The Hoga, a U.S. Navy district fleet tugboat that did epic work during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II, finally pulled into North Little Rock, Arkansas, on Thanksgiving week, some 15 years after the Navy agreed to donate the vessel as a museum piece.
The 100’x25’x9’7” Hoga joined the submarine USS Razorback at the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum, bookends to the great Pacific war. The Razorback was in Tokyo Bay when Japan surrendered in August 1945.
Built in 1940 by the Consolidated Shipbuilding Corp. in Morris Heights, N.Y., the Hoga and her crew were moored near drydocks in Pearl Harbor when the surprise Japanese airstrike came in on Dec. 7, 1941.
The crew got Hoga out to the harbor’s Battleship Row, where the USS Arizona and other stricken ships were in flames. The Hoga helped get damaged and listing ships out of harm’s way – including the battleship USS Nevada.
The damaged Nevada had tried to make a run for the open sea through the narrow harbor entrance. Japanese aviators, seeing an opportunity to sink the ship and block the main channel, renewed their attacks. As the Nevada began to flood and settle, the Hoga and another tug nudged the massive battlewagon off to the west side of the channel.
That ship assist in the heat of battle kept Pearl Harbor open for the return of American aircraft carriers that were safely at sea. In 1942, those carriers operating out of Pearl Harbor gained a decisive victory over the Japanese fleet at Midway that began the campaign pushing them back across the Pacific.
The Hoga spent later years as a fire boat for Oakland, Calif. before being returned to the Navy in 1993 and placed in the inactive fleet near San Francisco. The tug was marked for potential donation, and former North Little Rock mayor and museum board member Patrick Hays has worked on obtaining it for 15 years.
A long-awaited move through the Panama Canal to New Orleans seemed to imperil the project this fall, when issues were raised over whether using the Marshall Islands-flagged vessel carrier Thorco Isadora to carry the Hoga constituted a violation of the Jones Act. That was resolved when the tug was offloaded in Houston and new transport secured.
It will be some time before the tug is opened for visitors. Extensive restoration is needed and asbestos and other hazardous materials need to be removed from machinery spaces in the nearly 75-year-old vessel.
