USS Oklahoma

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 Voyage

On the morning of 7 December 1941, USS Oklahoma was moored alongside USS Maryland on Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor, in the 'F-5' berth position on the east side of Ford Island. She was the outboard ship in the paired mooring, with Maryland between her and the island. Her immediate neighbours along Battleship Row were USS West Virginia and USS Tennessee forward, USS Arizona and USS Vestal aft, and USS Nevada at the southern end of the line.

At 07:55 on 7 December 1941 the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack force of 353 carrier aircraft began its first-wave strike. Oklahoma's exposed outboard position on Battleship Row made her a priority torpedo-bomber target. Between 07:57 and 08:04 she was struck by between five and nine Type 91 aerial torpedoes on her port side, in a concentrated pattern along the waterline from Frame 60 to Frame 110.

The torpedo hits produced immediate and catastrophic damage to her port side. Her anti-torpedo blisters, designed to absorb the detonation of a single torpedo, were overwhelmed by the sequential multi-torpedo hits. Her port-side watertight compartments flooded almost simultaneously; the watertight bulkheads between the flooded compartments gave way as the concentrated flooding accumulated.

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 had retreated to the highest remaining internal compartments and were communicating by tapping on the hull plating. The last of the 32 rescued men, Seaman Second Class Willard Stively, was cut out of a bilge compartment at 20:30 on 8 December 1941, 36 hours after the sinking. Most of the remaining trapped crew died of carbon dioxide poisoning or of drowning as air pockets failed through the night.

The Legacy

USS Oklahoma was raised from Pearl Harbor on 8 March 1943 by one of the most complex salvage operations in American maritime history. The engineering firm Pacific Bridge Company, working under a U.S. Navy contract, constructed a shore-based winch system that applied progressive rotational force to the inverted hull through 18-inch steel cables. The rotation was performed in 24 discrete pulls, each of approximately 2 degrees, over a period of 62 days. The hull was finally righted to a 3-degree list on 8 March 1943 and refloated on 3 November 1943 after patching.

After refloating she was inspected at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. The inspection concluded that the damage was beyond economical repair: her entire port-side torpedo protection had been destroyed, her main belt armour was sprung on the port side, her main machinery spaces had been fouled beyond recovery, and the cost of returning her to service was calculated at approximately $25 million (equivalent to approximately $450 million in 2025 dollars). The decision was made not to rebuild her.

She was formally decommissioned on 1 September 1944, stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 27 September 1944, and sold for scrap to Moore Drydock at Oakland, California, in December 1946. Under tow toward Oakland on 17 May 1947, she foundered in a storm approximately 800 nautical miles east of Pearl Harbor and sank. Her final position is therefore not at Pearl Harbor but in the central Pacific, approximately 1,500 kilometres east of Hawaii. The loss of the hull during the tow was officially attributed to weather damage; she lies in approximately 5,300 metres of water.

The 429 dead of USS Oklahoma were buried initially at the Halawa and Nuuanu cemeteries in Honolulu. Between 2015 and 2020 the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency exhumed the remains and conducted DNA identification; as of 2024 approximately 420 of the 429 dead had been identified by name and reburied with individual headstones.

USS Oklahoma Memorial at Pearl Harbor, a white marble monument inscribed with the names of the 429 dead, was unveiled on 7 December 2007 on Ford Island facing the site of her capsize. The memorial consists of 429 standing granite sculptures in the shape of sailors, each sailor bearing the name of one of the dead; they form a silent honour guard oriented toward the Arizona Memorial across the Battleship Row anchorage. The Oklahoma Memorial is considered, after the Arizona Memorial itself, the most significant single memorial at Pearl Harbor.