USS Nevada (BB-36) was the lead ship of her class and a genuine leap in dreadnought design: triple turrets, oil fuel instead of coal, geared turbines and the 'all or nothing' armour scheme that concentrated every plate over the vitals and left the rest bare. Almost every American battleship that followed was built on those four ideas, which is why Nevada and her sister Oklahoma are counted as the first US 'standard-type' battleships.
On 7 December 1941 she was the only battleship at Pearl Harbor to get under way. Hit by a torpedo and at least six bombs, she ran for the open sea, then deliberately beached herself off Hospital Point rather than sink in the channel and bottle up the fleet. Raised, patched and rebuilt, she came back as a modern anti-aircraft platform.
Nevada then shelled the Normandy beaches on D-Day, fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and took a kamikaze off Okinawa. In 1946 she was painted orange as the aim point for the Bikini atomic tests at Operation Crossroads — and survived both blasts. Too radioactive to keep, she was finally sunk by naval gunfire and an aerial torpedo on 31 July 1948, after four days of shelling. Her wreck was located off Hawaii in 2020.
Foto: Wikimedia Commons — US Navy, Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, US Naval Post Office -- Stamp printed by US Bureau of Engrav (proste licence / javna domena)
