Transcript
On the morning of 7 December 1941, the USS West Virginia lay moored on Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor, a capital ship of the United States Navy, 624 feet long and armed with eight massive 16-inch guns. She was the fourth and final Colorado-class dreadnought ever completed, a battleship that had spent nearly two decades in peacetime training exercises, her crew of 1,241 enlisted men and 64 officers going through the routines that kept the fleet ready. Then, just before eight o'clock, Japanese aircraft appeared over the harbor and everything changed. Torpedo bombers struck West Virginia's port side with seven Type 91 torpedoes. Bombs followed—two 16-inch armor-piercing shells converted into aerial bombs. The first tore through the superstructure deck, setting off secondary explosions in the ammunition casemates. The second struck the rear turret and failed to explode, but the impact was enough to wreck one of the great guns and spill gasoline across the deck that caught fire. The ship took on water with terrifying speed.
As the West Virginia filled and began to sink on an even keel, a young officer named Claude V. Ricketts, the assistant fire control officer, orchestrated damage control efforts that kept her from capsizing entirely. Captain Mervyn S. Bennion, mortally wounded by bomb fragments from the adjacent Tennessee, remained aboard directing the defense until he collapsed. A mess attendant named Doris Miller, ordered to man an anti-aircraft gun despite having no training in its use, fired at enemy aircraft until the order came to evacuate. The ship sank in the shallow water of the harbor, taking 106 men with her. Three sailors—Ronald Endicott, Clifford Olds, and Louis Costin—survived in an airtight storeroom for sixteen days, crossing off each day on a calendar in red pencil before their air ran out. The West Virginia was gone, or so it seemed.
But the shallow water that had claimed her also saved her. Workers patched the two massive torpedo holes and pumped the ship dry. On 17 May 1942, they refloated her and towed her to dry dock, where inspectors found seven separate torpedo impacts—not five as first believed. When the ship was opened fully, salvage crews discovered the remains of sixty-six or seventy men who had been trapped below decks when she sank, some of whom had survived for several days in air pockets with emergency rations and fresh water before their supplies ran out. The Navy faced a choice: scrap her or rebuild her. They chose to rebuild, and the reconstruction would be so thorough that West Virginia would emerge as an almost entirely new ship.
For the next two years and four months, workers at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington, tore into the damaged battleship and remade her from the inside out. The old heavily armored conning tower came down, replaced by a smaller tower taken from a Brooklyn-class cruiser. The foremast became a tower mast that housed the bridge and fire control systems. One funnel was removed entirely. Her weapons suite was transformed: the old secondary guns gave way to sixteen new 5-inch/38 caliber dual-purpose guns, and the anti-aircraft battery was completely overhauled, now carrying ten quadruple 40-millimetre Bofors guns and forty-three 20-millimetre Oerlikons. New radars—air-search radars and fire-control radars—were fitted to guide her guns in ways no battleship had ever done before.
By early July 1944, West Virginia was ready for sea trials. She loaded ammunition on 2 July and steamed out to Port Townsend, Washington, for evaluations that continued through the middle of the month. After repairs and a shakedown cruise at San Pedro in Los Angeles, she departed for Hawaii on 14 September, arriving on 23 September to join Battleship Division 4 under Rear Admiral Theodore D. Ruddock. On 5 October, the ships arrived at Seeadler Harbor in the Admiralty Islands, and the next day West Virginia became Ruddock's flagship. She was no longer the battleship that had sunk at Pearl Harbor. She was faster, deadlier, and equipped with technology that would prove crucial in the battles ahead.
On 12 October 1944, West Virginia and the fleet sortied to invade the Philippines, beginning with the island of Leyte. She was assigned to the shore bombardment force under Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf, and on 19 October she moved into position to shell Japanese defenses around Tacloban. That day and the next, as ground forces went ashore, West Virginia fired 278 rounds from her main battery and 1,586 from her secondary guns, providing covering fire for the assault. On 21 October, while moving into her bombardment station, she grounded lightly on a reef, damaging three of her propellers and limiting her speed to 16 knots, but she remained on station to defend the fleet against Japanese air attacks. Each night she and the rest of the bombardment group withdrew from the beaches, and each day they returned to pour fire on enemy positions.
The landing on Leyte triggered Operation Shō-Gō 1, the Japanese Navy's planned counterattack. Three separate fleets were to converge on the invasion fleet: Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force coming from the west through the San Bernardino Strait, Vice Admiral Shōji Nishimura's Southern Force approaching through Surigao Strait from the south, and Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa's Northern Force from the north, where his depleted carriers would serve as a decoy. American carrier aircraft sank the battleship Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea and convinced Admiral William F. Halsey to send the fast carriers north to destroy Ozawa's fleet. This left the way open for Nishimura's battleships Yamashiro and Fusō, the heavy cruiser Mogami, and his destroyers to approach the invasion fleet from the south. Nishimura would never reach it.
