RATHER FEEBLE BEST SHOT:

One Last Mission for Ship Sunk in Pearl Harbor Attack (Michael E. Ruane, 12/07/06, Washington Post)

On Dec. 6, 1941, the Arizona took on 1.2 million gallons of heavy fuel oil at its berth in Pearl Harbor. The ship was scheduled to make a Christmas trip back to the West Coast the next weekend. The fuel, which was so heavy it had to be atomized for use in the engines, weighed 4,000 tons and was stored in more than 200 tanks, or bunkers, spread across four deck levels throughout the vessel.

In the Japanese attack the next morning, a 1,700-pound bomb plunged through the ship's deck, detonating in an ammunition compartment. The explosion obliterated a section of the Arizona's bow, blasted backward toward the stern and vented out the smokestack. It also ignited much of the oil, which burned for three days.

The battleship -- three times the size of the Statue of Liberty -- settled to the bottom in 34 feet of water, along with the bodies of more than 1,100 sailors and Marines.

The Arizona, which was launched in 1915, is 91 and has been submerged for six decades.

It's revealing that the Arizona became the symbol of Pearl Harbor, because it was the exception rather than the rule and obscures just how minimal a threat the Japanese represented, Pearl Harbor Raid, 7 December 1941 -- Post-attack Ship Salvage (Naval Historical Center, 19 November 2000)

During the weeks following the Japanese raid, a great deal of repair work was done by the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, assisted by tenders and ships' crewmen. These efforts, lasting into February 1942, put the battleships Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Tennessee; cruisers Honolulu, Helena, and Raleigh; destroyers Helm and Shaw, seaplane tender Curtiss, repair ship Vestal and the floating drydock YFD-2 back into service, or at least got them ready to steam to the mainland for final repairs. The most seriously damaged of these ships, Raleigh and Shaw, were returned to active duty by mid-1942.

Five more battleships, two destroyers, a target ship and a minelayer were sunk, or so severely damaged as to represent nearly total losses. These required much more extensive work just to get them to a point where repairs could begin. Starting in December 1941 and continuing into February 1942, the Navy Yard stripped the destroyers Cassin and Downes of servicible weapons, machinery and equipment. This materiel was sent to California, where it was installed in new hulls. These two ships came back into the fleet in late 1943 and early 1944.

To work on the remaining seven ships, all of them sunk, a salvage organization was formally established a week after the raid to begin what would clearly be a huge job. Commanded from early January 1942 by Captain Homer N. Wallin, previously a member of the Battle Force Staff, this Salvage Division labored hard and productively for over two years to refloat five ships and remove weapons and equipment from the other two. Among its accomplishments were the refloating of the battleships Nevada in February 1942, California in March, and West Virginia in June, plus the minelayer Oglala during April-July 1942. After extensive shipyard repairs, these four ships were placed back in the active fleet in time to help defeat Japan. The Salvage Division also righted and refloated the capsized battleship Oklahoma, partially righted the capsized target ship Utah and recovered materiel from the wreck of the battleship Arizona. However, these three ships were not returned to service, and the hulls of the last two remain in Pearl Harbor to this day.

MORE:
A Day of Infamy, Two Years of Hard Work (ROBERT TRUMBULL, 12/07/06, NY Times)

Here, 64 years late, are edited excerpts from a dispatch sent to The New York Times by Robert Trumbull, the paper’s correspondent at Pearl Harbor. It details a triumphant but mostly forgotten story of World War II: the salvage effort that rebuilt the Pacific Fleet after the Japanese attack.

A city of seamen, engineers, divers, carpenters, welders, pipe fitters and other industrial workers arose overnight at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. Its slogan was “We keep them fit to fight,” and within two years the yard raised all the damaged ships except the Arizona and the Utah.

One year after the attack, with the harbor still choked with wreckage, Trumbull wrote a 15,000-word, three-part series about the round-the-clock operation. But wartime censorship killed the articles. Like the civilian rescue workers and hardhats at ground zero, the shipyard workers dispersed, unheralded, when the job was done. Trumbull died in 1992.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 7, 2006 8:30 AM