Max Lieurance US Navy USS Nevada |
I joined the Navy on December 6, 1940. One year and one day later Pearl Harbor. We came into port on December 6, 1941. On December 7th, I was going ashore. I was down below decks putting on my dress clothes to go on liberty when there was a rumbling noise, and someone came running down the ladder hollering that we were being attacked; and from the things going on, I was pretty sure that it was the real thing. At that time, my battle station was on the foremast as a sky lookout (aircraft) so I went there. After a few minutes, it was obvious that we couldn't do anything there because they were already in on us, and it was our job to spot them before they came in. I then went to man the anti aircraft guns. The action started sometime before 8:00 a.m. I wouldn't have any idea how long it lasted. It was quite a length of time or at least it seemed like it. During the course of action the USS Nevada, the ship I was on, took 10 bombs and one torpedo (8 bombs forward on the forecastle deck, one bomb just near the stack and one bomb in the middle of the boat deck just above the galley, in fact, it blew the galley all to pieces.) The one that hit the stack was right close to where I was standing. At that time, I had a five-inch shell in my hand, and there was quite a lot of heat and noise. We had been instructed to do in case a fuse had been set off and activated the timer. I might mention here that the USS Nevada was the only battleship in the fleet to get under way. Being this was Sunday, and we came in the night before, practically all the officers had left the ship. There were only two or three officers and about 1500 enlisted men aboard. Our quartermaster, a second class enlisted man, managed to get the ship under way. This was quite a task when it normally took a minimum of two tugboats to get a battle ship away from the berth. He managed to get it out into the stream and headed out the channel. They wouldn't let us out of the harbor entrance, which had submarine nets across, because they were afraid of letting submarines in. Two tugs came out and pushed us against the beach. The beach now has a plaque on it. It is called Nevada Point. With the large hole we had in the ship (big enough to drive a semi through), it finally sank to the bottom during the night. About the only thing remaining above the water line was the main deck and super structure. The main cause of the ship to sink was not necessarily due to the bombs and torpedo damage, but when they counter flooded to correct the list (tilt) prior to placing the ship in dry dock. It took a lot of ingenuity and a lot of hard work and about two months to bring it off the bottom. The ship was a mess, and, of course, it was quite an experience to raise it up. Naturally, when the ship sank, there was a lot of oil on top of the water, and as we raised the ship, four to five inches of oil came down over everything. The ship was raised, using many pumps with power provided by a tugboat. Everything from the water level had to be stripped from inside of the ship and carried out and over on the beach and dumped. As soon as it was afloat, we moved it over and put it in dry dock. From then on, it was comparatively easy, because they just took the water out of the dry dock and let the water drain out of the ship. After raising the ship, we sailed her to Bremerton, Washington. She was rebuilt and refitted with new equipment and guns. During this time, I trained in Vallejo, California as an anti-aircraft fire control man. Prior and up to the beginning of the war, I was in the 6th Division which was a deck force division, and I was basically a deck hand. My battle station, as I mentioned before, was the sky lookout and an ammunition loader for the five-inch anti-aircraft guns. Previous to December 7th, we had been operating in the Pacific and around the Hawaiian Islands. We were warned that war was imminent. We had seen quite a few Japanese submarines. It makes you wonder when everyone knew that it was bound to happen, why were we caught unexpectedly? During the war, I served as a fire control man in the Fire Control Division, which is maintaining and repairing anti-aircraft and fire control equipment. My battle station from then on was anti-aircraft telescopic range finder operator. On December 7th, the USS Nevada was in one way rather fortunate insofar as the low number of men she lost. She lost in the neighborhood of 50 enlisted men and officers (mostly enlisted men). I might mention, too, that most of the casualties were from the deck force division, the same as myself, because we were topside when it happened. Those below deck were in pretty good shape though the bombs did hit the forward part, but that was in officer's country and didn't hurt much no disrespect to the officers it was just that they weren't there. To back up a little in regard to the bombing. The Japanese were attempting to drop these bombs as close to or down the stack, if possible. This is what happened to the Arizona. There is no armor plating in that area, and it could go right down into the inside of the ship and blow up. It blew up the ammunition and everything. We were very fortunate. The bomb missed by something like three feet. The bomb hit the armor and exploded. If it had gone down the stack, it would have been a different story. Another quirk of fate is the fact that there had been a mix-up in routing the Nevada and Arizona to their respective berths the previous day. The Arizona was in our berth, and we were in hers, and we were using each other's gangways (which are normally left at the berth when operating at a home port.) One of the men on our ship is credited with shooting down a Japanese airplane with a fifty-caliber machine gun. The airplane was one of the few we knew that was actually shot down. The first days right after the attack were rather hectic because we were up along the beach close to cane fields, which were mosquito infected, and everything aboard ship was dirty. After about three days, they assigned us a barracks over on the beach, and we worked in three eight-hour shifts. We would spend eight hours on the ship as a working crew, eight hours manning the guns in case of another attack and eight hours sleeping. At least with the barracks, we had a place to clean up, sleep and eat. I didn't get hurt. I consider myself very lucky. About the only thing that was affected was my hearing for about a period of two weeks. This was caused from gun noise and no ear protection. I would say about seventy per cent of the men who were topside were either partially deaf or completely deaf for several days. I served aboard the USS Nevada until about September 1945. During that time we participated in the battles of the Aleutian Islands, "D" Day at Normandy, Southern France, (with much good R&R rest and relaxation in Italy), Iwo Jima and Okinawa. During this time, we suffered many casualties including hits at Normandy, a suicide plane at Okinawa and a shore battery hit at IE Shima (where Ernie Pyle was killed). I served the next seven months at Washington, D.C. attending advance fire control school with the intention of making the Navy a career. I served the remaining time at Newport, Rhode Island, and I was discharged on August 27, 1946. |
Information provided by Max Lieurance. |
