USS Oklahoma

1941

Pearl Harbor, rolled 135 degrees, twelve minutes Location: Pearl Harbor, Battleship Row, Oahu, Hawaii · Coordinates: 21.37°N 157.95°W · Casualties: 429 · Survivors: ~900 · Depth: 12 m (raised) · Cause: aerial attack — Struck by between five and nine Japanese aerial torpedoes in the opening minutes of the Pearl Harbor attack on 7 December 1941. Her port blisters failed in sequence. She capsized in twelve minutes, rolling 135 degrees until her masts hit the harbor floor. · Fate: raised 1943 · scrapped 1947 · Type: battleship · Nevada class · Tonnage: 27,500 tons · Crew: 1300 · Flag: United States · Launched: 1914 Nevada-class battleship, moored on Battleship Row alongside USS Maryland on 7 December 1941. Struck by between five and nine Japanese aerial torpedoes in the opening minutes of the Pearl Harbor attack. She capsized in twelve minutes, rolling 135 degrees until her masts hit the harbor floor. 429 dead, trapped below as the compartments flooded and inverted; raised in 1943 at record expense and scrapped in 1947. The Vessel USS Oklahoma (BB-37) was a Nevada-class dreadnought battleship of the United States Navy, commissioned at the Cramp & Sons yard in Philadelphia on 2 May 1916. She was 177 metres long, 27,500 tons standard displacement, armed with ten 14-inch guns in two twin and two triple turrets, and designed for 20.5 knots. She and her sister USS Nevada (BB-36) were the first American "all or nothing" armour-scheme battleships, in which armour was concentrated in the critical zones (turrets, conning tower, main belt) at maximum thickness and the non-critical zones left substantially unarmoured. Her First World War service was unremarkable: she served in the Atlantic Fleet's 6th Battle Squadron with the British Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow from August 1918 through Armistice. Her interwar service followed the established American battleship rotation between the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. By 1941 she was one of eight American battleships assigned to the Pacific Fleet's Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor, Oahu. Her commanding officer in December 1941 was Captain Howard Bode, 53 years old, a career naval officer. Her crew on the morning of 7 December 1941 was 1,300 officers and ratings. The Disaster USS Oklahoma began listing to port within 90 seconds of the first torpedo strike. The list progressed at approximately 3 degrees per minute through the first six minutes. Captain Bode was ashore at the time of the attack; the senior officer aboard was Commander Jesse Kenworthy, the ship's executive officer. The speed of the capsize was extraordinary for a battleship. American pre-war damage-control doctrine had assumed that a battleship struck by multiple torpedoes would remain afloat long enough for counter-flooding and progressive abandonment to save the majority of the crew. Oklahoma's actual behaviour was completely different: she rolled 135 degrees in approximately 12 minutes, coming to rest on her port side with her masts driven into the harbour mud and only her starboard keel above the waterline. She capsized at 08:09 on 7 December 1941, exactly 12 minutes after the first torpedo strike. Of her 1,301 crew aboard at the moment of the attack, 429 died in the sinking. 872 survived, of whom approximately 32 were rescued from the trapped air pockets in the inverted hull over the following 30 hours. The rescue operation for the men trapped inside the capsized hull was one of the most publicised operations of the Pearl Harbor aftermath. American civilian workers from the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, equipped with cutting torches and air compressors, worked through the night of 7-8 December 1941 cutting holes in Oklahoma's inverted keel to admit air and extract men. The survivors h