Pearl Harbor was full of death and destruction — that of more than 2,000 men and the oil, debris and twisted, blackened hulls of formerly formidable warships that the fallen sailors and Marines had served on.
These damaged ships had to be refloated and repaired to be able to fight in the new war in which America was embroiled. It was a daunting task and sight. Twenty-one ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been destroyed or damaged.
“There was a general feeling of depression throughout the Pearl Harbor area when it was seen and firmly believed that none of the ships sunk … would ever fight again,” wrote the officer tasked with the salvage, Capt. Homer N. Wallin.
The USS Nevada — the only battleship to get under way — tried to leave the harbor under heavy attack but beached at Hospital Point. Its stern was on the shore, and its bow was in deep water. The Nevada had been hit by a torpedo and about five bombs, killing 60.
Upon seeing the Nevada, Adm. Chester Nimitz, the new Pacific Fleet commander, remarked that recovery of the battlewagon seemed impossible.
Yet the Nevada, the first major ship salvaged, was refloated Feb. 12 and, on April 22, 1942, joined a convoy for the West Coast.
One year after the attack, New York Times reporter Robert Trumbull wrote that two of the great stories of world naval history involved Pearl Harbor. The first was the attack. The second was the “miracle of reclamation” afterward.
By mid-1944 all but three of the damaged and sunk Pearl Harbor warships had rejoined the fleet.
Wallin noted Japan had done the United States a favor: It hadn’t attacked Pearl’s 5 million barrels of oil or its Navy Yard, thus making repairs possible. Immediately, Pearl Harbor shipyard workers pitched in.
“Eight-hour days and the clock meant nothing,” Capt. B.E. Manseau, with the ship salvage branch, said in 1944. “They all came into work on the 7th, and when dark came they couldn’t go home because there was blackout. … People worked all day, slept aboard the ships at night and ate where they could.”
The formal salvage operation began a week after the attack. Pearl Harbor’s shipyard went on a 24-hour schedule, with three shifts working every day.
Navy and civilian divers spent about 20,000 hours underwater in about 5,000 dives. “Long and exhausting efforts were expended in recovering human remains, documents, ammunition and other items from the oil-fouled interiors of ships that had been underwater for months,” the Navy said.
The Nevada’s interior was badly fouled by oil and seawater, and many compartments were burned. Its salvage required more than 400 dives by Navy and civilian divers.
The light cruiser Honolulu, which experienced flooding after a bomb’s near miss put a 5-foot-deep dent in a 40-foot stretch of the hull, went into Drydock 1 on Dec. 12.
“She left the dry dock on the 12th of January,” Manseau reported in 1944. “She was completed 100 percent and just as good as she ever was and went out to work immediately.”
The destroyer USS Shaw was hit by three bombs in a floating drydock — the third of which caused a fire and explosion, in spectacular fashion, of the forward magazines.
When the floating dry dock sank, the forward section of the ship went down with it. That part of the crumpled ship was cut off entirely, and a temporary bow was installed.
Wallin said the Navy Yard scrapped the bridge and installed a makeshift ship control station. The destroyer undocked Feb. 4 and left for further repairs in California on Feb. 9 — becoming the first severely damaged vessel to put to sea.
Wallin said there was “great jubilation at Pearl Harbor to see her leave under her own power only two months after she was given up for lost.”
The destroyers Cassin and Downes “had gone through every kind of ordeal which ships could be subjected to, from bomb hits to severe fires, to explosions, to fragmentation damage,” Wallin said.
Hundreds of fragment holes were patched on both vessels. The hulls were eventually scrapped, and new ships were built around salvaged machinery and main battery guns at Mare Island Navy Yard in California — allowing the ships to keep their names.
Almost all of the repaired ships saw action in the Pacific. The battleships Tennessee, West Virginia, California, Maryland and Pennsylvania went on to fight in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in 1944 — the largest naval battle of World War II.