Read full transcript (8 more paragraphs)
On the night of 24 October 1944, as Nishimura's flotilla passed through Surigao Strait, they came under attack from American PT boats and destroyers. West Virginia steamed at the head of the American battle line. At 03:02, Tennessee's search radar picked up the enemy ships at a range of forty-four thousand yards. Fourteen minutes later, West Virginia's radar acquired them at forty-two thousand yards in the darkness—a range so great that the human eye could see nothing. Oldendorf gave the order to open fire at 03:51, and West Virginia opened fire first a minute later, followed by Tennessee and California. The other American battleships had older radars that could not lock onto targets in the darkness and held their fire. West Virginia's gunners concentrated their fire on Yamashiro and probably hit her bridge with the first salvo. The Japanese battleship burned, hit repeatedly by American guns. Mogami was hit and burned as well. At about 04:00, both Japanese battleships turned to retreat, burning and sinking. The destroyer Shigure fled with them. Oldendorf ordered his battleships to make a 150-degree turn, and West Virginia led them on the new course, running parallel to the retreating enemy. This was the last battle ever fought between battleships in naval history.
After Surigao Strait, West Virginia remained in the Philippines to support the invasion of Leyte and then the assault on Lingayen Gulf in January 1945. She bombarded Japanese positions, defended the fleet against kamikazes, and on one day alone fired 395 rounds from her main battery and more than 2,800 rounds from her secondary guns. In February, she joined the assault on Iwo Jima, where she shelled blockhouses and machine gun positions as marines fought ashore. She was hit by a small artillery shell that wounded one sailor but remained on station through the end of the month.
In March 1945, West Virginia joined Task Force 54 for the assault on Okinawa, the largest amphibious operation in the Pacific War. She bombarded the landing beaches to prepare for the invasion scheduled for 1 April. On 1 April itself, while steaming to her assigned station in the darkness, her anti-aircraft gunners spotted and shot down an enemy aircraft. Shortly after, they destroyed three more hostile planes that appeared in the pre-dawn darkness. By 06:30, she was just 900 yards from shore, shelling the beach as landing craft made their way ashore. That evening, a wave of kamikazes arrived and at 19:03, one of them crashed into West Virginia's superstructure just forward of the No. 2 director. The explosion killed four sailors and wounded seven others. A bomb from the aircraft penetrated to the second deck but failed to detonate; the ship's bomb disposal officer later defused it. West Virginia remained off the island through the night, firing star shells to light up the beach and help repel Japanese infiltration attacks. The next day, the dead were buried at sea and the ship returned to bombardment duty.
West Virginia remained off Okinawa through April and June, shelling Japanese blockhouses that held up the American advance, providing fire support to the marines fighting ashore. On 16 June, one of her Kingfisher floatplanes was shot down by Japanese fire; the pilot and observer bailed out but fell behind enemy lines and were killed despite efforts by West Virginia and nearby destroyers to suppress the Japanese defenses and rescue them. She received another Kingfisher from Tennessee and continued her fire support mission until the end of the month.
At the end of June 1945, West Virginia left Okinawa for San Pedro Bay, arriving on 1 July. She took on replacement crewmen and ammunition, then began training in preparation for the expected invasion of Kyushu, the first assault on the Japanese mainland itself. On 3 August, she got underway for Okinawa again, arriving in Buckner Bay on 6 August. That day, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, a second fell on Nagasaki. On 10 August, rumors spread through the fleet that Japan would surrender. On 15 August, the surrender came. West Virginia's war was over.
On 24 August, West Virginia departed for Tokyo Bay, arriving on 31 August. She was present on 2 September 1945 when the formal surrender ceremonies took place aboard the battleship Missouri, and she loaned five musicians from her band to play during the ceremony. The ship that had sunk at Pearl Harbor, broken and burning in the shallow water, had fought her way across the Pacific and had been at the moment of Japan's surrender. She remained in Tokyo for two weeks to assist with the occupation, then took on 270 passengers for the voyage home. On 22 October, she arrived in San Diego, California. The crew repainted her and on 27 October she was opened to public visitors; more than 25,000 people came aboard to see the battleship that had been resurrected from the harbor floor.
In the months after the war, West Virginia took part in Operation Magic Carpet, the vast repatriation effort that carried American servicemen home from the Pacific. She made three runs between Pearl Harbor and San Diego in the final months of 1945, the last arriving on 17 December. In January 1946, she departed for Bremerton, Washington, where she was deactivated. On 9 January 1947, she was formally decommissioned and assigned to the Pacific Reserve Fleet, where she sat for the next twelve years. On 1 March 1959, she was struck from the Naval Vessel Register. On 24 August, she was sold to a scrap company and towed to Todd-Pacific Shipyard in Seattle. On 3 January 1961, the cutting began. The battleship that had survived the worst day in American naval history, that had been rebuilt from the waterline up, that had fought across the entire Pacific War and stood witness to Japan's surrender, was dismantled for scrap metal.
West Virginia was awarded five battle stars for her service, despite having missed much of the war due to the damage suffered at Pearl Harbor. Several pieces of her remain scattered across the United States: an anti-aircraft gun in a park in Parkersburg, West Virginia; two 5-inch guns at Illahee State Park in Bremerton, Washington; her wheel and binnacle at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum; her mast preserved at West Virginia University; and her bell displayed at the West Virginia State Museum. In 2000, on the fifty-ninth anniversary of the attack that sank her, Interstate 470 in West Virginia was named the USS West Virginia Memorial Highway. The ship herself is gone, but the story of what she endured and accomplished remains: a battleship that was nearly destroyed, rebuilt into something stronger, and carried American sailors through the war in the Pacific until the enemy surrendered.
Image: U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships, Public domain · AI-narrated · Drawn from Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
