⦿
Naval Historical Center Photo NH 50931
View from a Japanese plane taken around 0800 on 7 December 1941. At lower left is Nevada (BB-36), with Arizona (BB-39) ahead of her, with the repair ship Vestal (AR-4) moored outboard; West Virginia (BB-48) (already beginning to list to port) alongside Tennessee (BB-43); Oklahoma (BB-37) (which has already taken at least one torpedo) with Maryland (BB-46) moored inboard; the fleet oiler Neosho (AO-23) and, far right, California (BB-44), which, too, already has been torpedoed.
Author’s Collection
Col Alan Shapley, in a post-war photograph taken while serving as an aide to Adm William F. Halsey, Jr.
Oklahoma, Nevada’s sister ship moored inboard of Maryland in berth F-5, meanwhile manned air-defense stations at about 0757, to the sound of gunfire. After a junior officer passed the word over the general announcing system that it was not a drill—providing a suffix of profanity to underscore the fact—all men not having an antiaircraft defense station were ordered to lay below the armored deck. Crews at the 5-inch and 3-inch batteries, meanwhile, opened ready-use lockers. A heavy shock, followed by a loud explosion, came soon thereafter as a torpedo slammed home in the battleship’s port side. The “Okie” soon began listing to port.
Oil and water cascaded over the decks, making them extremely slippery and silencing the ready-duty machine gun on the forward superstructure. Two more torpedoes struck home. The massive rent in the ship’s side rendered the desperate attempts at damage control futile. As Ensign Paul H. Backus hurried from his room to his battle station on the signal bridge, he passed his friend Second Lieutenant Harry H. Gaver, Jr., one of Oklahoma’s Marine detachment junior officers, “on his knees, attempting to close a hatch on the port side, alongside the barbette [of Turret I] ... part of the trunk which led from the main deck to the magazines.... There were men trying to come up from below at the time Harry was trying to close the hatch....” Backus never saw Gaver again.
⦿