The 'Written Off' American Battleship That Won A Three Hour Duel With Hitler's Heaviest Coastal Guns

June twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-four. Six nautical miles off the Cotentin Peninsula, northern France. A battleship laid down in nineteen twelve turns her ten fourteen inch guns toward a concrete battery on the cliffs at Fermanville, and the battery shoots first.

The battery is called Hamburg. Four German naval guns of two hundred forty millimeters, each firing a shell of roughly three hundred sixty pounds out to about forty thousand yards. That is more than twenty miles. It is farther than any gun afloat in that task force can shoot back. The guns sit in concrete, they are ranged on water they have been measuring for four years, and they are being spotted from an observation post on high ground that can see every ship in the formation.

The American battleship closing that shore is USS Nevada, B B thirty-six. She had been sunk once already, in shallow water, on the seventh of December nineteen forty-one, and pulled back out of the mud. By nineteen forty-four the United States Navy was fighting its main war with fast carriers and new construction, and the old battleships were being sent to the jobs nobody else wanted.

For roughly three hours, Nevada and the battery at Fermanville exchanged fire. The battery straddled her repeatedly. Shell splashes came up close enough to wet her decks. When the American task force withdrew that evening, USS Texas had a dead helmsman and a hole in her navigation bridge, the cruiser Glasgow had been hit twice, and the destroyer O'Brien had taken a shell hit that killed thirteen of her crew. Nevada, the oldest heavy ship present, and the largest target in the formation, had not been hit once.

Cherbourg surrendered the next day.

That is the paradox. A battleship designed before the First World War, outranged by the guns she was sent to fight, engaged the heaviest coastal artillery on that coast and came home clean. The answer is not luck, and it is not armor. It begins with a decision the United States Navy made in nineteen twelve, and a second decision it made in nineteen twenty-seven.

Why Cherbourg had to fall

By the third week of June nineteen forty-four, the Allied armies in Normandy had a supply problem that was becoming a strategic one. The beaches could land men. They could not indefinitely land the tonnage that an army group consumes. On the nineteenth of June, a three day gale wrecked the American artificial harbor at Omaha Beach outright. Everything now depended on capturing a real port.

Cherbourg was the port. It sat at the top of the Cotentin Peninsula, and General Collins's Seventh Corps had cut the peninsula and turned north to take it. The German garrison, under Lieutenant General Karl von Schlieben, had orders from Hitler to hold to the last and to destroy the harbor before surrendering. They did destroy it. The point of taking Cherbourg quickly was to limit how thoroughly they could.

The land assault stalled against the fortified ring on the landward side. Collins asked the Navy to come in and shoot at the seaward batteries, both to knock them down and to pull German gunners and German attention around to face the water while his infantry pushed from the south.

That request produced Task Force one twenty-nine under Rear Admiral Morton Deyo. Two groups. Nevada, the cruisers Tuscaloosa and Quincy, and the British cruisers Glasgow and Enterprise in one. Texas and Arkansas in the other. Every heavy ship in that force had been laid down before nineteen twenty.

What the Navy was sending them against

The German coastal defenses at Cherbourg were not field positions. Battery Hamburg at Fermanville had four guns of two hundred forty millimeters in open and casemated emplacements with concrete walls measured in meters, sited on ground about three hundred feet above sea level. Height matters for a coastal gun. It extends the horizon, it improves the observation, and it flattens the angle at which a naval shell must arrive to do any damage.

Those four guns outranged Nevada. Hamburg could reach roughly forty thousand yards. Nevada's fourteen inch guns, firing the fifteen hundred pound armor piercing shell, topped out near thirty-four thousand yards. To bring the German battery inside her own envelope, Nevada had to steam six thousand yards deeper into water the German gunners had pre-ranged.

There was also the arithmetic that has embarrassed navies since Nelson. A ship is a moving platform firing at a fixed target it cannot see through a hill. A coastal battery is a fixed platform firing at a moving target it can see perfectly, in daylight, at known bearings, with a spotting station on the cliff above it. Naval doctrine going back decades held that a gun ashore was worth several afloat.

Everything on paper said the old battleship should lose this engagement.

