USS Arizona

1941

Ford Island, 08:06, the magazine Location: Pearl Harbor, Ford Island, Oahu, Hawaii · Coordinates: 21.36°N 157.95°W · Casualties: 1,177 · Survivors: 335 · Depth: 12 m · Cause: aerial attack — Struck by a Japanese Type 99 armor-piercing bomb at approximately 08:06 on 7 December 1941. The bomb penetrated the forward deck and detonated either in or adjacent to the forward powder magazine. The resulting explosion broke the ship in two and sank her in under nine minutes. · Fate: shallow water · memorial · Type: battleship · Pennsylvania class · Tonnage: 31,400 tons · Crew: 1511 · Flag: United States · Launched: 1915 Pennsylvania-class battleship, moored on Battleship Row alongside Ford Island. A Japanese armor-piercing bomb detonated her forward magazine at 08:06 on 7 December 1941; she sank in under nine minutes. 1,177 dead, nearly half the American casualties of the day. Still seeping oil into the harbor eight decades on, beneath the white memorial that spans her submerged hull. The Vessel The USS Arizona was a Pennsylvania-class super-dreadnought of the United States Navy, commissioned at the New York Navy Yard on 17 October 1916. At 31,400 tons and 185 metres long she carried twelve 14-inch guns in four triple turrets, a main battery characteristic of the generation of American battleships that followed Oklahoma and preceded Colorado. She served for a quarter-century in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and was the flagship of Battleship Division 1 in the Pacific from 1940. By late 1941 she had been in Pearl Harbor for the better part of the year. Her captain was Franklin van Valkenburgh; her admiral was Isaac C. Kidd, commanding Battleship Division 1 from her flag bridge. Her crew numbered 1,511, including a brass band of twenty-one musicians who had placed second in the annual Battle of Music tournament the previous evening and were scheduled to play again on the morning of 7 December. Most of the crew had returned to the ship on Saturday evening; the morning watch was drinking coffee on the forecastle when the Japanese aircraft came over the Waianae range at 07:55 on the 7th. She was moored on the inboard side of Berth F-7, on Battleship Row, with the repair ship Vestal alongside her outboard side and the battleships Nevada, Oklahoma, Maryland, Tennessee, West Virginia, and California arrayed along the rest of the row. She was among the first ships hit. The Disaster She sank in nine minutes. Her forward magazines had consumed the bow; her after boilers flooded within minutes as she settled onto the shallow harbour bottom. The fires burned for two and a half days, fed by fuel oil from her own tanks and from West Virginia's nearby. The shock of her magazine detonation had battered the repair ship Vestal alongside and set the inboard side of the Tennessee on fire. 1,177 men died aboard her, nearly half of the American dead of the entire Pearl Harbor attack. 335 survived. Whole gun crews, the band, the ship's marines, the officers at breakfast in the wardroom, the deck divisions at colours, the engine rooms that never knew what had happened: the Arizona's losses were the worst single-ship loss of life in the history of the United States Navy to that date, and remain so to this day. Of the 1,177 dead, 337 were recovered in the days and weeks following the attack. The remaining 900 or so are still aboard her, sealed in the compartments that flooded and never drained. In the decades since, survivors of the ship have requested on their deaths to be interred with their shipmates; the Navy has accommodated this, placing the cremated remains of dozens of survivors inside the wreck at dive-accessible compartments.