Handful of USS Nevada Crew Attend Reunion in 2016-- Part 3

After D-Day, its 14-inch cannons were refitted with some of the guns recovered from the USS Arizona and Oklahoma before it sailed to the Pacific and Iwo Jima.  It was attacked by kamikazes off Okinawa which killed 19.

Dick Ramsey of Port St. Lucie, Florida was 19 at Iwo Jima and remembers Marines of the USS Nevada volunteering to go ashore and some were killed in a kamikaze attack.  He remembers carrying one of the bodies from sick bay to where it was to be buried.

Cliff Banks, 90, of Dickinson, Texas, was a 5-inch gun pointer and served on the Nevada from November 1942 until December 1945.  At age 18 he was on board for the shelling of the Normandy coast,  "We spent 80 hours of shooting.  I never was so hungry in my life.  They sent us down a can of peaches to split among 13 people."

--GreGen