What thirty-two years had actually built

Nevada was the first American battleship built on the all or nothing armor principle. When she was designed in nineteen eleven and nineteen twelve, the accepted practice was to spread thin plating over most of the hull. The Bureau of Construction and Repair took the opposite position. Armor only over the magazines, the machinery and the turrets, and armor thick enough there to keep out a heavy shell. Everywhere else, nothing. She carried thirteen and a half inches on the belt and eighteen inches on the turret faces, and the ends of the ship were left unprotected on the argument that a hole in an unarmored bow does not sink a ship whose vitals are sealed inside a box.

She was also the first American battleship to burn oil exclusively, and the first to use triple gun turrets, two triples and two twins for ten fourteen inch forty-five rifles.

None of that alone wins a gun duel. The change that did came fifteen years later.

Between nineteen twenty-seven and nineteen thirty, Nevada went through a full modernization at Norfolk. Her turret trunnions were reworked and her main battery elevation was raised from fifteen degrees to thirty degrees. That single geometric change took her maximum range from about twenty-three thousand yards to about thirty-four thousand. Nearly fifty percent more reach, from a gun that had not changed.

Then Pearl Harbor sank her, and that turned out to matter. Nevada was the only battleship to get underway on the seventh of December. She took a torpedo forward and multiple bombs, and her commanding officer beached her at Hospital Point rather than let her sink in the channel. She was refloated in February nineteen forty-two, and the yard work at Puget Sound was not a repair. It was a reconstruction.

Out came the old casemate secondary battery, the five inch fifty one guns designed to fight torpedo boats. In went sixteen five inch thirty-eight caliber dual purpose guns in twin mounts, the best medium naval gun of the war. In went a modern anti-aircraft fit. And in went the part that decided Cherbourg.

Nevada came out of Puget Sound with Mark thirty-four main battery directors and fire control radar. The director could take a range and a bearing from radar rather than from an optical rangefinder, feed it into a rangekeeper, and hold a firing solution on a target the gunnery officer could not see. Radar ranging does not care about haze, smoke, or the sun angle on the water. It does not care whether the target is visible. It cares whether the target reflects.

Against a battery ashore, however, radar can only give the ship her own position with precision. Something still had to observe where the shells were landing. And here the United States Navy improvised one of the more remarkable arrangements of the war.

American battleships carried floatplanes for gunnery spotting. Over Normandy in June nineteen forty-four, a slow catapult floatplane would have lived about ninety seconds. So the Navy took the floatplane pilots out of their aircraft, sent them to England, gave them Supermarine Spitfires, and taught them to fly a high performance fighter in about four weeks. The unit was V C S seven, flying from Lee on Solent. Battleship spotters in Spitfires, flying in pairs so one could watch for German fighters while the other watched the fall of shot, calling corrections by radio to the ships that had launched them from the catapults they no longer used.

A hull from nineteen twelve. Elevation from nineteen twenty-seven. Radar and directors from nineteen forty-two. Spotting aircraft borrowed from the Royal Air Force in nineteen forty-four. That combination did not exist in any German fire control diagram.

The twenty-fifth of June

Task Force one twenty-nine sortied from Portland on the morning of the twenty-fifth. The plan was strict about one thing. The ships were not to open fire until the Army called for them, because Collins wanted the naval bombardment timed to his own assault and did not want German attention drawn to the sea a moment early.

The Germans did not observe the same courtesy. At about oh nine hundred, batteries ashore began firing on the minesweepers clearing the approach. The force stood on.

At twelve past noon, Deyo's group came into range of Battery Hamburg. Hamburg opened on the destroyers screening ahead, then shifted to the heavy ships. Nevada answered. Her first target was Hamburg itself, at a range that started outside twenty thousand yards and closed.

What followed was three hours of the least glamorous work a battleship does. Nevada would fire, the Spitfire spotter overhead would call the correction, the plotting room would apply it, and she would fire again. Between shoots she maneuvered. She did not steam a predictable line and she did not sit still. Every time Hamburg found her range, she changed the problem.

The German gunners were good. They straddled Nevada more than once, which means shells fell on both sides of her, which means the next salvo should hit. It never did, because by the time the next salvo arrived she was somewhere else. Deyo later noted that the German fire was accurate and persistent and that the ships survived it by continuous alteration of course and speed.

