sank, but in shallow waters. As the Nevada continued to engage the enemy planes, it tried to escape the harbor, but the damage left the ship in sinking conditions and there were concerns that it could get stuck in the entrance of the harbor. Still, the Nevada was targeted by Japanese aircraft, which hit it with bombs and a torpedo. Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images The USS Nevada burns following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese military. After the end of World War I, the Nevada spent nearly a decade transiting waters in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean, visiting various ports around the Americas and participating in drills and exercises. This force, which was later joined by USS Utah, was tasked with countering German raiding ships that threatened US troop transports and other convoys in the Atlantic. In August 1918, Nevada and USS Oklahoma - another Nevada-class battleship - sailed to Ireland. Neither of the major Axis powers managed to kill the Nevada, but the US military eventually did with a lethal combination of strikes over several years that started with nuclear bomb and later turned to gunfire and torpedoes.īuilt in Massachusetts and named after the 36th state, the 27,500-ton Nevada was commissioned in March 1916 and spent the first two years of service operating in the western Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. The storied US Navy battleship fought in both World Wars, and during the second global conflict, it was all but sunk at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese but then resurrected to later batter the Germans during the D-Day landings. USS Nevada had an epic three decades of service. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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