Original Item: Only One Available. Here at IMA we just received a very beautiful collection of U.S. Navy ships’ pennants, most of which were ships that were in port during the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. This pennant is for the USS West Virginia which was on Battleship Row during the attack.

West Virginia's base was moved to Pearl Harbor in 1940, and she was there on 7 December 1941, when the Japanese attacked with an overwhelming force of carrier aircraft. In that raid, the battleship was hit by two bombs and at least seven torpedoes, which blew huge holes in her port side. Skillful damage control saved her from capsizing, but she quickly sank to the harbor bottom. More than a hundred of her crew were lost. Salvaged and given temporary repairs at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, in April 1943 West Virginia steamed to the West Coast for final repair and modernization at the Puget Sound Navy Yard.

The battleship emerged from the shipyard in July 1944 completely changed in appearance, with a wider hull, and massively improved anti-aircraft gun battery. West Virginia arrived in the Pacific combat zone in October, and soon was participating in pre-invasion bombardment of Leyte, in the Philippines.

The pennant is of multi-piece construction of blue and gold felt and has the image of the West Virginia and all the writing painted on a leather surface. The top portion features the U.S.S. West Virginia painted in black with U.S. FLEET MANEUVERS 1933 in a scroll across the top. On the bottom of the leather portion are the words U.S.S. WEST VIRGINIA and are also in gold felt on the main body. The condition is great for its age, but it does have the expected fading and moth nips, nothing extensive. It measures from corner to corner 33” with a hoist side width of approximately 11”.

This is a very beautiful U.S. Navy pennant of a historic ship that was resurrected after the attack at Pearl Harbor and took the fight to the enemy in the Pacific.

Comes ready to display!

USS West Virginia (BB-48)
USS West Virginia (BB-48) was the fourth dreadnought battleship of the Colorado class, though because Washington was canceled, she was the third and final member of the class to be completed. The Colorado class proved to be the culmination of the standard-type battleship series built for the United States Navy in the 1910s and 1920s; the ships were essentially repeats of the earlier Tennessee design, but with a significantly more powerful main battery of eight 16-inch (406 mm) guns in twin-gun turrets. West Virginia was built between her keel laying in 1920 and her commissioning into the Navy in 1923. The ship spent the 1920s and 1930s conducting routine training exercises, including the typically-annual Fleet Problems, which provided invaluable experience for the coming war in the Pacific.

West Virginia was moored in Battleship Row on the morning of 7 December 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II. Badly damaged by torpedoes, the ship sank in the shallow water but was later refloated and extensively rebuilt over the course of 1943 and into mid-1944. She returned to service in time for the Philippines Campaign, where she led the American line of battle at the Battle of Surigao Strait on the night of 24–25 October. There, she was one of the few American battleships to use her radar to acquire a target in the darkness, allowing her to engage a Japanese squadron in what was the final action between battleships in naval history.

After the Surigao Strait, the ship remained in the Philippines to support troops fighting during the Battle of Leyte in 1944 and then supported the invasion of Lingayen Gulf in early 1945. The ship also took part in the Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa later that year, providing extensive fire support to the ground forces invading those islands. During the latter operation, she was hit by a kamikaze that did little damage. Following the surrender of Japan, West Virginia took part in the initial occupation and thereafter participated in Operation Magic Carpet, carrying soldiers and sailors from Hawaii to the mainland United States before being deactivated in 1946. She was decommissioned in 1947 and assigned to the Pacific Reserve Fleet, where she remained until 1959 when she was sold to ship breakers and dismantled.

Fleet Problem
The Fleet Problems are a series of naval exercises of the United States Navy conducted in the interwar period, and later resurrected by the Pacific Fleet around 2014.

The first twenty-one Fleet Problems — labeled with roman numerals as Fleet Problem I through Fleet Problem XXI — were conducted between 1923 and 1940. They were usually once-a-year exercises in which U.S. naval forces would engage in mock battles. One or more of the forces would play the part of a European or Asian navy. They were the culmination of the Navy's annual training maneuvers.

Fleet Problem XXII, scheduled for 1941, was canceled because of the rising tensions with Japan that led to the US' entry into World War II. Following the outbreak of war, Fleet Problems underwent a prolonged hiatus, with other names being used to describe large American naval exercises. However, the term was revived in the 21st century under Admiral Scott H. Swift, with Fleet Problem XXIII through XXVIII taking place in the Pacific from 2014 on.

Fleet Problem XIV
Held 10–17 February 1933, Fleet Problem XIV was the first naval exercise to test simulated aircraft carrier attacks against the west coast of the United States. Pacific cities had for decades vied for permanent stationing of U.S. military assets, and vulnerabilities exposed through the exercises were used by metropolitan navy boosters to leverage their cases. In spite of early Navy plans for San Francisco to be home port for the main west coast fleet, these plans had failed to materialize with San Diego incrementally gaining the majority of navy investments.

Fleet Problem XIV occurred the month before Franklin D. Roosevelt, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, took the office of the presidency. The results of the exercise between the U.S. Navy's Black and Blue fleets were mixed. The simulated attacks had certainly been mitigated by the defensive Blue fleet, however the Black fleet had scored key victories with strikes on San Pedro and San Francisco, California.