Was this an epic feat? I have seen photographs of sunken battleships being righted from shore with cables, and I wonder what the cables were pulled with, and how they were anchored.
The West Virginia, with high tech radar, played a significant role at the battle of Leyte Gulf; it was well worth the effort to recover the ships.
Was it a gargantuan engineering feat to raise the sunken battleships, or just a standard procedure?
Pearl Harbor isn’t that deep (some of the Arizona is still above water), so that made it easier.
Still, moving anything that big & heavy is going to be a major undertaking.
[I’d question whether it was worth it to recover them. (For war reasons. Maybe worth it for civilian morale reasons.) Like couldn’t the radar have been moved to another ship? But that’s a topic for a different thread.]
It took two years to recover, refit and get the West Virginia back into service. I’m sure that it would have taken much longer to built another battleship from scratch, especially since US ship yards were building new ships and repairing others.
Righting and raising Oklahoma was an epic feat. That’s the one with huge frames built on the hull and winches and cables from shore pulling it upright. Then after it was raised in late 1943, the decision was made not to repair it. So that one with hindsight can be questioned compared to just scrapping the ship in place.
And Arizona, obviously, was not raised.
The others that could count as ‘sunk’ (somewhat semantic for ships in harbor) were raised by mid 1942, West Virginia, California and Nevada (if the latter even counts as sunk). The first two didn’t return to service until 1944 because of extensive modernization as mentioned, also lead times on some replacement items and relatively low priority in the scheme of things. Nevada was operational by late 1942.
In an earlier attack which in some ways presaged PH (and one of the inspirations for the Japanese) British carrier torpedo planes hit the new Italian battleship Littorio, and modernized old battleships (somewhat comparable to the US ones at PH) Conte di Cavour and Caio Duilio at their base at Taranto in Nov 1940. All settled at least partly to the bottom. Littorio was returned to service in spring 1941, Duilio mid '41, Cavour was raised but never repaired although also settled upright. Italy more badly needed those ships back in terms of being able to replace them, though also had fewer resources to repair them than the USN, but like the USN other priorities slowed the return of the less important older ships. Anyway shows it wasn’t something that extraordinary to recover battleships which had settled upright to a harbor bottom.
The most dramatic moment of Leyte Gulf/Surigao Strait was when W Virgina and the other PH battleships opened fire on the remnants of the IJN Southern Force. Very dramatic, as it was the last battleship duel, and maybe that’s why the history books play up the role of the BBs so much. But the Southern Force was not destroyed by gunfire; it was torpedoes that sank all 5 of the ships that the IJN lost that night. Gunfire no doubt hastened the end of one of them, Yamashiro, but the torpedo hits had already doomed her.
Here is a web page detailing the righting of the Oklahoma. basically they attached large arms and connected each one to fixed position winches on shore.
Dennis
Thanks!
By 1944 there was plenty of new construction emerging from the yards and nobody had much use for old, slow WW1 battleships which couldn’t keep up with the carrier force. They were useful for shore bombardment, and it cleared the berths in Pearl for reuse. Except for Arizona, which was too badly damaged to be salvageable, and Utah which was one step away from being scrapped anyway, everything was eventually cleared up.
Oklahoma was built in 1910. What was the useful life of a battleship expected to be had the importance not switched to aircraft carriers?
The Washington Treaty forbad (with some minor exceptions) signatory nations from constructing any new battleships for ten years. It was extended for another five by the London Treaty. Under these conditions, capital ships generally were kept in service longer than the naval architects would have preferred, as new design ideas came forward after mature consideration of the effects of war damage. Many British ships remained in use through the end of WW2, by which time they were thoroughly worn out from hard steaming and lack of deep refits, apart from technical obsolescence.
I’d recommend this book: Descent into Darkness: Pearl Harbor, 1941―A Navy Diver’s Memoir
Yes, I think the descriptor “epic feat” applies here.
They couldn’t do repairs in total blackness.