During this period, they conducted extensive training operations and made several long-distance cruises, including to Australia and New Zealand in 1925 and Oklahoma's voyage to Europe in 1936.

The design of the Nevada class took place in the context of strong political opposition to the continual growth (and thus increases in cost) of battleship building that had accelerated with the development of the dreadnought type.

Woodrow Wilson, who was elected in 1912, opposed what he saw as excessive naval spending and his Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, blocked proposals from the General Board for larger, more powerful ships as part of an effort to return to two vessels per year.

Design work on the ships that would be authorized for FY1912 had begun in 1910, with the first sketch prepared by the Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) in May that was based on the preceding New Yorks.

The arrangement was made watertight to create an armored raft that contained enough reserve buoyancy to keep the ship afloat even if the unarmored ends were completely flooded.

[6] In June, the Board sent a set of requirements to C&R that incorporated the twelve-gun battery already projected, a minimum speed of 21 knots (39 km/h; 24 mph), and an armor layout based on the "all or nothing" concept.

The engineers at C&R noted that the armor deck would considerably strengthen the hull, but pointed out that the 11-inch belt of the original design would be wholly insufficient to defeat the latest main guns in foreign navies.

The amidships magazine of the battleship Delaware had difficulty remaining cool, as it was adjacent to the boiler room and the steam lines for the propulsion system ran alongside it.

Since the thicker deck increased hull strength, the initial arrangement proposed for Nevada could be abandoned in favor of a closely spaced superfiring pair.

Even by that time, the engineers at C&R continued to lobby for their original design based on the New York class, but the Board refused to entertain the proposal.

With the ships now authorized, the Board selected one of the ten-gun, 20.5-knot variations on 30 March, which had a belt that was increased to 14 in but included a series of tapers at the top and bottom edge to save weight.

The Bureau of Ordnance pointed out that the belt could not be manufactured in a single strake with the tapers, so a joint between upper and lower strakes—a design weakness the engineers had been attempting to avoid—would have to be used.

The problem was resolved in July, when C&R proposed removing the 1.5-inch splinter bulkhead in favor of increasing the belt to 13.5 in (343 mm) and incorporating only one taper at the lower edge.

As built, the ships had a minimal superstructure, consisting of a heavily armored conning tower directly aft of the forward main battery turrets.

They were completed with two lattice masts fitted with spotting tops to assist in directing the main battery, a common feature of American capital ships of the period.

To save weight and keep the mounts as compact as possible, the triple turrets had all three barrels supported by two trunnions, which required all three guns to be elevated as a unit.

Both of the twin turrets had armored rangefinders installed atop their roofs, with a centralized fire control room in the conning tower.

Trials with the triple turret revealed excessive dispersion caused by interference between the projectiles while in flight, so a system was adopted to fire each gun individually, separated by a tenth of a second apiece.

[19][20] For defense against destroyers and torpedo boats, the ships carried a secondary battery of twenty-one 5-inch /51 caliber Mark VIII guns in individual mounts.

[12][13][21] As was customary for capital ships of the period, both vessels were armed with a pair of 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes submerged below the waterline, one on each broadside.

[13] They were supplied with Bliss-Leavitt torpedoes of the Mark VII type; these carried a 321 lb (146 kg) warhead and had a range of 12,500 yd (11,400 m) at a speed of 27 kn (50 km/h; 31 mph).

In addition, Nevada was re-engined using the turbines that had been installed in North Dakota in 1917 and removed before the latter was scrapped under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty.

Both vessels were sent to Ireland in August 1918 to escort troopship convoys against German warships that might try to break out of the North Sea to intercept them, though no such attacks materialized.

[34][35] Throughout the 1920s, both ships participated in a yearly routine of training exercises with the rest of the fleet, including shooting practice, tactical training, and annual, large-scale Fleet Problems, the latter providing the basis for the US Navy's operations in the Pacific War, and experience that demonstrated that the standard-type battleships were too slow to operate with aircraft carriers led to the development of the fast battleships built in the 1930s.

In 1936, Oklahoma embarked on a training cruise to Europe; she was there when the Spanish Civil War broke out that year, and she went to Spain to evacuate Americans in the country.

In 1940, the Pacific Fleet was transferred from its homeport, San Pedro, California, to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in an effort to deter further aggression.

Nevada was refloated in February 1942 and was immediately dry-docked for repairs and modernization, while Oklahoma was too seriously damaged to be returned to service; she was righted in 1943 and partially dismantled in 1944 before being sold for scrap in 1946.

She took part in the Aleutian Islands campaign in April and May, before returning to the United States for further modifications in preparation for her role as a bombardment vessel for the Normandy landings.

She steamed to Britain in April 1944 to join the assault fleet, which conducted the landing on 6 June; Nevada remained off the beaches for the next eleven days to bombard German positions as the Allied soldiers fought inland, withdrawing only once to replenish ammunition.

During the landings, she shelled the remnants of the French battleship Strasbourg, scuttled in 1942, and now nothing more than a floating hull, scoring hits that inflicted further damage on the vessel.