The other ships had less room. Texas closed Hamburg to about thirteen thousand yards, which is nearly direct fire for a fourteen inch gun, and paid for it. A two hundred forty millimeter shell struck her navigation bridge, killed helmsman Christen Christensen, and wounded eleven men. A second shell came through her port side and lodged in her without exploding. Glasgow took two hits and kept firing. Quincy and Tuscaloosa were straddled repeatedly.

Nevada fired one hundred twelve rounds of fourteen inch that afternoon, against Hamburg and against the batteries at Querqueville and around the harbor mouth. At about fifteen hundred the force was ordered to withdraw. The action had lasted roughly three hours.

Not one German shell hit USS Nevada.

What the shooting bought

The tactical results were mixed, and it is worth being exact about that, because the value of the operation is not in the concrete it broke.

Naval gunfire did not destroy Battery Hamburg. Two of its four guns were still firing at the end of the afternoon, and the battery was finally taken by American infantry from the landward side on the twenty-seventh of June. Heavy naval shells against reinforced casemates rarely destroy the gun. What they do is kill the crews caught outside, cut the telephone lines, shatter the optics, and drive the survivors into the shelters, and a gun with nobody working it is as silent as a gun that is broken.

That is what happened. Suppression, not demolition.

The strategic result was decisive and it came fast. Von Schlieben surrendered on the twenty-sixth of June, the day after the bombardment. Organized resistance in the city ended on the twenty-seventh. Collins credited the naval fire with drawing German attention and German artillery to the seaward face at exactly the moment his infantry needed it pulled off them.

The Germans wrecked the port thoroughly, as ordered. American engineers began clearing it in July. By the end of the war, Cherbourg was handling more tonnage than any port in the world, and it fed the Allied advance across France.

The rest of her war, and the last of it

Nevada's barrels were worn out by then. She had fired so much fourteen inch ammunition off Utah Beach and at Cherbourg that her rifles had to be relined. She went back to England, got new barrels, and sailed for the Mediterranean.

On the fifteenth of August nineteen forty-four she was off southern France for Operation Dragoon, shooting at coastal batteries around Toulon. Then the Navy sent her to the other side of the world. She bombarded Iwo Jima in February nineteen forty-five, and Okinawa from March. On the twenty-seventh of March a kamikaze hit her main deck and killed eleven of her crew. She stayed on station. In April a shore battery on Okinawa hit her turret. She stayed on station.

She finished the war with seven battle stars.

The Navy had no place for a thirty year old battleship afterward, and it did not pretend otherwise. In July nineteen forty-six, Nevada was painted orange from stem to stern and anchored at the center of the target array at Bikini Atoll as the aiming point for Operation Crossroads. The bomb dropped from the air missed her by roughly a third of a mile. She survived the airburst. She survived the underwater shot that followed.

Too radioactive to keep, too stubborn to scuttle quietly, she was towed off Hawaii in July nineteen forty-eight and used as a gunnery target by the fleet she had served for thirty-two years. It took two days of battleship, cruiser and aircraft fire, and finally an aerial torpedo, to put her under on the thirty-first of July.

In May twenty twenty, a survey team located the wreck about sixty-five miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, upright on the bottom in nearly three miles of water.

What Cherbourg proved

The case against Nevada in nineteen forty-four was accurate on every point that could be measured. She was thirty-two years old. She made about twenty knots when the fast carriers made thirty-three. Her ten fourteen inch guns were smaller than the sixteen inch batteries of the new construction. She had been sunk once. She was outranged by the German guns she was ordered to fight, and she had to close six thousand yards into their beaten zone to shoot at them at all.

None of it decided the engagement.

What decided the engagement was elevation added to her turrets in nineteen twenty-eight, radar and directors fitted at Puget Sound after the Japanese put her on the bottom, a captain who refused to steam a straight line for three hours, and a floatplane pilot who had been given a Spitfire and a month to learn it.

The German battery had better guns, better ground, and four years of preparation. It lost, because the American ship was a system and the battery was a gun.

Battery Hamburg's crews were captured on the twenty-seventh of June, nineteen forty-four. USS Nevada was sunk by her own navy four years later, on purpose, and it took them two days and a torpedo.

The Navy had written her off in nineteen forty-one. She spent the next four years declining to accept the verdict.