Marta's Blog: The Federal Government is Abysmal At Preserving History

Did you all know that our country has an Office of the Historian? Apparently, their primary concern is America's foreign relations and documents, as well as advising the government. So who do I complain to, and about, for what I've discovered in the last few months? Evidently not them.

I have spent I-don't-know-how-long on the Library of Congress's archives for the speeches from Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, and they still come as images. Scanned images! Unsearchable images! Not even a PDF. Adobe can convert images to PDF's, and then turn them into searchable PDF's! Are you telling me that the government that spent $8 million on honeybees can't afford to pay for Adobe? Get Adobe, hire some college intern to spend the summer converting the documents and saving them! Maybe they can get college credit for it--history credit, so if they're a person who doesn't want to take a history class, they don't have to. They can get their credit by helping history teachers, and they never have to be stuck in a class they don't want to take. Everyone wins!

Oh, but that's not the main subject of my frustrations today, oh no. I seem to be on this WWII history binge lately, which has led me to remember one of the most exasperating stories of the US government's historical preservation.

Everyone knows about the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, but anyone who has ever watched the masterpiece movie that is Tora! Tora! Tora! may remember another battleship that made a name for itself: the USS Nevada. The Nevada was commissioned during WWI, and she was the only battleship at Pearl Harbor's attack that was able to get underway; she tried to escape Pearl Harbor (under the command of junior officers, not the captain!), but was torpedoed too many times, and ended up grounded on the side of the harbor.

National Interest may or may not be a reliable source, but according to that article, men at Pearl Harbor watching the Nevada struggling to get out of the harbor were inspired and encouraged by the ship's defiance to fight even harder. Can you imagine you're at Pearl Harbor, and the Arizona was already destroyed, but you suddenly see another battleship underway, her American flag flying in all the smoke? It's not all over, your fleet hasn't been destroyed, there is still a reason to fight on!

That's a wonderful story in and of itself, of defiance and courage, but the Nevada's story doesn't stop there!

After fighting at Attu in Alaska in 1943, she was transferred to the Atlantic, I assume as part of the Europe First policy. And what did she do in the Atlantic? After participating in convoys in the North Atlantic, she was at the D-Day landings at Normandy! Her task was to shell the beaches before the troops landed.

But even that isn't where her story ends! She was transferred again to the Pacific, where she took place in the landing on Iwo Jima, the battle that had the famous picture of American Marines raising the flag. And then, she went on to Okinawa, where she was hit by a kamikaze but still survived!

So the uplifting ship from Pearl Harbor that went to D-Day, also participated in two famous battles in the Pacific, and survived a kamikaze--have we missed anything? These were four of the most famous battles in WWII, and the Nevada was at all of them. What an important ship! So where is she now? What did the US military do with this amazing ship?

Well, according to Naval History and Heritage Command:

She was too old for retention in the post-war fleet, and was assigned to serve as a target during the July 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini, in the Marshall Islands. That experience left her damaged and radioactive, and she was formally decommissioned in August 1946. After two years of inactivity, USS Nevada was towed to sea off the Hawaiian islands and sunk by gunfire and torpedos.

What? Target practice?

You...

YOU ABSOLUTE MORONS WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?! How could you?

It's not like the US is incapable of preserving ships from WWII! Four separate aircraft carriers are saved as national parks all around the country, and not one of them was at all the famous battles that the Nevada was!

Oh, but it gets even better. The atomic blasts couldn't sink the ship, but she was made radioactive so that no one could visit her like those aircraft carriers. Then, three battleships tried to sink her for target practice, and even they couldn't sink her! It was a torpedo from a plane that finally sank the ship! This tough ship with a fabulous history that survived Pearl Harbor, a kamikaze, and atomic blasts, and... and..

The wreckage was found in 2020, and I can't help but hope that someone with their head screwed on straight has some plans to raise the ship. I mean, the British raised a ship from Tudor England, so it's not like the US doesn't have the technologies to raise a ship that's only a hundred-some years old.

Think about it, just imagine the educational potential of this thing. In a visit to one ship, just one ship, an American can learn about Pearl Harbor, Europe First, the importance of convoys and logistics in war, D-Day, Iwo Jima and its horrible costs, kamikazes, the high death toll at Okinawa and the decision to drop the Atomic Bomb, and atomic research that continued into the Cold War. That's about half of the important bullet points about WWII, and in only one ship! But no, oh no, that's not an experience the federal government saw fit to preserve.

And why didn't the Nevada deserve to be made into a monument? Why did she deserve it any less than the Arizona or any of those four aircraft carriers?