Nevada Class Battleship

Nevada Class Battleship

The Nevada class battleships were the United States Navy's first battleship design equipped with triple gun turrets (the Colorado class would be the last to carry twin turrets, armed with dual-mounted 16-inch guns), as well as introducing the "all or nothing" armor scheme in American capital ship design, in which protection of vital areas was optimized against heavy caliber guns, leaving other parts of the ship essentially unprotected. The Nevadas also represented the advance to all fuel oil propulsion. Taken together, the Nevada class represented a considerable evolution in battleship design and, in being designed specifically to fight at extreme gunnery ranges, was actually well ahead of its time. They would be followed by the Pennsylvania class battleships.

The Nevadas were the first Standard type battleships produced by the U.S. Navy Along with the Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Tennessee and Colorado classes, the standard type offered a battle line of vessels homogeneous in long-range gunnery, speed, tactical radius and damage control. While the Nevadas were built with what was then considered heavy armor protection, a possible design flaw over time became a lack of substantial deck armor, due to the prevailing belief at the time they were built that the submarine was the greatest threat to battleships. By World War II, the greatest threat had become airplanes. "he results of this were later realized at Pearl Harbor, with Nevada's experience proving that the watertight integrity of older warships was unlikely to be satisfactory." However, in this the Nevadas were far from alone; experience in World War II would show that older battleships, no matter how thoroughly modernized, did not have the same staying power generally as newer ones designed from the outset to take far greater punishment.

Active in the Atlantic Ocean before and during World War I, the Nevadas were deployed to protect Allied supply lines in the European war zone in 1918. Their service continued after the "Great War", though by the early 1920s they were the oldest of the main Battle Fleet units. Both were extensively modernized between 1927 and 1929. Oklahoma was sunk during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and was a total loss. Nevada beached herself during this raid after receiving damage to prevent blocking the harbor entrance and was salvaged and modernized. She provided gunfire support for amphibious operations in the European and Pacific theaters, which included shelling German shore batteries on D-Day along with USS Texas and USS Arkansas. Considered too old at the end of World War II to be kept in active service, Nevada was used as a target ship for nuclear and conventional weapons from 1946 to 1948.