07 December 2007

The Longest Battleship


Brian Sobel's picture of Arizona's armored mast on the Waipio Peninsula

It is a day that I cannot remember, though my father and mother can.

Every American one who was alive and could understand the words that issued from the radio knew exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard. Twenty-one ships of the Pacific Fleet had been sunk or damaged by Japanese attack. Eight battleships were out of action. Five of them sunk and three badly damaged.

The Pacific Fleet was destroyed, and the United States was going to war.

Take a moment this morning to remember those who perished that day. This will hit your mailbox almost to the minute that they died, and the oil drops that still weep from the hull of Arizona, where more than a thousand sailors sleep.

Of course, the attack had been a spectacular tactical success, but a strategic failure. The Carriers had survived, by pure chance, and the tank farm that held the oil that was the life-blood of the ships was undamaged. There was room for optimism, if you looked at things the right way, but that was going to take distance and perspective.

There was no time for that. There were Admirals and Generals to held responsible, and the work of clearing the harbor had to begin. Of that number, eight battleships were casualties, five sunk and three damaged. The main battle line of the fleet was out of action, and the Empire of the Sun had a free hand in Asia.

I was at THIRD Fleet on Ford Island in the early 1980s. That was before the causeway connecting it to the mainland was built, or the USS Missouri moved there, and all the tourists came. Then, we arrived by ferry, and the route took us past the hulk of the Arizona each day.

There was a visceral connection between us The Day, and of course the island was haunted. We had a bunkroom in the dispensary, which had been bombed and served as a morgue.

Litter from the great salvage effort was still all over the harbor; rusting cables from the salvage on the Oklahoma was on the shore, and it became apparent that there was much more still around.

I got interested in tracking down what happened to the wreckage. I assumed it went to smelters in the days when steel was so desperately needed; I don't recall exactly what sparked the interest was on the staff that caused us to flap about something- it might have been the request from the Nimitz Museum (the one to the Pacific War in the Admiral's home town in Texas) for a relic from the Arizona.

I think they had settled on a hatch as something suitable, and that one had been located at the scrap pile from the Arizona over by West Loch, on the Waipio Peninsula. Then it was lost, or stolen in transit.

Maybe it was that, or it could have been one of the first runs from a bidder who wanted to melt the remaining steel down into souvenir medallions. I don't exactly recall. I do know that I came into possession of a map of Waipio that dated from the salvage time, and it clearly labeled the piles of scrap from each of the ships- Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, and all the rest.

I really wanted to go over and see it- not that I would have picked up a bit of rusted steel as a souvenir- but it was another of those great ideas that never quite came together. There were plenty of ghosts. Some of them were on the quiet side of the island, on the far side of the abandoned flight line that faced Waipio. It was the hulk of the Utah.

She was the forgotten ship of the Pearl Harbor attack, but actually quite illustrious in her own way. In 1914 she was a key player in the landings at Veracruz, Mexico, supporting young general Blackjack Pershing's incursions into Mexico. Utah was deployed twice to Veracruz, and landed Marines and sailors to seize the customs house.

In 1918, finally in the great European war, Utah was at Bantry Bay, Ireland, as flagship of Battleship Division Six, protecting convoys on the approaches to the British Isles.

With the Armistice, Utah served as honor escort for the transport that carried President Wilson to the Versailles Peace Conference. Coincidently, in the vanguard was USS Arizona.

Utah became a second-class citizen when the London Naval Conference set limits for battleships, and Utah was slated to become razorblades. She was saved at the last moment, and converted from warship to “miscellaneous auxiliary.” She became an experimental mobile target ship at the Norfolk Navy yard.

Utah was one of the most sophisticated technical marvels of the age, capable of being remotely controlled to provide a variety of target aspects. She could accelerate, alter course, and lay smoke screens, all “hands off.” She was a steel robot, when the Navy needed her to do that, though she had a real crew of flesh-and blood sailors, since the maximum time for unassisted operations was four hours.

In her prime, Utah had a crew of 500. As a robot, she still required nearly a hundred officers and sailors. They had the space to stretch out; no crowding as there was on all the other ships in the harbor. Utah was good duty in 1941.

At least she was until December 7th. She was one of the first ships hit in the attack. It was a mistake. Imperial Japanese Navy Commanders Genda and Fuchida had meticulously planned the attack and warned their pilots to ignore the target ship.

The fog of war being what it is, even on a placid Hawaiian Sunday morning, eager pilots dropped two torpedoes on Utah immediately. One slammed into Utah's port side at 8:01, as the crew performed morning colors, and a few minutes later a second slammed into the same exposed flank.

She capsized and sank, and in the progress a Medal of Honor and a Navy Cross were won for sacrifice in saving the trapped and wounded.

The first priority after the attack was the salvage, which started even before the scapegoating of the Admiral and the General who were held responsible for the disaster. Clearing the wreckage was a massive work of great hazard. Unexploded ordnance, chemicals and poor visibility were just some of the problems. That was how Arizona became the longest battleship in the world.

It quickly became clear that she could not be salvaged, and was struck from the Naval list a year after the attack. The Brass decided that gun turrets No. 3 and 4 could be used for the coastal defense of Oahu and were transferred to the Army. Two sites for them were selected: one at Mokapu Head and the second at Electric Hill on the rugged Wianae Coast.

Only the one at Mokapu was actually completed, and made a test-firing four days before Japan threw in the towel.

But by 1944 the work was done; eighteen of the twenty-one ships that were sunk or damaged were returned to duty.

Oklahoma was righted and survived the war, but sank in May of 1947 while under tow to San Francisco. She is now on the bottom, five hundred miles east of Pearl. Two ships remained in the harbor, complete write-offs: Utah and Arizona.

In 1956, a new effort to remove Utah from the pier on the west side of Ford Island was begun, in part to keep the workforce at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard employed, but there were no funds. Besides, the salvage equipment necessary for the effort had been sold for surplus. Finally, the Chief of Naval Operations decided that 58 sailors were still aboard, and they should be left to their rest.

A monument was erected in 1972, and it was still new when we used to jog by on our lunch hour. Three port holes with glass still in them reflected the tropical sun, and in her way, Utah still looked like a real ship, even if she was not nearly as long as the Arizona.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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